#104 Issac Evans— How a Series D CEO Found Product-Market Fit, Stays Self-Aware, and Survived His Bank Melting Dow

I know that this outcome could be a lot better. I also know that you are smart, talented people with a long priority list. So, you know, what, what are the, what's the bottleneck to this getting solved, right? Rather than like, hey, like make this happen. I really want to understand like, well, do you see this as well? Do you also think this is an issue and what is it going to take for us to actually fix it? And also why am I even involved? Like you, you all are really smart, right? Like, is there some block or some friction here that is preventing things from like naturally working. And I see now my role as a leader, a lot of it is just kind of moving things out of the way. It's like, well, like we wanted to do that, but then there was this issue and okay, maybe I can go make that issue go away for you if it is something that is really at an executive level. That part of the job is really enjoyable, right? You know, the spreadsheets part of the job is less enjoyable and I still miss programming, but I like the, I like being able to build an environment where people feel like they can do the best work of their life. That's really satisfying.

Welcome back. This is From Startup to Grownup, my name is Alisa Cohn, and today I'm thrilled to welcome Isaac Evans to the podcast. Isaac is the co-founder and CEO of Semgrep, the developer-first security company determined to make it expensive to exploit software. Now, my favorite conversations start out organically, and that's what happened here since we have some behind-the-scenes discussions about, well, I'm just gonna say it, about love, how we express love to the people in our lives personally and professionally. From there, we talk about Isaac's company Semgrep and his journey from tinkering with code at MIT to embracing an open source tool discovered at a company hackathon, a pivot that sparked their rise to its current state as a Series D company. We dig into how he decides when to drop some costs, the way he makes sure he's delivering feedback to his team in a way that lands, and the rituals that keep him steady when crises hit. Speaking of crises, Isaac shares exactly what he did when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed the day their Series A closed. We also explore Isaac's 3-part framework for what he has to be great at to be a great CEO and how he's adapted his playbook for each stage of the journey. You're gonna love this fun, inspiring, and practical conversation. So please enjoy my great discussion with Isaac Evans.

I listened to your podcast with, uh, on, on Lenny's podcast actually yesterday.

Great.

Yeah, it was, it was—

Oh, well, thank you so much. What did you, what did you like about it?

I've actually been reading, um, a book that I picked up last time I was in New York called How to Be an Adult in Relationships. Some of, I don't, have you heard of this book?

No.

It was randomly featured in a bookstore that I happened to walk into and I was paging through it and I was like, actually, I, I like a lot of the concepts in here. Um, it's, it's almost, this is the most nerdy way to explain it. It strikes me as a kind of decomposition of love into eigenvectors, right? What are the things that we do that really make people believe that we love them? And that applies in personal relationships. It also applies in business relationships. And so I was listening to the podcast kind of thinking about, oh, what are the ways in which we express love to the people that we work with? And the book has 5 A's that it decomposes it into: attention, awareness, appreciation, affection, And I have not read enough to remember the last one.

And the fifth, and the fifth, say, to be named later. I love that. Cause it's also about like love languages, right? Like how do we make sure people in our lives know that we love them? And I think there's like a total work context for that too.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

I actually have a doc with the people who report to me where I've identified, hey, like what are their top 2 love languages? Just to remind myself that they're not mine.

That's right. That's right. It's so great because they don't speak your love language and you don't speak theirs. So you've got to consciously remind yourself. Yeah, I love that. Well, Isaac, we're just going to roll right into the podcast on that note, because before you were an expert on love languages, right, you were the co-founder and the CEO of Semgrep and you were at MIT when you kind of developed this, you know, technology or developed your technical skills for sure. And you met your co-founders. So like, Tell us about like the founding insight of where Semgrep started.

Yeah, well, first off, expert on love languages, my wife would take issue with that, so I just wanna make that clear for the record.

We're gonna delve into that later in the podcast.

And with Semgrep, the real genius of Semgrep actually, to be honest, was not my idea. Like we had the kind of belief that in order for there to be a real transformation of the security space, there needed to be a tool that was extremely developer-friendly and developer-native. And so we were actually working on something that, you know, we thought fulfilled those characteristics. And then one of the early team members who joined us from Facebook said, hey, I've been, I worked on this product at Facebook and It was what we used for security for the first, you know, at least 5 years of the company's existence. Um, we should take a look at it. And we were, um, in this sort of hyperfocused mode. So we were like, no, like we're in the middle of a sprint here. We're not going to do that. Like we have our product, like we are testing our hypotheses, et cetera. Um, and he was, he was like, okay, okay. But the next time that we had a company hackathon, he kind of pulled this out and dusted it off a little bit because it only worked in these languages that were used at Facebook, PHP and Hack. And, um, we were like, wow, like this is actually much better than what we were doing. And so we were at least smart enough to admit that we were wrong. Um, and yeah, you know, embracing that the first, the first, uh, kind of meetup that we held, we were talking about like our previous product and this, uh, you know, like open source technology from Facebook, which was called sgrep at the time. And we renamed eventually to Semgrep so we could get the domain names. and everyone wanted to talk about Escrow, right? And so it was, it was very, it was kind of instantly clear, hey, like this is the thing that people are interested in and excited about. And what made it so good was that it was really focused on, you know, traditionally when you buy a code scanning tool, it's a black box, right? Code comes in, vulnerabilities go out. There's really no ability to understand, well, why did it detect that? Or actually generally good detection, but not in this case, and I want to tweak it a little bit. And with Semgrep, the developers can edit these queries. It's kind of like a search engine for code or maybe even like a spell checker, right? And in the same way that a legal contract, let's say that you have a grammatical issue in the legal contract that could result in you getting screwed over later on. It's kind of the same with code, right? Like one line can be the difference between a secure application and something that is not secure at all.

Wow. So like having that sort of, as you say, spell check or search is actually so, it's actually really vital to your product.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And, and it enables creativity on the part of the user as well, because they can put in these search queries, write their own, and we have, you know, thousands of rules that have been contributed by the community. So for instance, NVIDIA has written rules for people writing code that targets the NVIDIA platform. Terraform, uh, by HashiCorp, the HashiCorp team has contributed rules that target that, which is great.

I love that. Wait, so just say very plainly what Semgrep does so that everybody really makes sure they understand.

Yeah. So, Semgrep is a search engine for finding vulnerabilities in code.

Mm-hmm. And one of your, your tags is to make it expensive to hack into your software or maybe to hack into your system. Is that right?

Expensive to exploit software.

