Decoding excellent leadership ft. Julie Zhuo

Paradoxically, humans get meaning out of contributing to something greater than themselves. Right. If you're only focused on yourself and your ego and what you want in the moment, it's actually very hard, you know, thinking about maximizing long term, long term happiness or joy to be able to live like that.

Judy, welcome to cred.

Hi, everyone. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me, Kunal.

And we should get started. Have a seat. As expected, we'll keep it random.

Fantastic.

And we do have some questions from people who have signed up and people who from the team have asked some questions. But I'm going to keep it a wide range because you have done many things. So maybe we can start with if you can give us a background about your journey so far and we can kick off with that question and just kind of get a flavor of things and also give us a quick overview on what Sundial is all about.

Hi, everyone, I'm Julie Zhu. Okay, let's start with my career journey. So I grew up in the United States. I actually grew up in Shanghai until the age of six. Then I moved into the United States. And I have Asian parents, just like many of you. So of course, the only possible jobs I could have were doctor, lawyer, or engineer. And unfortunately, I was really scared of blood. I also thought law was super boring, so it really naturally became engineer. So I studied computer science and my career journey really took off because I took one class at Stanford, where I went, that changed my life. And it was a class focused on entrepreneurship. So you have to understand, I grew up in China. I grew up in Houston, right in kind of the middle of nowhere. I didn't really know anything about Silicon Valley by the time that I went. And I didn't know anything about the startup culture. I didn't know anything about what it was to build an incredible tech company. And then when I took this class, it really demystified it for me. It explained to me why this place was so special. It broke down. What are VCs and how do two people in a garage go out and build something really incredible? And after that class, I resolved to join a startup right after I graduated. And I was very lucky in that I chose a little startup that was a social network called Facebook. It was about 100 people at the time. You know, many, many people who, all of us were about 22 years old, 23 years old. We were all just. It kind of felt like an extension of college because Facebook was a high school and college social networking product at the time. And so I was there and I feel that I grew up with the company. Everything I learned, I was really shaped by. By this idea of being at the hyperscale place with incredible people solving really interesting problems at scale. And I was there for about 13 and a half years, and then I left because it was time to learn something new. And I was lucky enough to start my company, Sundial, with my former colleague at Facebook. He used to lead data, and I led, of course, design and user research. And ever since then, we have been doing what it is that we love to do, which is work with fantastic people, solve interesting problems, and try and build something really amazing. You know, the product, the company. But of course, let's enjoy the journey along the way. I guess probably the one other thing I left out is I love writing. And writing became like a form of therapy for me through my journey at Facebook. This is really a culture of excellence. And one of the things that I often say you get if you want to sign up for a culture of excellence is you often feel like an imposter. You're not sure you can do it. You're like, everyone around me is so brilliant and wonderful. Like, what business do I have being here in their midst? And so I really suffered from that. I suffered, often feeling like, well, do I really belong here? Can I really make it in this place? And one of the things that helped me was writing, was using the time every week to clarify the thoughts and ideas that were going on in my head. And I started blogging pretty prolifically, maybe around 10 years ago. And then through that journey, I ended up writing a book about management. And I think many startup people or people going into management for the first time do read it. And it gives me great joy to know that some of the things I learned along the way can be valuable for others.

That's super interesting, Julia, and thank you for that intro. You've seen Facebook now meta grow from hundred people to how many people by the time you left?

Like 30,000? 20. 30,000.

How many people reported to you by the time you left?

Hundreds. Maybe 300, 400.

Okay, so if you go through these cycles, what has been the biggest advice you can give to companies who are going through these cycles faster? I think what I'm seeing is that companies are getting bigger really, really fast now, thanks to all the advancements and technologies and friendly environments, consumer readiness. Facebook was built in a time where people were figuring out smartphones at the same time while they were figuring out Facebook at the same time. What do you think has remained sort of a timeless Advice for companies or team members, many of them are in their first or second jobs. That allows you to scale consistently.

I think the most important meta skill is learning how to learn. Learning how to be flexible, learning how to be adaptable, learning how to take lots and lots of new information and be able to build that into a framework which helps with decision making and which helps with alignment. Right? Because that's the only thing that's constant now. It feels like the world is changing actually faster and faster. We talked about this the last time and so we know that technologies themselves change. We know that specific skills, coding, languages, design tools, all of that will change over time. The thing that is consistent and that will ever, forever be critical is knowing yourself and knowing how it is that you can roll up your sleeves, go back to being a beginner again, know how to test your assumptions and become little by little an expert in some new area. And I think, you know, at Facebook we really focused on that, right? That was really one of the core pieces of our culture. And I would say another thing that's really important for scaling companies, scaling teams, is know who you are, know what you stand for, right? That is what your culture is. You know, know the specific trade offs that you're willing to make to work the way that you want and to have and uphold the values that you want. Because that's the other thing that, you know, it might shift, but it, this thing shifts slowly, right? And every new person that comes in, you know, they know what the culture is based on, how they see other people working, based on what gets celebrated, what gets punished, what is the way that people resolve conflict, who do they pay attention to in a room? All of these things. Even if you don't have a poster with all your values, encode your values and the more that you can be intentional about, this is what we want to be and this is how we want to grow, and these are the values that we hold most dear. The easier it is for people to come in and actually really be able to adapt to that or otherwise understand very early on that it is not the right fit for them.

That is very, very helpful. I have a different question. I'm going to keep switching between your illustrious big Facebook thing to being a founder and hustling every day to make things work. You worked with super sharp talent in Bay Area and who worked in bigger companies sometimes and had lots of years of experience of building very large scale companies. And now you're building your startup with a large chunk of team being in Bangalore right here. In Indiranagar and we often discuss things around culture and other things being different. What are your few observations? And be brutal about this because this team can only learn from your observation that what is the key difference in work ethic, compounding cultural ambition. Anything that you feel is dramatically different from. And I'm generalizing, so be brutal about generalizing when you're observing this.

