Q&A - Mark Porter (MongoDB) & Vinny Pujji (Left Lane Capital)

Hey, everybody. How many of you are here to see me, Mark?

Okay.

How many of you are here to see Vinny? Yeah, see, look at that. So what we're going to do, since the show's running behind, is we're actually— since Vinny funds startups and I talk about careers, we've decided to merge our sessions together and get back on track.

Hi, everybody.

So that's what we're gonna do. So all of you are here for me, all of you are here for Vinny, we're good.

There you go. Yeah, I'm just a moderator, so in case you sort of run out of questions. But yeah, Vinny's more for sort of early-stage startup and, you know, what he's looking for in a startup as a founder. And yeah, Mark, of course, has done all sorts of things that maybe Vinny wouldn't even want to invest in, but was successful anyway. And so let's explore those, those subjects a little bit. So maybe, Vinny, why don't you start off with, with telling us a little bit, like, so what kind of founder would you be looking for in these days? Right?

So I believe in a lot of different founder archetypes. Yeah, we've invested in companies where the rest of the team said, hey, this guy can't even make eye contact with us. How's he going to build a big company? And you know what? He was just this persistent, uh, I don't know, hedgehog or beaver or whatever you want to call it. Just, just kept building, kept building. And the beauty of people like that is they create enough space for the rest of their either founding or management team to express themselves and take their own direction. And they attract people who are complements to them. And of course, the exact opposite is true. We've had founders who believe that they are demigods. And you know what? They work so hard that they make that a reality. At the end of the day, the 2 attributes that I have generally found in common are one, an unrelenting reason to and desire to and ultimately action of working really hard. But a lot of people have that. I don't think that that's enough. The other one is an absolute dedication To growth. And I mean personal growth when I say that. Because what happens with most companies that make it from 1 to 10, their founders are like this the whole time. And they never realize that, oh my gosh, I'm actually the main blocker to my company scaling. I'm choking my company's growth. And the flip side is the founders who do that, but then have a coach or investors or friends who help them realize, wait a minute. Take a step back, watch them make mistakes. Take another step back, watch them make mistakes. Every 6 months, you need to fire yourself. You need to replace yourself. Founders that are dedicated to that and understanding, how did you do that? How did you do that? I've noticed that these founders very humbly— they don't have to be humble people, but very humbly kept learning and leveling up. And those are ultimately the founders that didn't just start companies that got big, but they ran them the whole way, from nothing to billions in revenue.

Well, the obvious question to you, Mark. So, so would you— were you that kind of a founder?

So the only thing I ever founded was an audio-video business in Colorado. And frankly, since my wife is sitting here in the room, I'll tell you, I retired. And, and that was a terrible idea. And because I'm kind of one of these people that Vinny is talking about, who after I retired, I micromanaged the The heck, let's just say that, out of my family. And she said, you need to go back to work. So the only company I've ever founded was out of— when I came out of retirement. But I do mentor founders, and sometimes people like Sequoia or Madrona will hook me up with founders and say, can you please talk to this person? And I found a couple things. And the first thing I found is that what Vinny just said about people letting go and holding on and letting go and holding on is brilliant. It is absolutely right. I say it a different way, but it's really the same thing, which is, when it's you, you make 100% of the decisions. When it's you and 10 people who report to you, guess what? You're still making 100% of the decisions most of the time. But when it's you with people reporting to you who have people reporting to them, and you're like, 25 is where I start seeing this break down, you need to not be making 100% of the decisions. And so that's kind of what you were getting at, where as you grow up, you have to let go a little bit. The other thing which I do when I mentor founders, normally I'm brought in when it's not going well. So I think that's a small bias in my sample. Is 2 to 3 mentoring sessions in, they're typically running a company of 30 to 100 people. They've just spun up their first salesperson or whatever, and maybe a marketing person. And I go, oh, Oh, you still think being right is what matters. And they're like, yeah, being right is what matters. Being right is what has mattered to me my whole career. That's what talking to computers is, is being right. Well, I'm like, people don't necessarily want you to be right. People want you to work with them. People want you to help them grow. People want you to be collaborative with them. And as I've told many people, about 1/3 of my mentoring sessions, They never call back after the session where I say, you still think it's about being right. And so to me, that's a major growth step for a founder to realize that it's about so much more than it used to be. Now, the way they can solve that is they can just go back and be the CTO, and then being right is a large part of it. But if they want to be the CEO, they have to work through others.