Expensive to exploit software. I love that. So when you had your Facebook, it's so fascinating. This happens all the time. Somebody says, how about this? And you're like, no, we are focused. We are not chasing the new shiny object. We are going down the path on our thing. But someone's like, oh, excuse me, we should do this. How do you decide actually when to follow up on something and when to say, no, we're focused, we're staying the course?

I like that question a lot. in later years we actually introduced a Semgrep award at the hackathons because in the original hackathon, Semgrep did not win the top prize or any prize at the hackathon.

And so, wow.

We introduced a, a special award to kind of pick things that we felt like were high potential, even though they were very outside of, hey, this is what the company is focused on at the moment. I guess my sort of core conviction is that there's a phrase that's fairly popular in Silicon Valley engineering circles, which is that code wins arguments, which is an expression that, hey, the person closest to the problem who's actually willing to attack the problem and propose a solution, that earns a lot of points. And so, in this case, if that engineer had not said, hey, I'm going to make this work on the languages that our team is interested in and we know our customers are interested in, probably nothing would've happened, but it was kind of a commensurate, you know, hey, like he came this far and it was clear that there was some resonance there. And so we doubled down on what was working. And I've always found that to be, you know, that is a hugely powerful maxim, right? Like find something that's working, invest more regardless of sunk cost or your preconceived notions. About it. But, you know, that is a hard thing to do consistently for sure.

I know. I think it's really hard to let go of sunk costs and like we've gone down this path and suddenly we have a new insight. And I guess I would ask emotionally, what's it like for you as a founder?

That whole year I found myself repeating to the team the aphorism attributed to Churchill about how success Consists of going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm. I'm a very rose-colored glasses kind of person. So, you know, I want to tell you that in hindsight it was great, but it is very stressful and painful. And, you know, to be honest, I had recruited some really talented friends and, you know, one of the things I realized is that actually, even though lots of people like enjoy the positive aspects of startups. For some other people, it's like a roller coaster that, you know, hopefully you get off the roller coaster and you're like, that was so fun. I want to do it again. And some people get off and they're just like, hey, that kind of made me sick. Like, I don't think this is the right environment for me. And, you know, to be honest, we tried to make it work longer than we should have. And like, you know, some of the people on the team tried to make it work longer than they should have probably. So that was rough. It was a difficult time.

Yeah, I'm, I'm sure it was a difficult time. And did you have to, did some people leave as a result of it?

Yeah, a couple people did, right? And they were very talented engineers, like really, really good at what they did. Um, and then the end, you know, it was just like, hey, this is not actually, you're, you, I can tell you're not really enjoying the startup atmosphere. Like maybe it's just this startup, but like that's not working out.

Right. Tell us more about what the startup atmosphere is really like. And that's 'cause those were in early days. And now, I mean, I just wanna mention you're a Series D company now. You just raised $100 million earlier this year. So it's, I think easy to be like, ta-da, but like, what is it really like in those early days where you think you're on the right path and you're not, and you gotta change and pivot and like, you really have like emotional, I mean, growing pains, but also really existential threats. Like, what's that like?

I think there's a lot of rejection, right? Because, you know, some people when they start companies, they already have a brand and a career established. right? And so, you know, the VCs will be tripping over themselves to try to give money to if person X announces they're doing a new thing. Um, and we didn't, we didn't have that problem from a VC perspective. We were very fortunate that way to have some really fantastic investors, Satish Dharmaraj from Redpoint, Jim Goetz from Sequoia, who were like very well established names. But it was, it was still kind of like nobody knew who we were, right? And so we were relying on the brand of other people to be like, hey, like we'd love for you to take a look at this technology that we've been building. And, you know, we also were really deeply convicted that we wanted to get developers to be using the product. So we didn't want it to just be, hey, security teams are excited about this, they're going to buy it. We also wanted something that would have popularity amongst developers. And so this is, um, everyone, uh, you know, at the company remembers that we had this dashboard where the company's singular goal was 256 weekly active users, which is 2 to the 8th power. Um, and you know, we, we were like grinding our way towards that, right? And, um, you know, one of the co-founders went on a blind date to acquire a user.

Wait, tell us why that—

Hey, it was a friend who was like, I will become a user if I can set you up on this blind date. And so it was just, you know, like we were really trying to figure out, hey, like what is it going to take to like create a spark here? Um, and you know, now we have millions of monthly active users.

Yeah.

But I think all of us who were there remember just how much of a like slog it was. Cuz for the first like 2 or 3 iterations, we got to like 100 weekly active users and then like could not get past that. And, well, if we're just being honest with ourselves, what we are building does not yet have product market fit. Time to reevaluate.

Yeah. And so then you, did you, that's when you sort of were open to the, your employee who had built what they built at Facebook?

Yeah.

Yeah. And that was the unlock for you?

Definitely.

Yeah. I can, yeah, I can imagine it's so frustrating because you're, I mean, I know it's very frustrating because you're like building this thing and you can see the vision of it, but others don't necessarily see it. And I think you had some other, so I, I wanna understand what, what happened when you adjusted your business model? Because of course you've had ups and downs, and of course if you couldn't make the product work, it's like, that's not working. But then suddenly you've activated users, but then you sort of moved from an open source, you moved away from your open source environment. Tell us what happened and what the repercussions were.

That's a good question. So first off, the license for Semgrep actually has not changed. You know, the engine was LGPL at Facebook, which is an open source license. The engine is still LGPL. We removed some of our experimental features. From that engine because some of our competitors were actually using the experimental features and we were like, hey, this is, A, doesn't make sense for you and B, doesn't make sense for us. Um, and, and we removed like one feature, fingerprinting, that was not that big, but we wanted to make clear, hey, like SyncRep is not really for the use of our competitors. It's for end users. Um, and, you know, competitors were unhappy about that and made a bunch of noise about how we were changing the license. Which was not true. But it is true that, you know, the nature of our space is changing pretty fast because of large language models, right? And so there are many, many people using SemRep to train large language models like OpenAI and Meta, for example. And we are also using large language models to make SemRep better. So, you know, there are tens of thousands of rules that we've written now and, not yet a majority of them written by LLM systems, but a massively increasing rate of LLMs generating these. And a rule is basically just a search query on the code, and then a human reviewer comes at it and says, "Hey, does this make sense?" But that is a transformative impact, I would say, for us. That's a huge deal. And so that means that there's things that the kind of like core matching engine, which is the open source Semgrep, is almost like feature complete. And the real innovation is happening on the boundaries of what people are using on top of that engine with LLMs, including us.

So what is that? Just translate that to me in terms of what the user experience is and how that relates to open source. And also when you talk about your competitors making noise, Tell us more about kind of how that happened and how you handled it.