Absolutely. It's really interesting because as I've learned to hire here and compared to hiring the Bay Area, so much of it is also my own journey because as I said, I have Asian parents and in some ways my own upbringing is a lot similar to the upbringing of many people who live here. I think one immediate difference is probably, you know, how I felt going in and hiring in the Bay Area, right. There was a large network that had built already and coming here into a completely new market, I almost had to restart it. And that was something quite interesting to me. One of the things I noticed is of course, people here, it felt actually a little bit harder to find immediately people who maybe had the risk tolerance of what I would often be used to in the Bay Area. Right. And you know, it's not to say that there aren't people who wanted to work at startups or have experience, but there were just many more of them in the Bay Area than here. I felt that many, many people I talked to there was this element of really favoring or wanting stability. Right. And the idea of like a prestigious large company to be able to work for and that eliminated a lot of people from just like, you know, what you guys are a startup, you know, you don't have anything yet that seems a little bit risky. And so that's probably the first thing. The second is decision making. I noticed that often people or candidates would tell me that it's more of a joint decision. You know, like they had, they were going to think about their job, but they need to talk to their family, they needed to talk to like parents. Especially for younger people was like a really important, you know, sounding board for taking the job. And often, you know, parents tell you, don't take the risk, go for like the big name company, go to like a Goldman Sachs or a Google or whatever. Right. But that, that was another factor. I don't see that practically at all in the barrier. Like people just make their decisions. It's often not so much of a communal thing. Right. I think it's a little bit of that individualistic culture versus a more communal or collectivist society as we see here and in the Asian cultures. I think another one that was a surprise. I mean, this is one of the things that we really focus on, it is a core value at Sundial is we want people to think from first principles. And if you really care about everyone thinking from first principles, then of course one of the things that we expect and in fact value is pushing back against other voices, right? To kind of be like, hey, I thought about this problem and I don't, you know, I think you're wrong, right? And to say that to me, to my co founder, to basically everyone who might be more experienced or more tenured or more senior, that is really important if you want to be a kind of learning organization, if you want to be, you know, an organization that kind of pushes, right? And I know for many people who joined us, it was like kind of an almost like a surprise, like something a little different to constantly be asked to or oftentimes demanded of, like, hey, what do you think about this is a good idea? Is this not a good idea? Like, really do the thinking for yourself and really ask questions or push back if you think that's wrong. And so this idea of, like, constantly ask questions, don't just accept what you're told if you don't understand it, much better for you to be able to ask the question, right? Like, that shows that you are willing to. To put your ego aside for the sake of learning that it matters more for you to get better faster than to pretend like you're pretty smart and have everything under control. So that's something that I think we had to really make explicit, right? And it's hard, and I know that personally, it was hard for me to change that muscle in my own brain, to start to respect my own voice and to develop what I call the creative confidence, right? The confidence that, you know, I have a theory that, like, in order to really be creative, to push the boundaries, you kind of need to believe that you know enough about it. And if you don't keep asking the questions and get to the point where you're like, now this, this topic feels intuitive to me. It's very difficult for you to go and actually do very innovative and groundbreaking work. Like, these things go hand in hand. You have to do it. And the fastest way there is to just allow yourself to look stupid because you, you worry you look stupid. Everyone else thinks that you're just, you know, you're. You're like, you're a hustler. You're somebody who actually cares to learn many interesting lessons.

I'm going to ask you A pointed question on a topic that I have discussed with Chandra is pursuit of excellence. What's your view on India vs Bay Area? On the need for excellence?

The need for. I mean, we all need excellence. It doesn't matter.

Where do you see the same kind of hunger to thrive for that, to achieve that, to wish for that? Is it even in that zone of ambition of people over here?

I think so. But here's what I will say about that, right? I think that with excellence and with ambition, a lot of times you have to see it. To believe is really, really difficult for somebody to believe something is possible or that, you know, you could do it. You could be that if you don't know anyone in your local sphere who seems like an ordinary person to you, right? And that was me for, like, a lot of, you know, when I was little, growing up, right? As I'm an immigrant, you know, like, I get teased at school. I feel different. Like. And then I watch movies in Hollywood and I these actors. And it never crossed my mind that I could, let's say, be a leading person in Hollywood just because I didn't see that representation, right? And I was lucky to go to a good school district. And eventually I went to a place like Stanford, and eventually I went to a place like Facebook. And the thing that I learned is suddenly around me, I saw brilliant people. I saw them go out and do amazing things. I saw them achieve that. And then when you see that close by, you start to wonder. You're like, well, if they could do it and they seem like an ordinary person, why not me? What's so different about us? But I don't know. I think it's a very hard question that if you're never actually surrounded in an environment, it's hard to dream, right? And that's why I go back to, I think whenever I give young people advice on, let's say, it's job, find yourself a room or a group of people who show you. Who can. Who can show you beyond what you believe is capable and just spend a bunch of time with them. Like, you know what? You will be pushed and you will start to see what it means to. To be excellent.

Talking about ordinary people will talk about Zuck in a bit. I'm curious to ask the question, of all the people over here, how many of you think that you are spending time with people smarter than you for most of your week? Please raise your hand. Okay, that's good to know. That's good to know. That's a good representation. I believe that this is probably the most important thing that to constantly be paranoid about, who am I with? A lot of people get confused about, or how will I make money? How will I get promoted in the job? I think the true input lever is who are you surrounded by? And are they raising their bar consistently or not? Because if you are in their company, you will automatically just move. Talk about the evolution of Zuck. You've probably seen him from pretty much almost feeling like he's a college mate to become this profound founder CEO who's challenged so many things and challenging even more crazier things going forward and constantly suffering ridicule. You must be remembering the time when Facebook IPO'd, and everybody's like, oh, this is this candy crush company that has come and that's gonna do digital goods and turns into this very large company. How do you see him? How did you see him evolve? Like, can you give. Give us a sense of what Zuck was and became?

He is, to me, one of the best examples I've ever seen of somebody who was so focused on the pursuit of excellence and learning and, you know, all the things we just talked about, right? Like surrounding himself with great people. Because when you meet him, you know, what does he do? He asks you a barrage of questions, just like, one after another. Like, you know, if an engineer is giving a presentation about something and there's reviewing, Zuck wants to know all the details. He wants to know, like, wait a second, why did you do it that way? What's hard? What's easy? You know, it's. And a lot of times he's just. He's absorbing, right? He's just trying to improve his mental map of how things work, of how the world works, and then, you know, processing it, right? But that's the one thing, is he always. He was so good at hiring and forming a team. You know, often we do do this thing, right? When you go on Twitter and, like, people idolize a single person, it's not a single. I mean, it's a person. But so much of what made that person or that company great is their ability, frankly, to attract and retain really great talent, right? And it's both of these things. First, you have to have a vision that's grand and ambitious enough that all the smart people want to come. Then you actually have to be good and thoughtful manager to that person, right? Because if you're going to just treat them poorly, you know, I don't know why a smart person would want to stay with you for years and years. And so I certainly see that. You know, if you look at Mark's executive team, if you look at the people who have been with him, right? Exceptional people. Very, very long tenure, you know, decades. His, you know, Javi, folks who have been. Naomi, they've been there for over a decade. And. And I think that says something about his ability to also just be a really good people manager, right? To really care about people and to take care of the team and all of that stuff. And it's not the glamorous side, but it is, I think, really important because it's never about a single person. It is always about the company. And the organism that gets built that over time will hopefully outlast any individual founder. I think that's a really important aspect of it. So asking questions, surrounding yourself with great people, constantly just learning and learning and learning, and then the fourth thing is over. I think the thing that Mark does really well is that he listens to all the perspectives, but he is also not afraid to make a decision, even if everyone agrees with him, because at that point, he's kind of gone deep enough and searched deep enough and found the conviction. And I've seen many instances which I find quite admirable. Right. It's. It's hard for me, I know, for many, much of my career if, like, I'm in a room of 20 people and 19 of them are like, you know, I think this idea is really not good. It's not going to succeed. Like, I'm probably going to be influenced by that. But if you truly have done the work to focus on understanding what it is or have convictions in your belief, then sometimes that is the right call. And Mark has made calls like that, and they have turned out to be right.