Lots of wisdom in that, yeah. So what is your stance on serial entrepreneurs? Because as I see, I see a lot of investors saying, ah, he's done a really amazing startup already, so that's almost like blind, like, I trust this guy. This guy has been doing a phenomenal job before, so let me invest in him like almost blindly now. I'd like to hear your opinion, and you've mentored a lot, so you can think a little bit about that.

So 80% of the founders that we invest in are first-time CEOs. The bias that we have is toward hunger. Hunger, need to succeed, whatever you want to call it, some lack of comfort, lack of net. And I say the word bias to highlight the fact that that is not the right way to invest by any means. That is my and our firm's— Bias.

DNA.

And so that's what we feel most comfortable betting on, and maybe those are the founders who in fact like us the most because we have that mentality. When founders have had big exits, typically they'll go into one of two paths. Either they go, okay, now I'm gonna do something that has nothing to do with the world I know because I have enough money, because I can make a company work in any space. and they go start a toy company, or a baby food company, or a better refrigerator company, whatever it is. And we stay far away from founders like that. We say, great that you exist, maybe you're going to succeed, you're certainly a great person, but we don't have that mentality of, hey, if you're a great athlete, you're a great athlete anywhere. Other founders succeed in what normal people think is winning, and they make $1 million. $2 million, maybe even $5, $10 million from their founder, from their journey. But they go, damn it, I could have done this, I could have done that, I had too big of a team here, I raised too much capital. And they're almost inspired and charged up by the fact that this first exit was just stop one, and it's nowhere near their destination. Those are the founders that you're lucky if you get the chance to back. And they come in all different shapes and sizes. They come in aloof, whimsical-seeming people like Michael, the founder of Calm, the meditation app. By the way, he's, uh, he's your age and he just beat me in tennis. Um, so pretty, pretty, uh, switched-on guy and, and has a great life. And at the same time, he built a company, um, in the kids' content and learning space, and it's a good company. Most people would be satisfied with that. Most people, especially who grew up in a relatively comfortable way, etc., etc., would say, okay, I'm a successful entrepreneur. He got into all the parties, he got into all the clubs, he's in the 100-year-old tennis club, whatever. And at the same time, he was fired up by that. He said, what the hell? This was supposed to be a billion-dollar company, not a $10 million company. And that's the— anyway, that's the— how we think about it. But the other 80%, they just need to prove themselves to the world because they've never had a big and a public win like that?

So I think I have a lot less experience with serial entrepreneurs, but I have had some. And, you know, I call it sense of urgency, hunger, sense of urgency. During my talk, I put up 3 CEOs. I put up my boss, Dave, and then Anthony Tan from Grab, and Larry from Oracle. And oh my God, all CEOs who succeed have one thing in common, which is this sense of urgency and this hunger. And it's amazing. And so sometimes when I do get into these relationships, and some of these companies reach out to me and say, hey, can you talk to this company, talk to this company? The vast majority of the time, my comment back to the investors is, I can't tell if they're full of shit on the technology or not. I really can't. But I can tell you this person won't succeed. Because I didn't feel the hunger. And I go back to them and they go, but the tech, but the tech, but the tech. And I say, yeah, yeah, but this person is going to hit roadblocks. And they're not just gonna blow through them. So when I do my mentoring, or even when the startups reach out to me for advice, like there's one database startup which I'm kind of sorry I recommended getting backup because they're now competing with MongoDB. But I mean, the founder was just like a bulldog at stuff. And to this day, he's a bulldog and he's just going after stuff. So yeah. I mean, that's the thing that I see. So if you see that in yourself, Keep being a CEO. If you don't see that in yourself, I don't know if it's acquirable. I really don't. It's something for you to look at in yourself, because you can have a magical career without being a CEO, but being a failed CEO kind of sucks. So you might want to think about where— be self-aware about yourself.

Some advice for myself as well.

Thanks.

Any questions from the audience inspired by the first?

And by the way, I have no idea this isn't COVID anymore.

Yeah, I don't know what to say to this too. But yeah.

So I'll be very practical. We are a team working here in Cluj. We'll have a member that will go to California to study from autumn. I would like to ask you, how can we make the most out of this opportunity to have someone in the US, in California, knowing the impact that the US has and the place where startups are more common, I would say, than Cluj?

I think very straightforward.