So the user experience is basically that, you know, if you are writing your own rules, you should still be super productive with the open source version of Semgrep. If you're looking for something that works out of the box, increasingly you'll want to use, you know, the proprietary rules that we offer that have been written partially by LLMs. And actually for some customers, we're doing this thing where we will, take in all of their documentation about, hey, like this is what a security issue looks like in the past, or this is what best practices look like for our developers, and automatically convert those to Semgrep rules for them so that, you know, whenever you are building this like search engine that's supposed to find all kinds of vulnerabilities, while there are many, many kinds of vulnerabilities, how do you know that you're actually looking for all of them, right? And versus having what we would call false negatives, right? We said that everything was good and reality, everything was not good. And so, that's the kind of user experience, right? You should see fewer false positives, fewer issues that end up not being true, and fewer false negatives, right? Like false assurances that things are actually safe.

Yeah. That makes complete sense. And I'm just reflecting, I had Bob Young on my podcast. He's the co-founder of Red Hat and was the CEO for a long time until they sold to IBM. And I sat next to him at a dinner, which is how I kind of enticed him to come on my podcast. And he explained to me and then explained to all of us on the podcast, like, the whole business model around open source, right? And also, how do you sort of think about, like, how you can do open source? And basically, it's like, listen, if you want open source, great, take it. But if you want process and support and, like you're saying, rules and, like, service, that's when you wanna pay for the product. And yet the open source community around it is still very helpful because it's contributing and learning kind of together. Together, and my eyes were really opened about the sort of interesting intersect between, you know, the paid product and the open source product.

Yeah. I mean, Red Hat innovated that model originally, right? They were kind of the first people to figure out, hey, like, how can we, how can we build a great business around Linux? And I think the community and ecosystem really benefited from that. I don't know if you guys would have talked about the term open core. On that. Uh, no, tell me more, which is that, um, so there's a couple companies like HashiCorp and GitLab that have this where the kind of core of the product is open source. Uh, and then the things around that, that are like built out on top of it, still connected at the technology layer, like using the same APIs, but those are not open source. Um, and so that actually is probably the best descriptor even of what we're doing because it's not just a services thing. We also have a proprietary version of the engine that adds the ability to kind of like turn the analysis power up. So think about the, we've tried to structure it such that the capabilities that a developer cares about are all in the open source and the sorts of things that a security team would look for in an evaluation can only be found in the proprietary version. So, I think if you are an open source purist, like you could be frustrated by this, but my perception, my, my belief is that it's a good thing for the community to have models like this because it means that there's like more free stuff being developed, more software that is available for other people to reuse and remix, uh, and still hopefully sustainable funding models for open source projects. Um, because I think a lot of people are concerned that, you know, open source is a vehicle for venture capitalists to like drive mass adoption. And then, you know, engage in kind of capture later on, uh, which is maybe true in a cynical way, but hopefully the like positive value exchange is like, hey, like you got something good for free and it made sense for you to support that by purchasing the commercial pairing that goes along with it. Yeah, that's, you know, and so Red Hat never, like, I mean, I'm sure they have today, but like the original Red Hat model was not really about like building products that went along with the open source, it was much more services-based.

Right, totally makes sense. So when you got this kind of like, I don't know, upset, like people write on the internet, everyone's mad at you on the internet or whatever, you know, I mean, I had DHH from Basecamp on my podcast and he talked about that the moments where he and Jason, you know, sort of came out with their edict, which is we will not be talking about politics on work channels anymore. And like the disaster, I guess he said everyone's yelling at you on the internet. And not only were they yelling at him, and his co-founder, and they were kind of like, we're used to being yelled at on the internet. They were also yelling at innocent employees, like, how can you work there? And so it caused a real brouhaha. And even for him who gets yelled at all the time on the internet, it was very confronting. And I'm curious what that was like for you to get blowback, even if it was from competitors and people who didn't, you know, even if it was from like saboteurs in some ways, what was that like for you and the company to kind of have to go through that and how did you handle it?

Yeah, it's a good question. I think having the perspective about who the complaints were coming from was really valuable because we also had a lot of people from our community who spoke up and were like, hey, like, you know, actually we feel like some of the other players in this ecosystem have been freeloading off of, you know, the Semgrep project. And so one of our intended outcomes was that, you know, rather than freeloading, they would be required to open source changes that they had made to the engine. And that did happen, which I think was actually a really good thing for the ecosystem. But, you know, some of them were more adversarial and aggressive about it. And the big thing that I did was I got the engineering team together and we kind of just had like a bunch of people in person, a bunch of people were like in a virtual room. And I was just like, let's talk about this, right? Like, tell me your feelings, right? And, you know, one of the engineers opened up with some very colorful language about how he felt about it, but it was It was good. It was a pressure release, right? For the team. And I think it was really valuable for everybody to be like, hey, like, you know, of course this is a competitive space. Like things like this are going to happen. What's important is that, you know, despite claims to the contrary, we still believe in open source. We're standing by our values and we have a lot of support coming in from the users who are the people that we really care about serving at the end of the day with the product. so that, you know, that's the, the right perspective to have. Um, I think that the energy was very high personally. I mean, this is probably a good matching disposition for me as a founder. I love the intensity of crisis mode. Um, you know, my favorite day in, gosh, what year was that? 2 years ago, 2023, when Silicon Valley Bank was taken into receivership by the FDIC. That was the closing day for our Series C. And so we were actually on the way back from an offsite up in Northern California near the Oregon border. And one of our investors called me and he's like, hey, you should check on your bank. I was like, what do you mean? Right? And the only precedent I had for this was, you know, the movie It's a Wonderful Life and They're about to leave on their honeymoon and the taxi driver's like, hey, look at what's going on at the bank over there. It's like, if somebody calls you and tells you to check on your bank, things have gone really wrong, right? Totally.

Yeah.

So we called our bank and like immediately, you know, my co-founder's talking to one of the VPs at the bank who's like, don't worry, everything's fine. And so Drew's like, never talked to a VP at the bank before on my first call. Things are definitely not fine. So we literally pulled over the car and wired money out, uh, of the bank that day. We were so concerned, you know, we didn't know what to think. Um, anyways, but that was, and then that whole weekend, you know, it was like this massive Excel spreadsheet of like contingency planning and everything. That was great. Right. Um, moments like that are, uh, the kind of crisis mode things that make me really feel alive. So, wow.

Yep.

The, the license brouhaha was a similar energy.

That is a great match for you as a founder. Do you think you, do you have a natural, is that natural for you or did you learn that? Like, were you like that growing up? How did you get that?