Can you think about a call that you disagreed with and he still made it and turned out to be right?

Oh, so many, right. Instagram for a billion doll. People laughed like that was.

Did you laugh at that call as well? Did you?

I don't think I do enough about that one. I actually thought that was. I thought that was fine. But there are. There are others that like. But Instagram for a billion dollars was not very well understood, right? Because Instagram at the time was like, it's like 12 people. It's like a company of 12 employees. They had, I don't know, like, tens of millions of users. I mean, of course, now we know what Instagram is, and it's hard to imagine, but at the point in which this decision was made, people are like, this is insane. Like, no one's ever paid this much for.

Or WhatsApp for 19.

Yes. Or WhatsApp for 19.

People are like, this is ridiculous.

Yes. People are like. And some people are still like, it's ridiculous because, you know, WhatsApp doesn't make money. I still think it's a brilliant.

I don't know if you know, but WhatsApp is now making close to a billion plus in India alone now. So it's just a matter of turning on the levers.

Exactly, exactly. And a lot of that, again, what did it come from? It came from a core understanding of social products. What makes social products important is the distribution and the speed to which, you know, the virality of something grows. Right. And it's like Mark knew that formula. And so it's not about like all these other metrics that people were using to judge, like, oh, how many employees, how long have they been around? Do they make any money? Right. It's not about that. I mean, those are other proxy metrics. But if you really understood the business of a social networking company as Mark did, right. Then there's a different set of metrics in his head that he's using to calculate the return and has turned out to be right.

Talking about virality, what's Your view on ChatGPT? First of all, how many of you have tried it already? Okay, we are in a good company today. That's good. Most of you have tried it. What's your view on it? And funny enough, I actually asked Chad GPT today on what question should I ask you? And I have one question from that I thought I should ask, but I'm going to ask that next. What's your view on it?

Oh, I think it's incredible. I really, I felt that it is. And what's interesting to me is like, I don't think it's that, you know, the technology itself, right? What it is has actually been around for a little bit longer. What I find fascinating is that it was now put into this user interface that suddenly made it so intuitive for people to start to gather its value. And I thought that is actually interesting. And that's actually how a lot of things happen, right? It's not like, oh my God, this is the technology, this is the moment. It's this series of events, right? First it was the tech, but then it didn't really have a great, a super, you know, accessible way. And then little by little it gets to the point where, like, there is a watershed moment. And I think that the chat interface, the ability to think of and you Know, I've like actually tried to reflect on like well, what about it? And I think it's this idea of the personification of this technology, right? It's, it's sort of this like natural thing where like oh yeah, if there's a person or like an entity, I asked this entity questions and somehow that feels different than even just going on to Google and doing a search. Like, you know, emotionally it feels different, right? It feels a little bit more like you can imagine that there is a person at the end of it and it's a super smart person, a super smart friend or whatever and they just like give you answers. And I think that may explain my hypothesis at least that that explains a lot of why, you know, this in particular incarnate instantiation of the technology is just now so much more viral, right? So much more engaging, you know, for a wide audience. But you know, in terms of what it is itself, it's super, super fascinating. I do worry in terms of like, what are the risks of us sometimes thinking about this as like a super smart human? Because it's not like this is foolproof. It's not like this is the all knowing God. You know, it's still in a lot of ways just the some summation of human knowledge. All the individual pieces that have now been combined together, synergized together. It's super fascinating. But there's clearly now, I think in this instantiation we can see so many more use cases for it. It's something like our collective imagination has been activated.

Imagine you are at Google now and you see this stuff like ChatGPT, which is actually giving very good quality answers. I observed my own behavior that I am naturally thinking of asking a few questions on ChatGPT I would have not even imagined to ask on Google because I know that they will give me terrible results for that. For example, I asked today, how do you test what are the good, what are good interview questions to check for judgment in a consumer pm? And honestly it gave a very good list which I have arrived at after years and years of building companies. And honestly if I had these things before, I would really compound faster. If you were in Google right now, and Google is this large company, and I'm talking specifically about what happened with Zuck. He noticed a trend in stories and he took a mission to make every single product of Facebook turn and launch stories in no time. Do you think Google has that ability to kind of turn into a war mode and fight against chatgpt?

That's an interesting question. I don't think I know enough about Google having not really worked there. Now from, you know, my understanding of where they are technically in terms of their, like, I believe they have all the, they should have all of the ability to do this technically. Right. It sort of then becomes a little bit about, okay, well, are they, are they willing to maybe disrupt or be very aggressive about changing this thing that is their cash cow for so many years, which is Google search. Right. And that, you know, anything that is your cash cow is going to be a little bit more, you're gonna have to, you're gonna proceed carefully, right? Because that's like a core part of your business. And the reason why I imagine that they haven't been as aggressive in the innovations, even though they clearly have all the technology and the capability to do so, is probably because of that. You know, it's like you want to tread carefully so you don't. It doesn't disrupt so much of the way that your business is run. Now. I think if I were them, you know, I'd probably find other avenues of being able to test a, you know, just be like, okay, this is a proof point. It's clear that there's appetite for this. It's clear there's huge demand and interest in it. Let's find a way to roll out, you know, whatever our version of it that lets you ask questions and find other entry points. Perhaps that's the, you know, what's the equivalent of Siri, hey, Google or something, right? Do that there and use that as a potential testing ground and then figure out eventually how to incorporate a lot of that into a search. But it does, it changes the search paradigm because the search paradigm today is all about, you know, the business model is really all about advertising. Right. And I don't think we understand how an advertising business model is going to work in a chat based, you know, AI kind of chatbot model. That's just, that's a different problem. And that's. And somebody is probably thinking through that right now that'll that is one of the big things to figure out.

