360 - From Code to Connection: Transforming Engineers into Emotionally Intelligent Leaders with Vidar Hokstad

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started.

Pia Dora Hockstedt, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are a fractional chief technology officer and expert in helping companies utilize cloud and AI and all this tech stuff that I can barely understand. And you've also been a leader in a fair number of organizations. You've led very, very large teams in startups and VC-backed companies. So you've got a really broad background in leadership, which is why I thought you would be so interesting to talk with today. So thank you for joining me.

Thanks for having me.

Let's start with your backstory, how you got educated and how you got into the business of technology.

I left university actually to start my first company. I didn't finish my education until later. And how that happened was basically, I, my plan all through high school was to go into academia and study and research computer science. Because I started with computers from age of 5, basically. And it was, it's always been what's fascinated me the most. But when I started university, well, I was sitting with a couple of older students in one of the computer rooms at school and was so happy to finally have fast internet connection. We were thinking about, you know, the horrible internet, because connections we had at home and asked ourselves the question, well, how hard could it be to do better than the expensive slow providers that were out there? And so we decided to start one. And basically, you know, starting, starting position of not knowing anything about business and not having an idea how difficult it actually was. And that made it a whole lot easier to make that leap, right? So we got funding by pure chance. One of my co-founders went to a bar one night and ran into a guy that had some money that he wanted to place in a technology company. And off we went and it didn't go all that, that well, but we learned a hell of a lot from it. So, and I was hooked basically at that point.

What happened to your first company? You did go public or?

No, no, no, no. We started a price war with the largest incumbent and didn't understand that the reason their prices were so high was because they were milking as much profit as they could out of the market. And we assumed assume that they couldn't match our price, which was about 75% below theirs. The problem was it took about 3, 4 days of us being at the trade fair on the stand right opposite theirs with an offer, you know, 75% below theirs before they lowered their prices. And so suddenly we had this large company, you know, backed by the incumbent telco in Norway, where I'm from originally, that was just pouring money into making up for the reduced prices by making it a high-volume service. We got some traction, but not enough. And we ended up selling the back-end dialogue service to actually the publisher of PC World because they were toying with running these kinds of services as well at that time. So, you know, we got a pittance for that part, but we continued on hosting web services for websites for various businesses and actually running the service that we had started and sold off. So it was not, it was not, didn't get much money out of that, but got a lot of experience and actually the lawyer of our investor was impressed enough that myself and my co-founders were actually then headhunted into one of his client's companies.

So what happened next?

Well, so I worked at that company, which was a startup as well, but you know, at that point I wasn't one of the founders. I was just a regular developer for about a year. And then the VP of operations took me aside and told me he was planning on leaving to start another company and took me with him. This was 1999 at this point and actually '98.

Before the dot-com crash.

Before the dot-com crash. And we'll get to that.

Okay.

So basically I went with him to build tablets. So we were not first, but we were long before you. This was long before iPad and iPhone. This is interesting for me because one of the biggest lessons that I drew from that company was that how easy it is for geeks like me to get sort of seduced into thinking, oh, this is a fantastic product because we look at it and we see what we think it can become. And we, like, we have this tablet that was technologically, it was cool for its time, but it was not user-friendly because it was resistive tech, resistive touchscreens. It's like, if you remember the really old tablets, really the cheapest old tablets you could get, they were horrible to try to press anything on because the screen, the touchscreens were so bad. It had little memory, low resolution, you know, low battery life, and it was tethered to your house because you needed a base station in your house to connect it to the internet. And but for us, this was like, wow, really cool. Um, the market did not think it was really cool. Everybody tried to do tablets at that time. There's a lot— every— even the laptop makers tried to do tablets. Laptops with rotatable screens.

I remember those.

Yeah, exactly.

They were big and thick and clumsy.

Yeah, I had one of those too, and we were all very excited about them, but regular users didn't buy them. So the takeaway for me for that was basically the smartest thing Apple did. It was not the invention around iPhone or iPad. It was that they waited. They knew that this wasn't ready. Whereas everybody else were like rushing to market. I'm sure this would be a big thing. The market didn't buy it. And so everybody wrote it off and thought like, well, tablets, it's not working. And then Apple came a few years later. And I remember actually when the iPhone launched, I was like, well, what's this? This is like, we haven't tried this. It doesn't work. Nobody wants it.

That was the same reaction that Steve Ballmer had at Microsoft.

Yeah.

They lost $17 billion. Because they didn't tap into the— they didn't realize how important mobile phones were.

Because we had all tried it before, right? But we had all tried it before and not realizing that the problem wasn't the concept. The problem was the hardware wasn't ready, the software wasn't ready, the execution wasn't there. And that's something that Apple knew much better. And it's like, this has been a hard lesson, you know, for somebody who loves the technology bit of it, is it doesn't matter if the concept is cool if the execution isn't good enough.