That's a good question. Um, I feel like the, if you are going through something with like a team that you really believe in, then, you know, even if it's like almost, even if it's an existential problem, right? Like it feels invigorating. Because, you know, the feeling that you might fail and like your whole venture be destroyed makes you feel more alive than anything else, right? I mean, there's personal psychology around that as well, but I don't know. I, you know, I'm not a like huge personal risk taker. It probably came out more in like games where, you know, like my betting style is very aggressive in a way. So risk seeking, behavior. And in the professional context, you know, I, I always have this perspective. No one's actually going to die. You know, one of my, one of my best friends from growing up is now an MD-PhD who works in a hospital. And, you know, when we catch up, I'm always reminded how different his world is from my world. And that provides an incredible amount of perspective.

That does. I think that is such an important perspective, you know, sort of experience, and it feels really stressful in the moment, but actually, right, big picture, no one's gonna die. Do you have like a mantra or anything that you tell yourself when things do get stressful or where you coach the team besides your Winston Churchill quote?

You know what, I'm sure that the team could tell you things that I have unconsciously repeated to them over and over again.

Yeah.

I think the biggest thing for me is that, my identity has never been really about being a CEO. It was not something that when we started the company, I was, hey, like, you know, I want to be the CEO. I feel like I kind of drew the short straw, to be honest.

Not it, not it. Oh wait, what?

And that means that, you know, when the business is threatened, I'm really confident that like my identity is not, you know, wrapped up in this thing in a way that would destroy me if it was destroyed. And I've always, you know, I'm lucky to have a very loving partner and family friends who like support that in a really powerful way as well. The, okay. The one mantra that I have thought of though, that comes from one of my mentors is never confuse It's not working with I'm not working. And I have actually on reflection repeated that to quite a few members of the team, because I think that is a really powerful statement, especially in a startup where by the nature of startups, many things will appear to not work for a long time before they start to. And so being able to maintain that clarity of separation, and also for me, if I'm your manager, to tell that to you. Is really valuable. And actually just on Monday we were having some conversations about, there's some efforts that have literally taken a year and we knew it would take a year to start paying dividends, you know, on the marketing side of things. And it's like, wow, like that is really working now. That's awesome to see. But it wouldn't be true if, you know, the leaders working on that had burned themselves out with the perspective of like, I'm a failure because this isn't working over and over again.

Yeah, I think that is so powerful because, right, that's the whole point, like your identity around like, I'm a failure. And then for your manager to tell you that, it's really very encouraging because it's actually back to love languages, right? It's really about, you know, you understanding like that I, as a manager, I see you, I hear you. Also, I'm here to kind of like comfort you and keep you uplifted as we go through these difficult things. I'm not here to kind of like adjudicate or like be a traffic cop for you.

Well, it's hard because at the same time you do have a professional responsibility to, you know, assemble and maintain the best team that you can. And, you know, I think that's where things get really tricky, to be honest. Right. You know, and the best leaders are able to maintain like clarity about the like professional role and responsibility along with like real genuine human connections. To the people on their team.

Yeah. I wanna talk more about that, how you learned to do that, what mistakes you made along the way, where you are now with that as, as sort of a leader and a manager.

Well, I feel like I am still very much a neophyte. Yeah. On that topic, I have been really fortunate to have some incredible mentors, both from the investor side and the operator side, who have shared a lot about the things that they've done. And being able to watch them in action, you know, because they've spent time with our team as well and given me perspective on, hey, you know, here's what it looks like for me to like actually ask this person or hear the questions that I would ask in order to understand. I can tell you one thing that like very early on was a stark, stark change for me, which was, you know, in high school I was a speech and debate kid, did a lot of policy debate, loved it, loved cross-examination, you know, Zinger questions. And I would use that at the company, right? And it was not very nice. And eventually I realized that, you know, when I was arguing with people, what was actually happening was that I was defending myself, right? And so I was not really arguing. To establish like what is the right next thing for the company, right? I was arguing that I was right and I was defending like why I chose to do it this way, which may have been totally legitimate, but ultimately was just not really helpful to figuring out what needed to happen next. And one of the things that we talk about at the company is the primacy of winning, right? Like actually like winning in the market is so, so clarifying. Right? Like there is no fakery, there's no trickery of performance reviews. You got a good performance review even though the work wasn't that good. The market will kind of slap you around. Right? And like when we were sitting there with 100 weekly active users, it's like there's no way to get past this, right? Like there's only figuring out the right product to suit this market. So I found that to be actually really transformative for me and And if you ask people at the company, I think they would tell you that I became significantly less defensive over time. And I would really seek to understand, hey, you're a really smart person. That's why we're working together. We're trying to assemble a phenomenal team. If I think your question is making me bristle, it's probably because it's touching on something that is an insecurity of mine. What is that?

Yeah. So self-aware. It's very helpful to sort of like examine your own biases and your own triggers and to see where they're kind of leading you astray and then making those course corrections with your people.

Right.

Yeah.

I think the other thing that I really have enjoyed learning how to do is give and receive feedback. And there's a fantastic Stanford class called Touchy Feely.

Yeah, I know Carol.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so we've actually had, um, one of the former lecturers of the class came to our company and like did a workshop from the class with the team. And this was actually pretty fun. We had another startup who we're friends with. They came in and did it so that when we did the pairing pods, it wouldn't be, you know, with people from your team. You could do the scenarios of giving feedback with people from the other startup. So that they're so brilliant overlap. And that was, that was really fun. You know, and we, we actually have that as part of the onboarding process for new hires is we have this whole page with a bunch of resources about how to give and receive feedback. Because I find that especially for people who have not experienced a healthy feedback culture or for people who have only worked at big companies, it's, it's easy to just be in this mode. You know, I have so many friends who are at big tech companies. Where, say you join a bad team at a big tech company. What's your real incentive to give critical feedback to fix the team? It doesn't really exist, right? You're just going to be like, this sucks, I'm going to go find a different team. Big tech companies, because they're smart, make it easy enough to do that. But at a small company, what I tell people who join is, hey, this is kind of like a sailboat versus a cruise ship, right? If you were on a cruise ship and you saw somebody starting a fire, you'd be like, that's weird, right? Like, hey, maybe a crew member should look at that. If you're on a sailboat and somebody starts a fire, you're like, you're going to kill us all. Totally.

What are you doing? Put that fire out. Yeah.

And so that means that the emotional stakes are much higher, which can be really frustrating, but it also means that, you know, like the feedback you're going to receive should be way more clarifying. And I know for myself, being in this kind of atmosphere and actively asking people, hey, what feedback do you have for me? Has resulted in way more personal growth than if I had been in a, you know, professional corporate environment, like at one of the big tech companies.