If—

where in California? Irvine? Okay. So Irvine is enough of a tech hub. It's not completely one, so they should probably have the mindset of, hey, I'm gonna go to San Francisco and LA, and I'm gonna meet relevant investors. You should genuinely look at companies that kind of look like you, both in a stage perspective and in what you do. Use Crunchbase, make a list of 30, 40 companies, then go to their investors who backed them early, who did the seed and the pre-seed rounds, and make a list of 100 of those investors, and then figure out where they are. Probably the majority of them are, you know, driving 2 to 6 hours away from Irvine. And just send them direct email. Say, hey, here's what I'm doing. Saw that you invested in this company. Why don't we grab a 30-minute coffee? And the vast majority of them will respond. And if they don't respond, email me and say, hey, I really want to get introduced to this company. And I'll email them and I'll say, hey, here's a company. Seems really relevant to you. Why don't you meet it? And then if they don't respond to that, they're jerks. What can you do?

I have nothing to add. That's awesome. Okay.

Thanks, Kristin.

Hello.

What kind of— what kind of financing do you offer? If I understood correctly, you do offer financing for startups? And entrepreneurs, which, which stage of—

Yeah, so, so we're A and B investors. Our checks range from $3-4 million on the low end to $40-50 million on the high end. This is typically in post-product market fit, revenue-generating businesses that are ultra-high growth, typically growing 150-200% plus. More specifically than that, they tend to be internet companies. So they're not the next cool sunglasses company. They're also not mega, mega enterprise businesses. They're businesses that are either consumer, prosumer, small business, or freemium software companies.

So I'm a little bit nervous sitting here beside him since he knows so much more about this than I do. But I'll tell you what we do. We have the MongoDB Ventures Fund. And we invest at the smaller end. So our investments range from $250,000 up to about $2.5 million or $3 million. And we're trying to do something different. We're not trying to get an ROI out of it. What we're trying to do is keep our pulse on what's going on in tech. So with, for example, a— I don't know if I can say the amount— with a small investment in Big Idea, we actually now have our pulse on exactly what is going on on ID. So if you're looking for investment, there's multiple kinds of investment. One is the money, which is going to pay the salaries and the rent. The other is the connections. And the people you're going to talk to, and making connections around the world. So by giving up, you know, $250,000 or $500,000 of your equity, you might actually make a connection with an executive staff that will help your company make the right pivot. And so we really get involved with companies where we think they're adjacent to us in the market, not competitive with us, and not far away, and that way we think it's of value to us and value to them. So as a small startup, you might have a mix of these small investments and maybe some of the larger investments as well. That's just how we think about it.

Can you give me advice? So because of COVID and the war going on right now, we have a company based in— a startup based in Berlin, and we were supposed to get to our seed phase, but instead we are kind of trying to invent an extended pre-seed. We are not exactly break-even yet. So what kind of advice, or do you know any VC that could back up this stage of a startup?

I think there's a good number of VCs in Berlin specifically that do pre-seed investing. I wouldn't sit around—

Do you invest in Europe or only US?

No, we invest 30% in Europe. Um, we— I mean, we don't do pre-seed or seed. We do kind of A and beyond. Um, but I think that there are a lot of pre-seed investors. The question is, if you forgot about fundraising and you just looked at your company's profile, as you've taken longer than you expected to reach that seed stage, what are you raising on? Are you raising on growth? Are you raising on a pitch deck? Are you raising on the caliber of your team? And then you have to make a tough decision of, is the inertia, baggage, whatever you want to call it, actually hurting me from raising pre-seed funding? Because sometimes if you look at your last 6 months, revenue's been somewhat flat. And if you take flat revenue to a VC investor, that's actually worse than taking them no revenue.

Right.

So you might have to think about, What's the best way to pitch myself? Should this be a fresh company, fresh name, forget about the revenue, focus on the thing we're most excited about, and just re-pitch this as a, as a new company? Because if your existing investors, especially if they're in the local ecosystem, aren't continuing to back you, then what every VC does at that stage is they gossip with each other and they speak with people and they say, hey, how's it gone? How's it gone? And if your existing investors aren't backing your pre-seed, it's going to be a slog, and it's actually going to be harder than just frankly starting a fresh company and raising a pre-seed round. And I would be giving you a different response if you said, hey, we're at Series A stage and we want to raise, you know, an extension of the Series A. Then I would be saying something different. Okay, thank you. You have one.

Sorry.

Hello, you discussed about the career and career path. What about work-life balance, or can you say something about what habits, practical habits to follow in order to have a good career path and grow and also build a family? So you've put me incredibly on the spot because my wife is sitting right there. Hey, Bonnie, I think they're serving lunch. I think they're serving lunch over there. Can you go check it out? Because you should have lunch. I'm blushing, as you can see.

Thank you.