That's right.

When this was like starting to get traction, um, I met the co-founder for my next company while working there, actually. Then we were gearing up to the dot-com crash. So that was like mid-'99. I ended up leaving this tablets company to co-found a vanity email provider. So my email address is my first name at my last name dot com. And he had a similar one. So we were talking about this and, uh, you know, thinking about how many people would like an email address that was easier to remember at that point, uh, most people had Hotmail addresses or Yahoo.

Hotmail or AOL or Roadrunner. I think there was a Roadrunner.com platform. Yeah. I remember exactly.

Whereas I had idara@hox.com. So we decided we were gonna build a platform where people could basically share domain names, uh, get their first name at their last name.com. And we ended up then getting venture capital. Um, at the time I thought it was a crazy high number. We got about $1 million, uh, in funding. To, and we bought like 60,000 domain names, and then we moved to the UK. So this was, so in the summer of 2000, basically I moved to the UK with this company, and we were at the time, we had scaled up to about 50 people. And the reason we moved was basically that the VCs in Oslo at the time were basically saying, well, you're not going to be able to get enough for a second race in Oslo because the companies here were at the time where they were all focused on like energy and oil, gas, forestry, that kind of thing. So we moved to London, secured a second round financing, and then a few weeks after we had secured our second round financing, the bottom fell out of the market. And our plan at that point was basically, well, we were going to spend all of that money. So that's our second round, was $6.5 million. Um, doesn't sound that much anymore, but at the time that was a large, uh, you know, it was a large B round. Now it's hardly seed money, you know, it's like, but plan was to spend all that money in a few months and then do another race. And instead we had to basically buckle down and survive on that money for the, for the next several years. That was like a harsh introduction to VC. That was the first time we got out and, you know, talked to an actual fund and I got, um, experience of dealing with pivoting because we then ended up pivoting to start the .name top-level domain, you know, because ICANN was opening up licenses for new top-level domains. And we were part of the first batch of that. We sold off the vanity email service, uh, to, uh, actually to a company owned by Mark Cuban. And they got the, they got this because it's a steal. Um, basically, you know, we ended up selling that for about $2 million. They recouped the money in about 6 months by basically, uh, telling people, oh, this is a paid service now, shedding about 96% of users or something like that, and the remaining user base was, uh, it was enough for them to, to recoup their entire purchase amount in 6 months. I was so annoyed because I was the— I was basically the only vote on the board, uh, for holding on to it and see whether we could monetize, whether we could actually do the same ourselves. Uh, instead they were like— the investors insisted on selling it and focusing on the .NET bit. So, but you know, that's what happens when you're dealing with, when you are giving up that kind of control to investors. Basically every startup that I've gone through have given me like those, a lot of interesting lessons that way. I think to a great deal shaped what, how I'm approaching things today.

So when did you form your consultancy?

So I started my consultancy about 10 years ago, but I have been moving sort of back and forth because for example, about 5 years ago, when I, while I was consulting, one of my clients basically said, well, you know, We want to hire you. How, what's it going to, what's it going to take? And I ended up basically at that point joining a venture capital fund that was building out platforms to try to automate some of the investment processes.

Really?

Yeah. So then I got to see it from the other side of the table and that was eye-opening.

I bet. Wow.

So during all this time you had, you've obviously had a lot of experience during the growth of the beginning of the internet, really back in the '90s. And the technology expansion that occurred through the '90s and the early 2000s. Just by way of background, I learned how to code in 1969 at Dartmouth College. Beginners All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction, BASIC programming. That's what I learned.

It's the birthplace of BASIC, wasn't it?

Yeah, and it was all mainframe, timeshare on mainframes. Anyways, what is it that has kept you going? You've gone through a bunch of highs and a bunch of lows, and you're in a technology which is constantly changing. And a lot of people get burned out. What keeps you motivated?

So I think, I mean, I, I love getting my hands dirty and this is part of the reason why I've ended up doing startups instead of like going into a safe corporate job. I did the closest thing I had to a safe corporate job actually was after this .NET top-level domain where I spent 3 years at Yahoo, which at the time was, you know, barely 10 years old, but it was a 10,000-person company. Wow. So I spent 3 years basically doing politics. Shielding my engineering team from, uh, from product managers and that kind of stuff.

That sounds hard.

It was surprisingly relaxed, but basically my team only existed to protect the European financial directors from the US payment services team in Yahoo.

Wow.

Because the US payments and services team in Yahoo did not understand European financial regulations. And so they did not understand the requirements of that. So my team basically, we ran our own billing system for Europe and Yahoo at the time had 8 billing systems.

Wow.