Google and Facebook, both of these companies have acquired companies that were misunderstood, scaled them and made them really, really big and proved a lot of people wrong by actually showing massive monetization potential behind that. What do these companies do very well to make sure that their M and A does not have a poor success?

I think a lot of it, I can't speak to Google as well, but having seen a lot of MA acquisitions at Facebook, I think one really important thing is if you Just ask a bunch of MA experts. What matters. Obviously the first is, well, does this extend your strategy? Is it a natural complement to the kinds of things that you already want to be doing? I think the second one that is actually equally important is is this going to be a good cultural fit? It's super important. You know, if you look at like failed mergers or areas where it went really, really poorly, a lot of times it's just like the organism could not subsume the other one and get to a productive way, right? It's like it was totally different ways of working or like, you know, the host came on too strong and it like killed everything that was great about this other company. And one of the things that I think Mark and Facebook has done really well is like, there is a really strong respect for the other company. For, for. It's a very, very slow process. It's not like, you know, Facebook or Meta acquires a company and it's like the next day it's like, all right, we're going to go in, change everything. You're going to do it all the Facebook way. In fact, with Instagram, you know, with WhatsApp, it's sort of like, look, you're already doing a great thing. You already were succeeding. Right now there's a lot of things that Facebook has done and innovated on that could be helpful. You know, for Instagram, for example, it might be like infrastructure, right? It's like we built all this technology, this infrastructure that allows it to scale or like do spam detection or all this. You know, every scaling company eventually has to deal with these problems, right? Problems of bots, problems of spam. And it's like, oh, by the way, we have already built a lot of this stuff. If it would be helpful for you, we can help. But it's that mentality. It's like, look, we are just want to be helpful. We just want to be able to, you know, truly accelerate all of the great success that you've already had. So it's a very natural thing, right? It's almost like both parties go into it. There's nothing like we're not going to force you in. We're not going to try and be like you have to now, you know, have these six executives suddenly be a part of your staff. It's nothing like that. It's a lot about just simply trying to help and over time, you know, bring these things closer together.

I remember going to Facebook office and the WI fi password was ship fast or fail fast or one of those things. Over there, what is the importance of speed being in a tech startup world? And when does it not work?

So to answer this question, you have to go back to. Look, there's a core thing that is really, really critical in every industry you pursue. You're in, let's say, consumer, right? Which in of itself is a huge market, or you're in social, which is even that amplified because it's all about you and your friends in order to make a service valuable. And what you quickly realize is that being the first to be able to capture a network is of critical importance to the value of the network, right? Facebook or WhatsApp or Instagram gets better. The more people are on it, and especially in the case of these messaging apps, the more our friends are on it. That is the number one thing that matters to value in the service. It's not about the, you know, how even the performance side about, like, is it, you know, beautiful, or does it have, like, an animation? It is simply, if these are social utilities, it's like, do the people you care about is that on the network? And the faster you can get them on the network, the more valuable this thing becomes and the harder it will be for somebody else to try and spin up a competing network. Okay, so this is the core thing that we have to understand about social and you can say broadly consumer, right? Which meant speed of doing stuff is of the essence. Now, the problem is you can't just, like, blanket take that to any other company. Okay? What if you're building rockets like Elon Musk is, or you're building some very important surgical robot, right, that is going to perform operations on people at that point. Here's the thing. If you go with speed, everything has a trade off, right? Go back to my. My sense of, like, every value has a trade. If you're going to be super, super fast, you should be willing to accept that there is going to be mistakes, there's going to be failures. And early on, this was so intentional. I remember, you know, being there in 2006. An intern started, and somehow that two weeks later, the intern took down the entire Facebook service, right? Which in many cases, you might be like, oh, my God, like, that. That guy's getting fired. Nope, not. We were just like, you know, what happens? You know, actually, let's like, let's figure it. Let's do a postmortem together as a group, and let's, like, see all how we learn about it. In some ways, it was almost like, you know, proud of you for. For actually upholding our, like, move fast and be bold value. And, you know, yes, sometimes things break and that is okay, right? That was a lot of how Facebook operated. Again, willing to trade off a little bit in those early days of moving fast and accepting the errors for that speed. Now, of course, that doesn't scale forever. Eventually it got to the point where, like, Facebook was so big and these mistakes became very, very costly. So now it's, you know, if you go to Facebook offices, it no longer says move fast and break things. It says move fast with stable infra. But again, if you, if you, if you even go back to the startup world and you're again making surgical robots, there's not a lot of room for error. Like, an error will kill your business. You know, you're doing financial payments or whatever and you get hacked, it's going to kill your business. Right. In fact, there are stories of that. I forget which exact one, but it was like an identity login provider and there were two of them and one was bigger than the other, but the bigger one got a huge hack and guess what happened? Nobody wanted to use that one anymore. Everyone switched to the competitor and that one grew, right? So. So it's going to have to depend on your business and your industry and your context. And different values are necessary for different types of businesses to succeed.

Let's talk about journey of becoming a leader. And you've written a book also on the topic of your journey and your reflections on that. I have two specific questions. One is what are the things that individuals need to do consistently to become great leaders or great managers? And second question is, what are the traits that are timeless of people being mediocre and with no hope?