Look, I'm not a really great person to talk about work-life balance to. I love to work. And so, at the same time, and so I don't wanna speak as an expert on the subject, okay? It's just who I am. I don't do it because I'm a workaholic. Maybe this is how workaholics justify what they do. But I do do something else, which is I try to have everyone who works for me not work in a way that is unnatural for them. I tell every single one of them, the fact that I might text you at 3 AM, whether I'm in your time zone or here in Romania, you should just ignore. And so I try to have them have work-life balance. And then what I do to them is I say, look, I'm not tracking where you are, I'm not tracking when you are. By the way, this is all pre-COVID. I'm not tracking when you are, when you're working, or where you are, or what you're doing. I'm tracking what you get done. And I think that there is this disturbing trend post-COVID for managers to go back to tracking and wanting you in the office and all that. I was actually really excited that we might go to a world where we would only track impact. and not track hours. But managers are still kind of tracking some hours. So to me, I would just say negotiate with your leaders what it is they want you to get done, to what level of quality, and then just get it done. And that's, I mean, that's my first piece of advice. My second piece of advice, which Bonnie has lived through, as there's been sicknesses in the family and there's been sicknesses at work, i.e., disasters at work, Is make a deal with all your stakeholders that sometimes you're going to work 80-hour weeks at home and sometimes you're going to work 80-hour weeks at the office, and be transparent with them. The reason marriages break up and you get fired is because you never made the deal with both parties that sometimes you're going to surge one direction or surge the other direction. And instead, you made the deal with both parties that you're going to be perfect to both of them. And I don't know about you, but that's not possible. So Bonnie and my kids have been incredibly supportive at times when I've had to surge onto work. And then there have been times when I've surged home a little bit, maybe not as much as I should have since she's in the room. But yeah, so I don't know if that helps. I mean, I think transparency and honesty is the key.

Are you asking for, for yourself, work-life balance? Or for people who work for you? Okay, I'll give quick bullet points on my thoughts here. I don't like the word balance. I think it's similar to the word. equality, where the ideas behind it's great, but the pursuit of it, if you're overly focused on the concept, is actually destructive. I think that you should organize activities into this gives me energy and this takes my energy, and you should try to have balance between those things. I think, like Mark, I'm super energized by what I do. I feel incredibly lucky to do it, and at the same time, I have stakeholders and I have priorities. And so the last thing I'll touch on is what everybody's forced to do as they just get more and more and more, because if you're doing well in your life, you probably realize that there's a funny pattern happens where you go, man, last year was super busy, but next year will be less, and then it's more busy. And then you go, man, last year was— and it keeps happening. And then you go, okay, wait a minute. I need to get better at creating space and prioritizing. And prioritizing, you go, okay, who are the stakeholders that matter? You're one of those stakeholders, by the way. And you go, okay, I matter the most. Then my wife matters. Then, you know, this person matters and that person matters. Okay, how am I gonna split my time? Well, what matters to me? What do I need to do healthy? I need to eat a certain way. I need to feel a certain way, whatever. And then there are best practices. A lot of people find that doing 5 minutes of either meditation or breathwork or yoga in the morning really helps. I like doing Wim Hof breathing in the morning. I do it every single morning. It makes me feel amazing. I've failed to meditate even though we invested in the biggest meditation app, right? I failed to do all kinds of prayers. I failed to do yoga, whatever, but I was able to do Wim Hof breathing. So I found something that worked. And all these, you know, you just pick up these little habits. But if you find, most importantly, if you find that you're off the rails and you've made your prioritization, you've made your clear agreements, which are the hardest thing to do and the most important to maintain, but somehow you're still off the rails. You have to say to yourself, it's okay to pause and assess. You're going to go off the rails 100 times in your life. Pause and assess. Where am I? Where do I want to be? And make changes. Most people just let inertia keep taking them and taking them until they're so far off the rails they don't know where they are anymore because they didn't realize that they can pause and make changes.

Yeah, and I particularly liked the part from I particularly like the part that both of you stressed, like, talk, talk about it. So if you have partners, but even if you don't have a partner, talk to your friends, you know, make sure that you constantly talk and tune in. Because at a certain point in time, indeed, you go off the rails a little bit. And I luckily had a partner for the majority of my life who every quarter sort of pushed the reset button. She'd go, ah, you're doing it again. And if you have, you know, a partner like that, it's a lifesaver. Right now I have a partner who just loves to work as well. So now we're jointly sitting in bed, one laptop there, one laptop there, and we're having a blast as well. So I agree with Vinny, it's like work-life balance, there's no such thing. There is just life, right? And how you blend work into your life and your free time is up to you. But you do use, well, just as much if you're product developing, you're asking users, right? So in this case, you're developing yourself. Ask the people around you who matter to you, whose opinion you value. They can be your anchor.