In large part because basically the US, the US payment team didn't understand the regional needs for any of the other regions. But yeah, that was, so I got that experience as well of dealing with the politics of a large, you know, large organization like that. It was, Yahoo was a great employer, but it was not a fun place to work because I didn't get to do any of the tech stuff. Wow.

When you look back on your career, you've been doing this for a while. What is it about you, Vidar, the human being, that has made you so successful?

So I think I'm very much an introvert to start with, and I had to learn basically to deal with the social signaling, stuff like that, by studying. Basically, I had to practice. And I think for a lot of people where it's, uh, that goes into like engineering, stuff like that, a lot of us are introverts, but a lot of engineers don't go through that process. So they buckle down, they like sitting in front of screens, headphones on. And I love the peace and quiet of that as well. I love focusing on code, but I also realized that, well, because I think probably because I was doing startups where you can't hide like that because you have to do a lot of other things. I had to learn. In my first company, I had to do phone sales because we had to do sales. We had to, you know, get revenue and there was nobody else that could do it. Um, everybody has had to do it. I had to do phone support. I had to deal with, uh, go out to sales meetings. And so I had to learn to pick up on those clues that does not come naturally.

How did you, from being a hardcore introvert who all you wanted to be left alone in peace and quiet, how did you develop these skills that allowed you to work with other people?

One of my strengths has always been that I'm incredibly stubborn.

That's not, that has nothing to do with being a Norwegian, right?

Well, so one of, so, so the side effect of that basically has been that that's That's been very helpful for me when it comes to, you know, my, my software development, for example, if I run into a bug, you know, I will just keep at it until I figure out, figure it out. At the same time, my being introverted, that I never liked asking for help since then I would go out and look for solutions. And ironically, then when I'm then dealing with, okay, well, how am I going to deal with the social aspect and dealing with the stakeholders sort of outside of my comfort zone? My solution basically was to study. It was to look at, okay, how does this work? And for example, my the phone sales you did, I actually did a stint at a company doing phone sales to figure that out and got training in how to deal with it. And a lot of people who are good at it will just think, oh yeah, this is just instinct. You don't need any training, but you can train it. You know, it's like for a sales process like that, for example, it is very much, you have your pattern of first you're going to make them feel good about talking to you. Then you're going to make them feel bad about the problem they have. And then you're going to make them feel good because you're telling them there is a solution, but wait, they can only get a solution if they, you know, if they actually pay you. So it's like you have all of these, these things that you can practice and you can learn. Eventually I got pretty good at it. I still feel like it's, you know, it's draining me. It's, it takes a lot of energy for me to do that. So I love having my quiet moments with just me and the computer and the screen, but I can switch it on and I can go out and You know, talk to clients and solve problems, that involves dealing with people. And I think that's something that is less common among software developers and among technologists than it should be, because it's not, you know, it's something everybody can learn, but not everybody puts in effort.

My impression and my experience working with technologists and software engineers is that they are very resistant to learning anything about emotional competency and emotions. It's like, it's poison to them. Why is that?

That's an interesting one. I think there is a, there's a lot of us versus them in a lot of software engineering teams where it is, yes, but it is very much like things that are quantifiable, measurable, observable are the good things. That's science. It's objective. You can deal with it. You can understand it and learn it that way. And then the moment you're looking at, yes, that kind of emotional stuff, you'll find in a lot of engineering teams, there'll be a lot of fear or negative talk about the salespeople or the marketing people or the managers and that kind of thing that I think comes from, well, they are speaking a different language than a lot of the engineers are. And it's a language that the engineers don't want to learn, but it feels soft and squishy. And it's like all of these things that aren't so easily quantifiable.

You know, it strikes me, I've heard that exact explanation. And my response to that is emotions are data. Just like numbers on a spreadsheet. The only problem is engineers haven't learned how to read that data. And so it's just, it's not even information to them that they can comprehend until they learn how to structure it. It remains unfathomable to them. And the trick is teaching them how to structure emotional data in a way that they can read it, understand it, and react to it.

An interesting thing now, I think, with, with AI is that you find a lot of the same resistance. The people who struggle with dealing with the, with the unreliability of other people also tend to be more negative, I feel, to AI because they're like, well, it can do the wrong thing. You know, you can't predict 100% what it's going to do at any time because it's reacting in a way that is more similar to people than what they're used to out of programs. So you kind of see the same thing now happening with some engineers that are very negative to sort of AI adoption.

Wow. Same negative attitude. I gotta tell you, I use AI every day and it's amazing. It's absolutely amazing what it can do, but you gotta know how to use it and you can't trust it.