Totally. I think that's so powerful. Is there a piece of feedback that you got that really like made you like sit up straight? Like, oh my gosh, wow. That's really hard to hear. Yeah.

I mean, so much, you know, one of the, one of the most, and this is actually an interview question that I ask people, right? Like, I'd love to hear about a time that you gave or received difficult feedback. And one of the things I've realized is that if this person, if when you're answering that question, you have a kind of a glib answer and it's like, oh, well, you know, like I didn't like how this project was going. So I said blah, blah, blah. It's very different from like what it feels like to receive real feedback, which is always a little bit of just like a punch in the gut, right? Of like, oh wow, like I thought things were good here and you're showing me something that I did not see and that feels awful. right? Um, and I can very clearly remember the, like, some of the most intense feedback that I received early on. A very, very talented engineer wrote up a, like, 5-page PDF basically about, like, failures in my leadership that he saw. And it was actually very constructive, right? Like, it sounds, that sounds like really dysfunctional, but I, you know, I think this person is great and brilliant and like, it was really thoughtful document. And I'd never received anything like that before. And so I very much embraced this perspective that all feedback is a gift, right? Even the most negative feedback. And it was really powerful to be able to read that, even though I confess that when I opened it, my heart sank a couple levels.

Totally. By the way, what a powerful culture that you have somebody who's sending you a PDF document feedback, taking you apart. Was there something that came out of that or another kind of experience of feedback where you were like, wow, that was hard to hear, but you made a change based on that?

Yeah, definitely. And actually, um, you know, some of the changes that we made were really about, um, you know, in the, in the early days, I would say that, you know, I had deferred a Stanford PhD offer to start the company. And in the early days, I, I kind of, we had like a broad overarching objective, but it was being run a little bit more like a PhD research lab, right? Which was my fault. Um, and was kind of fun to be honest, cuz you know, everybody's like exploring their little things. And so how we got to that like goal of 256 weekly active users was this belief that we had to have a singular focus as a team, right? Like, hey, like we're all talented, we all have good ideas. We're actually going to all work on the same thing for a concrete period of time. That's why we were like, hey, like shut up about that project. Like we are focused. And that was, that was really powerful, right? Like actually getting everybody working in the same thing and then changing, right? Like the next month if it wasn't working, made a big difference.

Yeah. And if, was it sort of before that you were a little bit like, let's pursue all these interesting things?

Exactly.

And so then you were, okay. You were like, let's focus.

They're like, you know, hey, like I'm your research advisor.

Uh-huh. What do you think is gonna solve the problem? Oh, I see. Yeah, that makes com— that makes complete sense. What else have you learned about hiring and managing and leading, especially as a company How many employees do you have now?

So, we are just under 200.

So, you really must have had to learn how to shift your leadership style quite a bit on the way from like just the, just a few co-founders to 200. Like, what was that journey like for you and what shifts have you made in your leadership style?

Well, first off, I would tell you that I feel like I could be a great CEO at a 30-person company today. Yeah. You know, but not, not the best, but like pretty good. And, um, you know, when, when the company grows, you're constantly outgrowing, you know, your level of competency and having to like re-up, hey, like what are the new techniques? In the early days, it was really about learning to work through other people, right? So hey, like I'm not gonna do the work myself as a manager. Now I am responsible for, you know, the output of the overall team. Rather than my individual contribution. You know, as a, as a good IC, you can kind of inspire people, right? But you're still doing it by doing the work yourself. And so there's a huge relinquishment that has to happen in terms of how you prove value to the team. That was very hard for me at the start, right? Because I was like, hey, I'm a programmer. I'm going to prove value by like chipping code, hands on the keyboard. And a lot of my identity was in that. And so one of our investors very wisely decreed Isaac must stop coding. He was like, ah, he's just, he's like, I know this is gonna be painful. You can't do it. He had one of my other co-founders like sending him, uh, you know, like screenshots of how much code I was pushing into the codebase. And it, it was never like a, you know, like, oh, this is a serious issue, but it, it was playful but true. Um, that was, that was an early stage. Now I would say that, um, I've learned a lot about the difference between being a manager and an executive. And that those are, you know, pretty different things, right? Like the executive has a lot more responsibility about the assembling of the team, right? Like, and one of my mentors who used to run one of the largest public security companies has this rubric for, you know, hey, like, What are the things that as a CEO you have to get an A+ in? Because there's 100 things that you have to do. What are the things that like you absolutely have to get an A+ in, in order to succeed at the job? And so I actually have that at the top of my weekly goals, right? I always come back to that.

To that question, or do you have your actual A+ things?

The 3, the 3 things. So he shared his and I agree with them. So I'll share them with you.

Okay.

Yeah, please. My own words. Um, you know, the first is like, Hire the people who are right for the team and fire the people who are not right for the team. So the assembly of the team. The second is set the metrics for success. And the third is be the cheerleader for the team. And so tons of other things that CEO has to do, fundraising, look at finance, track the burn. But his perspective is if you're not getting an A+ in those three, you're not fulfilling the core responsibilities of the role.

It's, yeah.

Of those 3, I will tell you the one that is the hardest for me is being the cheerleader for the team, actually.

Tell, how come? What do you mean?

I think this actually goes a little bit back to the kind of MIT mentality. MIT is very much, you know, hey, like, you know, you're surrounded by such talented people and, you know, most of us like were like great students in high school and suddenly we get to MIT and you like, you realize that you are interacting with some people in your classes who are just on another level, right? These people are going to be a world expert at some point in their field. And that I think creates an attitude of like, hey, you're never going to quite get to— good enough is not there, right? We're striving for perfection and you're clearly not there. And so you can always do better. Than you have. And so like the perfectionism and like drive towards perfect is really, really extreme. And I think that has made it hard for me to basically say, hey, like actually, you know, I can tell that you are doing the best you can and I want to celebrate that. And so, you know, what I've, what I've described to you previously is me trying to compensate in a lot of ways for maybe my nature and some of my nurture in that environment. But it's intense for sure to be in that kind of space as a competitive person.

Yeah, it is intense. And, you know, you can say it's about MIT, and I'm sure that's true. I would just observe that of the many of the founders, maybe most of the founders I work with, and I would say many of the folks I've had on this podcast have that same thing, the drive for perfection, the discontent, the knowing it could be better. And I would add the self-criticism themselves.

Yes.

Right? And so, it is very challenging to then convert that into like the, you know, like the cheerleader-in-chief. So, like what practices have you put in place to help you learn to be that person when you need to be, the sort of person who will give you the pep talk and celebrate success?