So this is such an important topic, I'm going to riff a tiny bit on it. If you search on the internet for Chloe Tan, she's the wife of Anthony Tan, who's CEO of Grab. She did an article on work-life harmony and what that means.

Yes.

And it's a better word than balance. I liked how you described balance as a dangerous word. And like I said, sometimes the wave flows one way, sometimes it flows the other way. So that's one piece of advice. But the other piece of advice that I would give all of you for both your work and your personal life, there's an article out on the internet which is, you know, how will you measure your life, single backlog of your life. It's by Clay Christensen. And it talks about this idea of raising your kids and your work, and I'm not gonna go into it here. You should look it up. But the one thing that's missing from all this advice that I see people fail on time and time again is build the muscle to have the hard conversation. How many of you were in my talk today and I said 29 minutes into your 30-minute one-on-one is when you bring up the hard subject? We all do it.

Okay.

The most important thing to do is after you do these social graces, 3 minutes into your one-on-one, bring up the hard subject. 5 minutes into your date dinner, bring up the hard subject. That single trait is the hardest thing you can do. It scares you. It fills you with all these bad chemicals. But here's the good part. It becomes a muscle that you actually get better at over time. And you go, God, I'm gonna do this one thing today. I'm gonna bring up with Bonnie or bring up with my boss something really hard. And you just build the muscle over time. And so over a 10 or 20-year period, building that muscle changes your effectiveness as a human more than I think almost any other single trait.

That's a very powerful set of answers.

I never—

Bonnie's looking at me going, you don't always bring up the hardest thing first.

Also a question about the muscle, the sales muscle. I would like to ask, how could Europeans improve their sales skills? I know in the US it's pretty common, but in Europe I think it's not at that level.

Do you mean selling in the US or just selling in general? Sales is very similar to learning a new language. Everybody takes the entry course and they learn the rules, but what keeps people from becoming great at it is they don't want to feel like they're being someone else. They don't want to feel like they're faking it. They don't want to follow some set of rules that doesn't come naturally to them, right? So most people speak Spanish in the US like, yo hablo español, because they don't want to Make an accent that's not their own. But what they don't realize is you have to, if you're going to grow in anything, especially in sales, which I think is a universal skill set, and it's not like, like, Marc has sales skills, right? It has nothing to do with being a salesperson. It's a very valuable skill set. There genuinely are books and courses on it, and they're good, and they're correct, but you can't just watch them in an intellectual way.

Right.

You have to take those things that they're saying and put them into your everyday life and just say, okay, what's a hard thing? Okay, a hard thing is going to this car dealer or this market or whatever and just selling something that I've never sold before. I'm going to sell this t-shirt. By the end of today, I'm going to sell this t-shirt. And you will learn so much from doing that. That you'll realize, oh man, that was hard, but man, did it feel good when I did that. Sales is ultimately about completing the feedback loop, and the people who get good at sales get addicted to that feedback loop. So my first job was selling acne medication on the phone, and I loved it. And then my next job was selling vacuums door-to-door, and I loved it. And then I sold clothes. at retail and I loved it. And this was all before I was 18, but that gave me an early taste for sales. It's not ever too late for sales. Once you get more advanced at sales, what you realize is, okay, I'm not actually acting like a different person, I'm doing this in my own way. Because if you lead with authenticity and if you lead with empathy, then what you find is that even though I'm super different from the person I'm selling into, They see that I'm not trying to con them. I'm not trying to fake them out, right? Because V1 sales is like the overly salesy person who's like, let me tell you why you need this thing. Here's the best thing, right? It's actually authenticity and empathy. And when I was in your position, here's what I did. But I gotta be honest with you, this thing really helped me. And it might not be of interest for you today. You tell me if I'm wrong. Just leading with a less pushy tone, I think helps. But the biggest thing is just do it, right? Sales is not to be studied, it's to be done, it's to be practiced, right? There are the principles and the rules and you learn them, you can learn them in 30 minutes, but then you just have to do it.

I have nothing to add except we should all work on selling his shirt today and see how it ends up. No, I mean, I gotta tell you, I mean, I think we all do have sales skills. I have nothing to add on the sales side, but I'm just gonna be a little vulnerable and say just listening to him talk about going in front of customers time after time just made me nervous. I bet it made a lot of you nervous too. I mean, it's not a skill I really have. So kudos to you for doing that.