Exactly. And you, and you need to, and the irony there is that you need to learn how to speak to it in, in a way that very often, uh, is similar to how you're dealing with people. So I have, for example, a typical example is that one of the biggest tricks to learn with AI to get AI to reliably do repetitive tasks is that you have to expect that the AI is going to act as if it's bored. I mean, you can argue about whether this is real or not, but I have had Claude tell me this is getting tedious and stop doing what I told it to and try to take shortcuts. And it doesn't matter whether it's, you know, a real sentiment or not. You have to treat it the same way.

Right.

And the solution is to break up the tasks. Yeah. The same as you might do with people.

Yeah.

And you know, but that is a hard, that is a really hard message to get through to those engineers who are not interested in dealing with sort of soft squishy emotions.

How do you think you would go about getting engineers to change their perspective on emotions and people as being soft and squishy and being instead thinking of them, these are very complex biophysiological machines that we have to interact with, and there are patterns and they are predictable, and there are repeating patterns that we can spot. And when we see those patterns, we can learn how to react to them properly. Would that even resonate with engineers?

I think with some it does. It's something that's, uh, the approach that I feel works best is to basically show them, as in point out certain things, point out things. And I, it's kind of funny because, uh, one of the things that I did to get better at this was to learn, um, how to understand body language better by actually reading a book by a former FBI FBI profiler. It's a fantastic book. It's called What Everybody Says. And it's one of the very, very simple things that is very easy to observe there and that you can tell somebody and they'll instantly start noticing it is, well, if people are turning away from you, you know, that's a very strong signal of disinterest. It's such a simple thing. People who are good with people knows this. They instinctively, they react to it. Everybody instinctively reacted. This is the interesting thing is that you can tell people, do a simple experiment. If people start talking to you about a subject you're not interested in, suddenly shift away from them. They will take the hint very, very quickly that you're not interested in them and you're not interested in this. And it will change their behaviors. They'll be like, they will pick different subjects to engage you the next time because they see that whatever he was talking to you about didn't work. And our, you know, at least listening will notice this. And they'd be like, oh, okay. If it can be that simple, you can learn, you know, you can convince them that it's worth learning more.

There you go. So where do you see yourself in your career at this point in time and going forward?

So I'm, uh, part of the reason why I'm, I'm doing consulting now is because, as I said, I like getting my hands dirty and being at a sort of seniority level where I have to make a choice, right? Either I keep on managing people and, and that kind of stuff and, and be very hands-off, or I do startups, but startups at this point struggle to afford me full-time. And so consulting is a nice way for me to keep my hands dirty while splitting the load over, you know, that's—

You don't have the responsibility of managing people or making a product.

Well, I mean, I don't mind, you know, working with the team for a while, but eventually it gets boring to me. I'm like, okay, I've solved the pressing problems now. The day-to-day management, that's not very interesting to me.

There you go.

But solving problems in, uh, for example, getting a team that's, say, skeptical of AI adoption, for example, to, to buy into it and solving the, uh, both of the technical hurdles to that, but also the interpersonal challenges of getting them to trust that this isn't going to mean they're all getting fired, kind of thing. The AI is not ready to take over for them yet.

I would say you were a creator, not a manager.

Yeah. I mean, that's the part that I enjoy the most. So I'll do the management bit if I have to, but it's not something that will keep me happy long-term. That's right.

You got to be in there problem-solving and creating.

Exactly. So at some point the company gets to a stage where, where I'm not the right person for them. And then I'm more than happy to, to sort of move on, help them find somebody who are the right person to drive the day-to-day management. In a more mature—

Good for you.

All right.

One more question and I'll let you go, Vidar. What's one thing about yourself we would never know about unless you reveal it to us?

I would say never because my name is globally unique. So it's, if you were to search for me, you'll find out. But I, one of my hobbies is writing novels. So I write sci-fi novels as a side thing.

You write Viking novels? Novels about Vikings?

Sci-fi, science fiction.

Science fiction. You're a sci— you write science fiction novels.

Yeah.

And you've been published?

Uh, well, self-published, partly because I couldn't be bothered going through the— I mean, basically you're not going to make any money out of it. Oh no. You invest a lot of years in building up a reputation. So I decided that if I'm not going to make any money out of it anyway, there is no reason to spend time going through the cycle of submission and rejection over years.

But you just enjoy the writing.

I enjoyed writing and it's fun to get occasional feedback from readers. I think, you know, they sold reasonably well, which is like in the high hundreds, uh, closing in on 1,000 copies or something for the best-selling one, which amazingly is far above average. This is why you're not making money out of publishing.

I know my fifth book is coming out in September. I know all about that.

Yeah. So at least, I mean, for nonfiction, it's it's great as a way of building personal brand and getting your name out there. So that's for that part. The science fiction thing doesn't really do much for my, for my tech career.

So, no, but it sounds like it's a lot of fun. There you go. Well, Vidar, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate your time.

Thank you.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up, ratings, and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team.

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