Yeah, well, one of the things that, you know, I already mentioned is, hey, keeping track of what are the love languages for the people on my team. So, if I have somebody who is words of affirmation. And I actually have a couple people on my team who will literally tell me, they'll be like, hey, like Isaac, I just wanna remind you that this is really important for me to hear that I'm doing a good job if I'm doing a good job. So please tell me if I am or if I'm not.

That's great.

That, that is super, super helpful for someone like me, right? To be reminded of that. But I also try to create a structure where I will remember that myself. Um, and the other thing, to be honest, is that, um, we have, you know, some people on the leadership team who are more natural celebrators, uh, and giving them budget and time to be like, hey, like, how can we, how can we celebrate this huge achievement that the team has reached? Um, that helps too. That's not the, that's not the one-on-one. That's more the one-to-many, but, um, there's still a lot of value in that. And I'm, you know, I'm always so impressed with that. Like our people team, for instance, and our head of people is a great celebrator. And I'll go to our events and I'll be like, I feel celebrated. This is so lovely.

That's so great.

I'm not expecting that at all. Yeah. And not because they're calling me out or anything, but just because the experience at the event is like, hey, like, wow, let's celebrate what we did together.

Totally. I think it's so important to have the people around you who can remind you, prod you, but also kind of create a system. Like, yep, it's happening without you. And therefore you can just kind of show up and be part of it. And then it helps because then the CEO is there being part of it. But one thing you talked about is, you know, sort of learning to be the difference between a leader and an executive. And I mean, also you talked about like you could have been, you know, a researcher in a lab, right? And a PhD student and running a lab. How, what is your take on the following? What is your take on the ability of a founder, and you're definitely a founder and entrepreneur, it's clear that you have a natural bent in that direction growing into being a leader and an executive, the CEO. You know, there's the difference between, they say, the pirate versus the pirate ship versus the Navy. How do you view that transition? And do you think it's like normal to think that a founder can be an effective CEO of a large company?

I, I really like that question. I guess at the most like root level, I think about the Nietzsche quote that he who has a why can endure almost any how. And I think that if you look at the founders who have successfully made that transition, they have insane drive, right? They're just like, hey, like we had to make the company successful. I had to make the company successful. And I didn't think that I could get another CEO in here. Who could do that. Um, I also have that drive. Um, you know, so far I've assessed that I don't think we could bring in another CEO who could be more successful, but there are plenty of examples of that. And to be honest, actually the security space is, that's more common than, uh, other spaces because the security go-to-market is often like a traditional enterprise. You know, you want someone with a lot of sales experience and so you often see Hey, like founders come in, they get it to a certain point, boom. Okay. It's time for the professional sales leadership to take over. In our case, because we've had a more bottoms-up go-to-market, um, that hasn't been the case. Uh, it's also become less common. I would say in the past 20 years, it used to be that that was a very common Silicon Valley playbook. You know, my initial impression of Sequoia was that they fired CEOs a lot.

Yeah, I hear you. There's a trend right now, I think, towards keeping founders in place.

Right. Sure. Which I think is overall good, right? Because I feel like when you, professional management also has a bunch of weird incentives. And I think that if I was an employee, I would try to look for founder-led companies because I think there's a deeper care about like making sure the employees are taken care of. But in terms of the mechanics of what you described, we actually, we have this analogy that comes from the programming community of commandos, infantry, and police. You know, like the, the kinds of engineers that build an initial product are not the kind of people that will maintain a legacy product at all. Right. And that doesn't mean that they're better or worse. It's just very different. And to be honest, like we are struggling right now with some of the dynamics around like our commando engineers versus our infantry engineers. Because we still have a lot of innovation going on and things are changing quickly. We also have some core responsibilities to provide like great, stable infrastructure to our customers, like make sure that security scans are accurately completing on time, right? We don't want to drop those things. And that causes tension, right? Because you've got move fast and break things versus, hey, like we are working on making it more expensive to exploit our customers' software and it needs to be reliable in order for that to work. So I've not figured that out yet. I have had some really great advice from people like Jason Warner, who was the CTO at GitHub. One of my favorite things that he told me was, and this goes back to the difference between a manager and an executive, he's like, at some point, the role changes from only being a kind of psychologist to gifted engineers to being a sociologist for the whole team. right? And you have to make decisions about like, hey, well, what makes sense for the whole village here versus just your case? That's hard. It's a hard transition to make.

That is hard. How have you made that transition?

Um, well, I think that talking with other people who have seen similar dynamics play out with their teams has been the biggest thing, right? Like, I think a lot of that aspect of the job can You know, you could read about it in a book, but it'd be kind of like reading a book about football. You know, some of it just has to be lived. This is another, another thing from Jason. You know, he's like, he's like, the best leadership book I can give you to read is go coach a local city sports team for a season and keep everybody together on that team for a season and you'll learn more about leadership. Than you can.

Yeah, just getting into the thick of it. I think that is so true. And it's like a little bit like learn by doing. And I think it's also, it's powerful to see what works and what doesn't work. And it's also, I think, very confronting when the playbook that worked last week no longer works this week or the playbook with that person doesn't work with this person.

Right.

Have you experienced that?

That's one of the hardest things about startup, right? What worked at 30 people definitely will not at 200. I'm sure you've seen plenty of that as well. I actually, I would love to hear your answer to that question, Alisa. Just, you know, you've, you're in a rare position to be able to sample a lot of different cultures and organizations as well. And I'm sure you've seen people make that transition successfully or maybe not also.

Yeah, well, both, I mean, both make it successfully and then also make a lot of mistakes as they make it successfully, right? So, I think like, first, the first thing to know is that you will make a lot of mistakes along the way. Will and not to take that to be discouraging, but actually realize that's encouraging in a way. Like, yep, I'm trying new things. It's really challenging like that. And then I think the self-awareness is so important. Like what you were saying is I'm not great at celebrating and yet it's on my top 3 A+ things. So I better freaking change that, right? I better trigger myself to do the celebration or have people around me who are gonna kind of remind me and poke me. And then I think it's also, It's very, it's kind of the day-to-day getting out of your comfort zone and your natural go-to behavior. Like there's one CEO that I'm working with and what they say about him is, this is a very, very large company all over the world. He goes to the different sites, which is great. He meets with a bunch of people, which is great. But when he's in the social experiences, He only talks to the people he feels comfortable with. That's not good. Right? And so you don't necessarily know that about yourself until you sort of hear that from other people or understand like the impact of that where people are wondering like, oh, he doesn't like me or whatever. And so, you know, recognizing yourself, I think what's really hard for founders who start with, you know, 2 beer cans and in their garage with 8 friends, they don't realize that they've become a big deal. And that actually people are intimidated by them because they're the founder CEO. And so kind of always recognizing that you're a figurehead, I think is another part of the puzzle on that. Does that resonate with you?