Okay, so what are most important for leaders? So I look at the three key things that I think a leader needs to do that, the key levers, right? The first, purpose. So you got to know what you stand for. You got to know what success and great looks like. And it has to be an exciting story, a visionary story, right? You have to get people excited about what it is that we're all here to do together. And if you personally are not excited about it or, you know, it's not very clear what success is like, it's going to be. It's going to be hard for people to feel excited, feel following you, or again, sacrificing or working super hard towards this thing because it's not exciting. Why would we all do that? So the first one is really purpose. The second one we talked about in the past is people. So the ability to be able to understand what talent, what skills, what qualities are needed in order for this group to achieve its purpose. Right? So that goes back to what we were all talking about before. It's like, what does good look like? What does great look like for any, you know, you want to hire a great team of engineers to be able to solve some really hard problem, right? Do you know what a great engineer looks like? Do you know how to hire one? Do you know what to ask them in an interview that will separate a great engineer from a mediocre engineer? Right? So being able to identify talent, being able to attract that talent, and being able to help that talent become even better. Right? So there's a coaching element as well. It's not like you hire someone and then you just let them be. You know, you work with them, you help them work on the projects that are best suited to their strengths. You put them in, you know, key, difficult problems that are going to help them grow, and you give them feedback. You help them become the kind of person, the kind of engineer or whatever role they are that they want to become. Right? So the nurturing of that relationship, the ability to help. You want the person to say, wow, I am a much better person. I'm a much better, you know, more skilled as a result of being here, working on this team with you than I would have ever had otherwise. Right? That is what you want people to say. So people is the second and probably in my opinion, the most difficult and the most important of the levers. And then I think the third thing is process. And process to me is simply how do people work together? You know, it goes back to kind of the culture and all of this. Right? Again, defined or undefined? Right. If you and me disagree, what happens? What do we do? Do we argue about it for three hours? Do we, you know, just decide one of us just pulls? Do we not argue? Because, like, that's just not how we do things. We just listen to the, you know, most tenured person in the room. How. How do these people work? Right? And the design of process, the design of culture, is an extremely important lever as well. Because you want to make sure that smart people can do the job that they're meant to do, that they can. You know, it's this idea that if you do this well, then one plus one is bigger than two. Right? You know, it's not just the sum of everyone's individual talents. The whole is better than what each individual could have done on their own. That is what great process or Great culture.

Looks like that makes sense. I'm going to switch back to the question on three traits you've seen in almost all mediocre people or all mediocre talent over many years, which repeat.

Mediocre talent. So I think the first one is fear. Right. The underlying thing is fear. There is something that they're scared of more than they are growing and improving. And it's, you know, maybe like. It's like ego, maybe. That's one way. Another way to put it. Right.

Insecurity.

Yeah, some insecurity or some, you know, where they're. They don't want to look bad, they're afraid to fail. They're afraid of what people will think. They're afraid of a lot of things. Right. They're afraid to be judged. I think if you have that, it's very, very hard to push yourself to be excellent, to be a learner and all that. That's probably the number one quality that I would say. I think the second one is just. It's related to that because you have that insecurity fear. You might do things where you want to put yourself in a room where you're the smartest. And if you're the smartest person in the room, it's gonna. You know, you're gonna feel. You're gonna feel great all the time. You'd be like, oh, yeah, look at me. I'm awesome. But you're really not gonna get better, and. And your trajectory is not really gonna go anywhere. Right. So you kind of have to be willing to, you know, you get what you put in. Right. And if you don't want to get better and you're gonna just be satisfied with it, then. Then that's. That's just where you're gonna be. Yeah. I don't know if there's, like. It's. It's all. It's all. I think it's all. They're all circling around these.

That makes perfect sense. It's like a shield that protects you but makes you mediocre. Okay, this is good. I'm going to ask a question that ChatGPT asked me to ask you, and then I'm going to switch to questions that teams have asked. I have it on my phone. The ChatGPT question was that with the advent of AI and all the things that it is likely to do in the next few years, what do you see is the future of design?

I had this vision for years, even before ChatGPT or Dall E or any of that stuff. It's always this idea of more and more helping us humans become curators rather than full fledged creators. And what I mean by that is like, you know, oftentimes today as a designer you kind of get, you have to like open up Figma, you open up whatever, Sketch or Photoshop, and you kind of have to like generate something from nothing, right? And you know, you have to construct it from its base elements. You have to draw the button, draw the page, put the header in. And I think in the future AI world, you know, we can just assume that the creation of new things is like an infinite capacity, right? And so often what it'll be is just in the future, you know, you'll just like. I'll say a couple things. I want a dark, moody website that looks futuristic, cool. You're gonna get me instantly. And I'll be like, oh, you know, it's pretty good, you know, show me ten of them, right? And you'll give me. And I'll be like, oh, I like number seven. Seven is like the direction. But you know, I want to, I want to change a couple things. Instead of this like bright fluorescent pink over highlight, let's make that green. So you start to then tweak smaller, smaller elements, right? But the tweaking is again, you're not doing, you're just asking for more explorations. Give me 10 more. Instead of this fluorescent pink with the green highlight, or you're like, I like this art style. You're doing this, but try it with this more outline style or something like that, right? Or try a font that is even, you know, more like whatever they showed at the Matrix, you know, so it's just, it's almost like how, you know, a creative director would be if you've ever been, you know, involved with like what creative directors do. It's like they just, they, they have the vision for how it is and then they just ask for like a lot of different options and then they select through the options and then, you know, they get something ultimately in the end, right? And I think that's what, that's what all of us will be. And I think that'll be really fun.

I'm personally excited with that because I think you talked about the creative director or a visionary of sorts who can see things and you're trying to find the right thing through that particular options. I feel that it will become faster. For example, imagine as a founder, if you can really mock well what you want, then you can really get the team on the same page faster versus constantly saying in words and everybody Drawing a different thing in their head. I think it's a fascinating possibility by itself. Okay, I'm going to start with questions. We have a question from Kalyan, who's from our team. What made you zero down on Bangalore for Sundial? You could have gone anywhere.

Good question. So we started the company during the pandemic, so. So we were all remote and it was that time, you all remember, we were like, are we ever going to be able to see people again? Is this just our future? It's just looking at screens. There's, of course, so much that's great about being on screens, right? You can, you know, it feels like the world is smaller in a lot of ways because you can't really step outside your house. So, you know, the person who lives next door to you just feels about the same as the person on the other side of the world. And so I think it was during that element, we're like, oh, we. We have actually access to all of these different pockets of talent. It also so happened that we had started this project that ultimately became the company. And you know, a lot of times startups start like this, where it's just. It's like a side project, right? It was like a proof of concept of sorts. And often when it's a proof of concept, you're like, oh, let me just find like two or three people who might contract with me for like a couple weeks to do that. And that's what we've done. And we actually first started working with this person named Aditya, who is now on our team, has been a core leader in our team, but he was the very first person and he just happened to have a connection to my co founder and he was like, I've got some spare cycles. Are you guys working on anything interesting? We're like, oh, yeah, we're working on this proof of concept. Want to help us? He's like, sure. So that's how he started. And then eventually he. He recruited a couple of people from his alumni network to help contract with us on engineering. And so before you knew it, we had a proof of concept that was built by three people. And it felt natural to just continue that. Right. Again, we were in this, you know, it didn't start off as a company. It started out as this project that eventually became a company. And of course you want the people who contributed to, you know, we were like, well, we're working remotely. We don't know if we'll ever work in person. We already have like a quarter core group of people. Who have been working with us on this project. Let us just have them go full time and maybe they can help us hire more people. And we continued from there. But I will say the other thing that, that Chandra and I had talked about and is still something that we believe to this day is like, we thought we could build something really exceptional here. We thought we could build an exceptional team and we thought that we could be able to meet really, really amazing people and build something that felt really different and differentiated. Right. Even culturally. And that was another really big part of our drive here.