It does. Yeah. I mean, um, I, uh, I, I don't love that aspect of it, right? Like there's parts of the executive job that are really acting at the end of the day. Uh, yeah. And you know, my favorite thing as a 2 months ago, sitting down at the lunch table and there was somebody I didn't know there. So I introduced myself to him and he introduced himself to me and he was like, so what do you do here? The rest of the table, of course, like busted out laughing. It was his first day. That's so great. I love that. Right. And to me, you know, having one-on-one connections, you know, as someone who's a natural introvert, with people on the team. It's definitely my favorite. I've had to learn a lot about the public and extroverted aspects of the job for sure.

Yeah, totally. Actually, it's funny, one of the CEOs I coached a while ago, he had been away for 2 weeks and he walked into his company and the security guy downstairs was like, "Can you show your ID?" He's like, "Oh God, right, things have changed around here." But, But Isaac, as part of that growth, I think there's also this issue about being able to look at your executive team and see who's scaling and see who's not scaling and make choices about that. Have you had to, had to deal with that? And what's that been like for you?

That is one of my least favorite parts of the job, right? But going back to, hey, like things that you need to get an A+ in, hire the people who are right for the team, let the people who are not right for the team go. and we, you know, because our, our go-to-market journey, we didn't have any revenue for the first couple of years. It was just all about like open source and like, you know, building that. And that takes a different team than the kind of leadership that it takes to, you know, drive like a sales process and, you know, engage with large accounts who are going to end up signing, you know, large checks to purchase your software. Um, and so I would say that I was, late on making some of the changes to the go-to-market leadership side of things. I'm really happy that I did make those changes, but it's, you know, like we talked about earlier, I think one of the most difficult parts of the job, right? Because you care about somebody as a person, they're the reason that you came so far. And so one of the phrases that I come back to, again, not mine, but from one of my mentors, what got us here is not necessarily what's going to get us there. Right. And that is no shade on what got us here at all. And I'm actually like, I'm really delighted that in most cases we've been able to retain, you know, people in different roles, even if that's a different level of the organization. Not all, but some. And I think that's like a really like healthy thing for the culture to be able to like keep people on board who have had so much context. At the same time, one of the things that I realized is that it's comfortable to keep on with the same team, right? And so seeing other founder friends who have not done that and have struggled as a result, I'm kind of reminded that like, hey, like, you know, going back to that primacy of winning, like we're all, the thing, one of the things that I do really love is that everyone at the company is a shareholder, right? Or at least an option holder. And I hope it becomes shareholders. But I feel like that, you know, it's not a perfect system, but as opposed to a lot of large corporations where there's, you know, nowhere close to that, it really creates an incentive for people to think about the long term, right? Like, hey, like, and so, you know, one of the leaders who I replaced was, he was like, hey, like, I really don't like this decision, but as a shareholder, I understand. And I appreciated that perspective. Right. And I, and I feel like that, you know, aspect of the startup ecosystem is actually like a big positive that makes me feel a lot more comfortable with things like that too, as compo— as compared to, you know, um, say like your generic large corporation.

Yeah.

Where most of the employees that, you know, say would be affected in the layoff are not shareholders.

Right. I think that's so true. And I think that also it gives you more incentive. So like the idea is you've gotta think about the company first and everybody at the company is a shareholder and they want you to be thinking about the company first. And so, if you are gonna kind of maximize for your own comfort, which is like, I'm not comfortable firing this guy, I feel so bad. Right. You're kind of doing it at the expense of, you know, sort of the ownership of everybody around you.

That's right. Yeah. And one of the things that I, you know, I love history and I, I find it kind of fascinating actually that even until the 1980s, the idea of stock options was very much still like an executive thing. Right. And so it was really some of the early technology companies that popularized this idea of, hey, let's give like stock to employees, like everyone who gets hired. So it's kind of a late-breaking development, you know, relative to the history of the corporation. And I think on the whole, like, I just feel like, wow, like why would you work for a company that's not going to give you, you know, an ownership stake in it? It seems great.

Yeah, totally. I, I think it, I, I can see what you're saying. We sort of think it came factory installed, but no, actually it's kind of new. That's amazing. Right now, Isaac, you have partnerships, if I'm not mistaken, with Replit, Cursor, Lovable. Is that right?

Uh, there's an official partnership with Replit.

Okay.

Um, there's nothing official with Cursor or, uh, Lovable, but we do have integrations that, you know, if you are using something like Cursor, click to install, and there's a bunch of users who have done that.

On that. Okay, got it. I stand corrected. Good. I think my point in saying that was like, you're obviously, you're in Silicon Valley, you're dealing with all like the vibe coding people, which need security for sure. And you're also, you know, you're pretty attuned to what's going on in AI. So like, what is your view? Could you narrate the future for us? Not to put you on the spot, but like, just tell us what's gonna happen with AI and then we'll know.

Well, uh, I'll, I'll scope my prediction a little bit more narrowly. Yeah. I think that, uh, you know, it's, it's easy to dismiss vibe coding as, hey, like these people have no idea what they're doing. I actually think that it's something more profound than that, right? It is a, a new layer of abstraction that the next generation of developers will use. And so in the same way that most of the engineers on our team have never had to look at assembly language. And, you know, people who wrote assembly language looked at people who used, you know, these high-level languages like, ah, what do you don't really understand? Like all these abstractions, what's going on? That's true. But the productivity gains of writing in these high-level languages is so insane that that is where the, you know, like new generation of developers went to. I actually think like vibe coding is exactly that. And so, um, you know, it's, the original definition of vibe coding was kind of like, close your eyes, you never even look at the code. I think that people, like the more senior developers, will still look at the code to verify and see what's going on, but that the advancement in models will be sufficient that there will be a whole class of developers for whom looking at the code is really optional. And that is good news for security companies because that even if models are trained to eliminate the kind of most obvious security flaws in an application, ultimately security is just a feature that gets added to an application, right? You could ship faster if you don't care about security at all. And in fact, it might be inappropriate to dial security up to 11 before you really have the need for it. And given that a developer is kind of a voltage gap between like, hey, like how do I get from A to B? And they like, most direct possible way. Um, I think most developers will not care about putting in security, even if it's available in their Vibe Coding environments by default, which means that there's always going to be a kind of controlling mechanism for the security team to come in and say, hey, like we need to adversarially check this for security issues. Um, and also we know that security issues are generally linear in number of lines of code and the Vibe Coding agents spit out a lot of code. So that just creates a lot more complexity that can be, you know, like like fertile ground for the discovery of security issues. But it's hugely exciting because, you know, the nature of what those vulnerabilities are going to be is going to change. Like the speed of development is accelerating. So I'm just really excited about it. Uh, and I've really enjoyed working with Replit. You know, I think they have a belief that there will be a backlash against vibe coding in the future. And I mean, this is a conversation I had with their CEO a month ago. Um, you know, and just this weekend there was a news story about, you know, uh, Replit deletes a production database, which I think is a little bit like the, uh, blaming a chainsaw manufacturer for, uh, an accident that happened with the chainsaw. Yeah. There's, we're still figuring out like, what are the boundaries, right? Like, is it user error? Is it like, you know, system had this claim that everything would be fine. Um, so I, I think that the Replit approach is, hey, like we're going to, overinvest early on in kind of being a secure and safe platform for these kinds of things to build trust with the users. And I, I think that's wise, uh, and I'm glad that we can be a part of it.

Yeah, I love your rose-colored glasses also. Like, it's such an exciting time for security. So many security flaws to kill.

If I wasn't a partially delusional optimist, I probably couldn't be a CEO.

So, for sure. For sure. Well, uh, speaking of that, I've got a few more questions for you. Have you ever experienced imposter syndrome? So speaking of like having delusions. Have you ever experienced, you know, this feeling of like, uh-oh, I can't do it. Like having it, like they're going to find me out as a fraud.

That's, I, many people on the team have. For me personally, that's never been like a big thing, right? Like I will tell you that my, my deep fear is unconscious incompetence. So maybe that's related, right? But hey, to, you know, being consciously incompetent is one thing, but to have something that like You didn't, you weren't even aware. And suddenly you realize, right. That's where that sinking feeling of feedback comes back and you're like, whoa, I didn't even know that this was something kind of, kind of to the example that you shared about the CEO who's like, oh wow, I only talk to people who I feel comfortable with.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, well, that's, that's really powerful. Like I, I feel like you're only concerned about what you don't, or not concerned about, but like, You feel, it sounds like you feel like you can handle challenges as they come.

Generally, yeah. I mean, you know, one of the great things I think about just the environment at the company is I've not lost a lot of sleep over the company. You know, obviously like I care deeply, I'm worried about it. I feel a tremendous amount of responsibility for the team, but I also know that my team doesn't want me, you know, suffering at night, like racking my brain, like how are we gonna fix this issue? In a way that would be unhealthy, right? And I very much have a perspective that startups are marathons, not sprints. And so I want to work at like, it's a grueling pace, but it's a sustainable pace. And part of that is like maintaining my psychology to be able to like bring energy, right? Like transfer that to the team. I very much believe in the chief energy officer framing of the CEO role.

I love that. That's so great. What do you wish you had known earlier on your journey?

Well, there's a ton, to be honest. I mean, you know, that's so broad. Some of the things that we've already covered certainly fall into that, right? Like the importance of a singular focus of a team, the importance of hiring people who are not just super talented, but are also dispositionally suited for a startup. And actually, that's a good one. You know, we've really evolved the hiring process over the years based on things that we've learned, right? And so now, uh, anytime we talk to a candidate who has not worked at a startup, sometimes people naively assume, oh, like a 200-person company is just like a 2,000-person company, only everything's scaled down by 10. And you and I both know that is not true at all. Right? A 20-person company is a radically different beast from a 200-person, from a 2,000-person company. And sometimes people really, and so I'll generally advise people, hey, like if you've not worked at a startup before, you should think long and hard about this, right? This is going to be extremely different. It's going to be way less comfortable than a larger environment that you've been in. It's going to feel much more chaotic, even if it's well managed. And I'm trying to, you know, basically anti-sell people who will not like be super excited about that kind of environment.

So important. I was just reflecting on how it's so true that people think like, oh, it'll be fine. It's like, no, it'll not be fine. Let me just set you up unless you love it. Unless you love it.

The hardest thing too is when you have somebody who's like a great fit culture-wise maybe. And they're like, you know, I want to work hard. Like I'm super excited. Those are not, those are, those are great positive things and you'll want to make it work and they'll want to make it work. But if it ends up that, you know, they're getting off the roller coaster and feeling sick, it's not going to work out. I really encourage people to like know that about yourself before you think about joining a startup or even starting a startup. I think like they kind of, they like, they really, really wanted some aspect of it and then they got into it and they were like, oh wow, like this is not actually For me.

Totally. Well, that might bring us to the last question. Isaac, what advice do you have for other founders as they embark on their journeys to grow into leaders?

I'll kind of on that vein, I would go back to Socrates' know thyself. Although I was recently reminded, I was having a conversation at the dinner table last evening with a bunch of engineers. Socrates was very anti-writing. He thought that writing would destroy the ability to memorize and recall. information that was so huge in oral cultures. And so we were talking about our company runs almost 100% on Slack, very little email. So we were talking about how, uh, how Socrates would react to that, you know, big negative for him, I'm sure. But, um, really knowing yourself as a person, right? And like, hey, like, what do I really want? Uh, you know, wow. If you are clear on that, you will be able to really see through and you will like naturally solve a lot of problems. So one of the things that I have learned, I think, as a manager is when I, when I come into a situation and, you know, yesterday I was in this check-in meeting with our marketing team and I was like, hey, like I observed this thing and I know that like this outcome could be a lot better. Um, I also know that you are smart, talented people with a long priority list, so You know, what, what are, what's the bottleneck to this getting solved, right? Rather than like, hey, like make this happen. I really wanna understand like, well, do you see this as well? Do you also think this is an issue and what is it gonna take for us to actually fix it? And also like, why am I even involved? Like you, you all are really smart, right? Like is there some blocker or some friction here that is preventing things from like naturally working? And I see now my role as, uh, a leader, a lot of it is just kind of moving things out of the way. It's like, well, like we wanted to do that, but then there was this issue and okay, maybe I can go make that issue go away for you if it is something that is really at an executive level. And so that part of the job is really enjoyable, right? You know, the spreadsheets part of the job is less enjoyable and I still miss programming, but I like being able to build an environment where people feel like they can do the best work of their life. That's really satisfying.

I love it, Isaac. Thank you so much. What a great conversation. I really appreciate your time today and talking to us and sharing your lessons learned along the journey.

Well, thanks so much. And it was a pleasure speaking with you as well. I hope to see you around at some of the other conferences and trade some more protein tips.

I love it. We bonded over protein and muscle building. Thanks, Isaac.

All right.

Thanks for listening to From Startup to Grownup. If you like what you heard, give it a review on Apple Podcasts so other people can find it. And if you know of a founder or someone else who is meant to be on this podcast, drop me a line through my website, alisacohn.com.