That's great. There's a question from Divya. She is at Ola Electric and her question is, what are some ways to grow in your career as a self taught PM in a world of MBA grads? I want to answer that for one line before you can answer, don't be around them.

I sort of feel that you have a big advantage of being self taught in anything because you can really approach it from first principles and, you know, learn what you need to be adaptable to this environment. Right. You know, you have to understand that MBA programs are in a lot of ways compared to tech companies. You know, they're just, they're lagging in terms of what they learn or what they believe is important. And so if you're in an actual very innovative, cutting edge, dynamic tech company, a lot of these skills you're not honestly going to learn in your mba. And in fact you might learn things that, to Kunal's point, might hinder you in your actual job. Right. I think the most important thing is you should ask yourself first, who are the top PMs out there in the world on the Internet, you know, and just obsessively read their stuff, right? Listen to their podcast, learn from them. You know, like you, you've had, you've interviewed Charayus, who's a friend of mine, and I think he's, he's fantastic. Like, there's like so many people who have incredible advice who have done the job, who are really, really great. And if you want to learn anything, I think one of the first things, you know, my sort of hack is like, I don't know anything about, let's say I don't know, data or tennis, right. The first thing I'll do is be like, who do I know who might be the best at it? So I'll ask someone who is a data center, then I'll ask that person, who do you believe is the best at data in your field? Right? And maybe if you know Them, please introduce me. I'd like to talk to them. But if not, even if you're just pointing me to people on Twitter, now I'm going to follow those people on Twitter. Then I'm going to be like, who do those people follow, right? Who do they admire in their field? Then I'm going to go and follow those people or ask for introductions, if I'm able to do that, right? But the first step to getting good at anything is you have to know what great looks like. And you have to identify and learn from that the best. And then. And if you can go and ask them for coffee, you know, go in and. But even if not, if they're an ocean away, at least you can, you know, try and inhabit their thoughts, right? And today it's so easy to do this.

You know, this is such a valuable advice for at least for Indian talent, is that we are stuck in trying to compare with the batch that you passed out in your college with. And we are still comparing with them. How am I earning against this person? How am I doing against them in terms of my career or my designations? Not knowing what is the absolute best and what are they doing right now? What did they do to get to the best? I've never. Everybody is like, oh, like so, like everybody fascinated with your journey. At the end, nobody wants to know your process, right? Like this whole thing about asking people and asking for the best, you know? You know, I spend a lot of time in Beira just. Just being a nomad, meeting from meeting, just asking dumb questions all the time. And there are many people over there who's like, we've never seen Indian talent or Indian founders show up in Beira and asking these questions. And I'm like, I don't know what you mean by saying that, but why aren't more people doing this? I'm sure they can afford a trip. And many people are very happy to meet you or you can just socially just connect over there. And people are very happy to help, but there is this innate need to not. And when we are in this local maxima, we build envy and not inspiration. Global maxima is the only way to build inspiration. A local maxima just creates envy. And I think we have to get out of that loop. Anyways, I'm going to move to Ankita from cred. She's asked a question that being predictably fast versus being unpredictably good, how do you choose one and do it well?

Predictably fast, unpredictably good. So take my caveat that I had before about, look, what is your industry? What really matters for you to be able to, you know, do the best for the kind of thing that you're trying to do, right? All things being equal, I believe that more shots at goal results in more goals. And so what that means is, you know, if you can run two experiments in a month versus 20 experiments in a month, right, maybe your two experiments are really good. They're real well thought out. They're nice features. The thing is, we have such a vast amount of area that is we don't know what we don't know. That's the whole. If you knew what you knew and you knew everything, then, yeah, you'll make good decisions and more time might make you more thoughtful. But the reality is there's a lot of stuff we don't know. We don't know. And the only way you're gonna learn it is you gotta just do. You gotta try and start the journey and just be like, oh, my gosh, I didn't know I was gonna encounter a swamp, but now I've encountered a swamp. So now I have to design a whatever, a new thing, a new vehicle that lets me get through this swamp and journey through, right? If you're just like, let me just figure out how to build the absolute best vehicle that's going to take me through from point A to point B. But you didn't know what you were going to encounter. Again, you're spending too much time trying to perfect from a landscape of what you know when you don't know what you don't know. And so all things be equal. If you can try more, if you can shorten the time it takes to try something and to start to learn, you will probably, at the end learn and go much faster and get to higher quality faster.

That makes. That got me thinking. There's a question from Manan at Razorpay. What do you think is the most effective way of managing upwards?

Oh, great question. Managing upwards. So I think about, here's my framework for managing upwards. Okay? So a picture a Venn diagram in your head. All right? There's one circle. That is what my manager cares about right now. You got to fill that circle. If you don't know what your manager cares about, it's time to ask, you know, you ask questions like, hey, I'm just really curious, you know, at the end of the week, how do you reflect on what success is for you? Or, you know, Julie, if I can.

Interrupt and ask this question, how many of you know what your Manager cares about, please raise your hand. State of union for you.

Yeah. Great. So you go and ask and you make sure that you have an understanding of, like, how. What their success goals are and. Yeah. Second circle. Does my manager know what I care about? How many people. How many of you would say your manager knew what you cared about? Your personal goals?

10, 15 people? 20 people, 25 people.

Okay, so that would be the second thing. I think what you really want is you know this circle, your manager knows this circle, and there is a large amount of overlap in the middle that you can identify together. Now, if you can really have this honest conversation and it turns out your manager cares about this thing and you care about some other, then that is a sign. That is a sign that perhaps this is not the right fit for you. Maybe this isn't the right team. Maybe this isn't the right job. Maybe this isn't the right career. Right. Let's be honest. It doesn't help you or your manager to be in a situation where there's very little overlap in this true Venn diagram.

I can tell you that this applies for even general relationships in life. If you've had bad ones, you will know that these Venn diagrams were not discussed or figured out. I'll add third. I'm a philosophy major. I love Venn diagrams. The third one I would add is if you knew what your customer cared about and added that into this, and somehow that overlap between these three is large. You have a very good company that you're building. You'll be surprised how little sometimes these overlap.

That's right. But let's say, okay, so if you do this right, your manager knows you have, and if they don't, you tell them, you know, hey, it's my goal to get better at these skills. I really want to learn that. I want to do what you do. Honestly, your job looks awesome. I'd like to work my way up there. Right? Let them know what you care about. Okay, so then it's time to then find the intersection. Right? And so what you want to do is you want to ask your manager for help from their perspective, identifying places where what you care about and what they see as what they care about can be useful. But you also don't just like, put this job. I mean, tell them that's what you would like, but also do it for you. Right? You know, tell, hey, if I knew what you cared about and I know my own skills and what I want to do, perhaps I can raise my hand and volunteer for the types of projects, the jobs or the things that would be helpful for you. Right? Managers love that. If you come in and you're like, oh, I know exactly you care about and by the way, I'm happy to help with A, B and C. Just, you know, roll me in. That is a wonderful, you know, wouldn't you be excited if somebody said that to you? Right? So that is what it is. Right. But it has to feel authentic, it has to feel real. Right. It's not like you're sucking up to your manager. You really need to be able to find the intersection and have that feel like a good and natural fit.

This is a very, very helpful framework, honestly, and I'm surprised at how little it is used. I think it's understanding motivations at core. And any leader or any potential leader that sucks at motivation as a subject matter, they have a hard life ahead. Generally, it's probably the most important topic to understand and master how human motivations work.

And I think a great managers, great leaders often do a great, you know, because everybody can be proactive, right? When it's a two way relationship, each party can own their part and push harder. So, you know, even if your report is not doing this, you can be very proactive. You can certainly be very proactive about communicating what you care about, what you think success is and the purpose and also asking questions of that person. Hey, you know, I see that you might be good at this thing. Have you ever thought about doing more there or giving them feedback or asking, you know, what are, what are your own goals? Like helping them be able to reflect on that?

I'm curious to ask a question to the audience. How many of you spend more than 5% of your time every week to learn something that you are not learning on the job? Please raise your hand. Okay, that's good to know. And how many of you know what you need to learn to progress in the direction that you want to eventually be in 5 years? Please raise your hand. Okay, the ratio has dropped, but these are some important questions. All of we are some version of product leaders over here. We all think about outcome and input levers. If you had to build an OKR for yourself, what would you put over there? And if you do not know this, A, you will never understand how OKR works, B is that you will not be working towards that. You'll mostly be confused about doing that. And one interesting framework I learned from somebody was, and I'm sure Julie, it may be very common in Bay Area, but it was fascinating for me to know Is that somebody asked me that. Let's say you want to be, I don't know, a millionaire, a billionaire, whatever that you want to be, and identify the top 10 obstacles to achieve that. And let's say you write down the obstacles to achieve that. And then if you think about it, these are exactly your okrs. Because just removing those obstacles are actually the okrs. Because if you do that, for example, when Facebook thought about getting from 100,000 users to a billion users, well, talent was one of the most important lever that it thought about, right? And constantly working on that and improving talent density of the company is an important lever to think about. And you can't just say, oh, that will come later. Let me just focus on TV advertisement. But you don't. Building the substance inside to kind of handle growth or whatever, it just kind of results in some chaotic stuff. One question. I found this question to be quite interesting from Sushain from Growth School. What does design mean to you?

What does design mean to me? So I think about design in the most expansive way possible. To me, design is intentionally making decisions that you believe will impact an outcome towards the direction that you want it. Right? So that's what it just means. Look, outcomes happen regardless of whether we're intentional or not. Like, shit just happens, right? And often what happens is we find ourselves reacting to it. You know, a thing happened, oh, shoot, let me go figure out what to do. Right? But design is trying to think ahead. Okay? It's you being like, oh, it's going to, you know, I want to even something as simple as I want to invite a bunch of people to my house for a party on Friday night. How do I want them to feel? Which people do I hope will get to meet? Which people? What kinds of conversations do I want people to have? What's the vibe of the party? Right? You just, you think about that ahead of time and you make the necessary adjustments. Okay, what's the music going to be, right? What's the space? How's the lighting? You know, what kind of food am I going to serve? Is there going to be alcohol? Is there not? You know, how am I going to, you know, engage with my, my guests once they arrive? Are we all going to sit around the table? Are we going to be standing? You know, am I going to say, hey, this person should meet this person? Right? All of these. If you think about them intentionally because you want a particular outcome, you are designing. So that is how I think about design. And so as a result, I think of everything, everything as design I think about my company's culture as a design problem. I think about, of course, the product and how I want users to use the product as a design problem. I think about the time that I spend with my friends and loved ones and, like, how do we make the most of that time as a design problem? You know, these are all design problems. And I think that's exciting, right? Because, you know, as humans, I think what we want to be is we want to be the masters of our fate. We don't want to just feel like we're reacting to the throes of the gods or whatever they may be. We want to feel that we can do things that improve our lot in life. Like, we can get the dreams that we want. Right? We have the agency to do so. And if you believe that, then you believe that design matters, and you should go ahead and design your life. You should design all aspects of it. Don't just respond to stuff.

I'm going to switch to a slightly more controversial side on this is form and function arguments on design. Let's talk about luxury goods or luxury bags, for that matter. Or you could get a bag that can be sturdy for $1, $2, $5 to potentially $10,000 also, or $50,000 as well. Now, if it helps you achieve what you want to achieve, it solves that problem. How do you make that design call over there that what are we really solving for over here? When does it become to have these nuances over here?

That's a brilliant question, because the more that I understand and I've kind of progressed in my journey as a designer, the more when people just ask me for my opinion on a particular design, I give it less and less. And the reason why is because I think in order to know whether you are succeeding in your intent to shape an outcome, you have to be really, really, really crisp about knowing who am I designing for, Right? What is my target audience? And what for that group am I wanting them to feel? And it's hard. It's actually very, very hard to answer these questions right, right now, you know, and in our startup journey, and this is one of the most important and. And difficult questions is like, which, you know, if you get to really, really specific, it's like, what group of people? And then I think the other thing we also think about is on what time frame, on what time frame are we thinking about success, Right? Because let's say that I wanted to design, you know, a really great. Like, we have a great time, and it's this weekend that's a very different problem than asking how can we have a great relationship that 10 years from now, right. We are, we are continuing to be really the time frame that you choose to think about the problem as well as the audience will shape what you're going to do and what success looks like. And I think we often, you know, when you, when, when, when people disagree about like let's say policy or some, it's often because they have a different audience in mind or they have a different time frame in mind in which to evaluate success. Success, right. This is one of the huge problems between, you know why founders sometimes complain about venture capitalists. Because it's like venture capitalists need to make their money and they're thinking on a seven year time frame. And a lot of times founders are like I'm in it for like 20 years so I'm going to make different decisions and if you want me to capitalize on my short term gain in, in you know like year, year three or year seven. Right. It's you just make different decisions and no one can tell you what is right or wrong. It your only criteria is a clear definition of you know, you have to know yourself or what, what is the audience you're designing for well enough and you have to know the problem statement well enough to be able to say this is the group, this is the time frame in which I'm conducting the work to influence something and this is what I want. This is the desired outcome.

So powerful because when you do not have a long term view or long term values in general, it becomes a very hard thing to constantly debate, not just design every decision. For example, in India several fintechs make money by selling products which are not really good for the consumers and they come in many shapes and forms. And the net financial progress that the consumer has made through using your product is negative. Right. But you are EBITDA positive. And the thing is that these are interesting thing because investors walk in and say, oh, why don't you copy the startups this model? You already have more customers than them and you should just build that and you'll make more money. And the thing is that we build a principle at CRED and we've not documented it more widely is that let's not build something that we would not give it to our friends or family, like would we give it to them? So we launched a product called credmint which is a deposit product which we launched to external customers only when 80% of CRED team members invested in it. And Then we launched it to outside because they're like, how do we tell people that they should do this till. I don't believe as a team. And I think these are such hard choices, but I think they play out in the long term because. Because we made these choices, and because we make these choices, the trust inside the building of doing the right thing is much higher, which spreads interestingly because all of the team members have roommates and friends and relatives who keep asking them, what do you guys do? How are you doing it? And all of these strange questions. And I think when something bad happens, like, these are the same people who will be asked that, hey, you recommended this stuff to me that is blown up. And like, all. Like, what are all of these choices? And when you make this argument about how long are you playing this game for? Julie, I'll tell you an interesting insight you'll probably find fascinating, that all the places, all the businesses around tourist spots are usually much more scammy than the businesses that are not around tourist spots because they do not have repeat customers. So it's a fascinating way of looking at it. Okay, I'm gonna ask one final question and we'll wrap it. I want you to probably spend some time over here and meet some folks over here. I would encourage guys to meet people over here. Many of the cred team members are here. This is our. Probably our first product event. Did we ever host any? I don't think so. We did not. Rahul, you are nodding. So I'm believing that you are the oldest fixture over here. So I'm believing your word to this. We've not done this. So please feel free to ask questions also. Ask questions. How terrible Kunal is as a manager. You can ask that question also. You will get honest answers, I'm hoping. But I would request for you guys to spend some more time. One question for you, being an early Facebook team member, you've probably made enough wealth then. More wealth than you would have imagined you would make. What's keeping you going? Why are you struggling in Bangalore? Taking an auto and what's up?

You know, I've had the best two weeks, and every time I come to Bangalore, it is such a. It's a highlight for me. It's a highlight of my year. And it. You know, I've always, like, on the plane home, it's like I'm decompressing and I'm. I can't wait to write my journal and just like, try and capture everything that I felt like I've learned. The ways that I've grown, the people I've met, the new perspectives, you know, even the sights, sounds, colors, everything, right? And. But you're right. You know, I think one of the ironies, maybe it's an irony, but. But it's like whenever, before I came into a lot of good fortune and wealth with Facebook, I always thought that, oh, if only I had a lot of money, then all my problems would go away and of course I would be happy. And many of my cohorts, my peers who were there with me at Facebook, we kind of went through that journey together. And it's also interesting to see. It's like, okay, when people have enough money and they don't need to work for money anymore, they can do whatever it is that they want, right? You're often confronted actually with this paradox of choice. And the lesson we all learned was like, well, you know what? It doesn't actually solve your problems. It doesn't automatically make life happy and meaningful all the time. In fact, many of my cohorts struggled to find a lot of meaning afterwards. You know, when we look back on our time at Facebook, we. We saw it through this incredible lens of gratitude, right? Because we all worked so hard and we believed so much in what we were doing, and we did. It was like our pride and joy. It was our identity. And we looked back and we were like, yeah, we were always at the office until 4 or 5am but like, my goodness, what an incredible time it was because we were all humming together as a group. You know, we had this purpose that was greater than each of us, right? And later on, we're like, okay, well, we now have all these privileges. We have all of this ability to do whatever we want, but it's hard to still find that meaning. And I believe that, you know, paradoxically, humans get meaning out of contributing to something greater than themselves, right? If you're only focused on yourself and your ego and what you want in the moment, it's actually very hard, you know, thinking about maximizing long term, long term happiness or joy to be able to live like that, right? Like, often we find the most satisfaction when we feel like we give a part of ourselves to something beyond yourselves. It could be other people, right? I have children of my own, and I think that's one of the greatest gifts. It's like being a parent is really, really hard. But. But it is satisfying and meaningful because I'm putting these children in a lot of cases before my own needs. And that actually feels paradoxically good. It feels meaningful. I think that's also why sometimes you see people who really dedicate a lot to the community or to some greater cause. And I think companies are like that too. I think the startups, the best startups, are that right? There is a reason we are all here, because we have this vision, this mission at Sundial. For us, it's about helping everyone make better decisions with data. Because data is confusing. Data is hard. Like data makes me feel stupid. But data, if we use it well, can help us actually make better product decisions. Then we can make better products and services and help the world. We can accelerate the progress. And it feels really ambitious, it feels really meaningful. And, you know, it's worth the work that we're going to put in. It's. It's my pride and joy and I don't know how the journey will end. It's still very early days for us. But I think the dream is what gets myself and Chandra and everyone at our company up every morning. And the important thing that I'm trying to do now is focus on the journey, right? The journey which is the journey of growth, which is the journey of pursuing excellence, of learning more about myself, of trying to find that razor's edge of my skills and that ability to translate those skills in a way that can be helpful and powerful for the world. And that is ambitious. And it feels sometimes scary to say it because like, oh my gosh, what if I meet you on three years and everything failed and I crashed and burned? But I'm trying to remind myself that it's the journey that matters because that's all we have. It's less about the destination, it is more about the day to day and whether I did my best.

Perfect. Thank you so much, Julie. It was good having you and hopefully we'll see you more times in Bangalore and you'll have more chance to interact and spread your network and all your good work. Thank you so much.

Thank you for having me. This was such a pleasure, Sam.