Any last questions? Wow. Last. Sorry. You stuck your hand up first. Thank you.

So aside from the people that have companies and hire employees, there are lots of us who would want to or are contractors, individual contractors. What kind of advice would you give someone that would like to become visible but also have a good match with the potential client so that their skills are actually in the right direction?

I mean, I don't really have any advice on how to do that. Sorry.

What do you do?

I'm a software developer. I work in Angular frontend technologies mostly.

Okay, and your question was around becoming more discoverable or around optimizing your business?

Becoming more discoverable and make sure that you use your skills to their best.

Okay, do you— sorry, you said becoming more discoverable and what about skills did you say?

Making sure that your skills are actually matching the client's needs.

Are matching the client's needs, okay. So the matching the client's needs, I'm not qualified to speak on. Maybe you are. Okay. On the amplifying your kind of reach, the biggest thing around building personal brand is actually consistency. So my friends who have a million Twitter followers and podcasts and blogs and all these funny things, they didn't even start out as being good at it. And the original stuff that they put out was pretty bad. My buddy Harry Stebbings, uh, he's, you know, he's like a— an annoying little voice who just liked VC, wanted to work in VC, and he just started. But now he has 2 million listens per episode because he was really, really consistent. And now he's, he's got the best people on there. Um, one of— the thing that he does is a hack that I still— people tell people to do to this day, including a lot of portfolio companies. People sometimes don't respond to your sales emails, but man do people respond quickly, case in point, when you give them some forum to talk. And you'll probably triple your response rates if you say, hey, I have a blog, or I have a podcast, or I do Twitter interviews, whatever it might be, about this subject, and I'd love to interview you on it. So that's one of 20 different ways that you can kind of increase your standing, associate yourself with the companies and the people that you want to be associated with, and then what do you know, in doing that, you're actually qualifying them as a potential client. The other side of being contractors, and this is very just general advice, is as you're building that business, let's say you have 10 clients that you work with in any given year, you should always have the mindset of who do I want to retain and grow, and who should I fire? So if I have 5 live clients right now, I need to make sure I retain and grow one and I need to let go of one because they're taking up space relative to the revenue they could be producing. And every year, one way or another, you should basically be increasing your prices. Keep increasing your prices until people go, you're just too expensive, then maybe pause. Because most contractors are actually too shy about increasing their prices, but especially if you're selling into the US, us dumb Americans, what do we think? The more we pay, the better quality we're getting. We just assume that. And so just keep increasing your prices until genuinely all your clients are like, hey, you're prohibitively expensive.

So speaking as someone who runs a US company that contracts with the Europeans a lot, what he said is false. We are not stupid. Ignore everything he just said. No, actually, there is a grain of truth about the assumption of quality with price. The one thing that I would say, and I've contracted with companies throughout my career, is the ones that worked well were the ones where people had shared skin in the game. The ones that worked well were where the contract was written such that everyone felt secure that we won together or failed together. The easiest SOWs, you know, statements of work, and MSAs to write are the ones that are hourly. Those are the ones that end up failing, because from the moment the first hour is billed, You're like, I don't know, are they as invested in the success of this project as I am? So when we write projects at MongoDB, which we don't do that much, but we used to do an awful lot at other companies, we would work very, very hard to make the statements of work be actual concrete deliverables. And as we got halfway— this was at News Corp when I was working at News Corp— as we got halfway, because News Corp contracted everything, we would check in and we would see whether we were off track. The worst time to figure out you're off track is when you get the bill and you go, I'm sorry, what is this? This is not delivered. And so that halfway point check-in was something we required of our vendors. And they would come to us often and say, we're halfway done. And we'd be like, no, you're not. And it would be— but at least that's fixable then. And so that concept of shared skin in the game, I don't know if you were just one person or if you were a larger company. Are you just one person?

Yeah.

So, that shared skin in the game, I think, is really, really important. And you have to— like, I had that contracting job with the Department of Education that I talked about earlier. I had to be willing to lose the job. I worked for 3 months for free while writing that CA authoring system, hoping to heck that it was going to end well and I was going to start getting paid, because I was paid by the lesson. And so, that was a way that I put my skin into the game. And even though they were like, okay, you've done literally nothing for 3 months, they're like, well, we're not paying you. I don't know if this helps. And I think the advice you just got about firing customers is really brilliant. When I ran an AV company, I had some customers I probably should have fired. And I was thinking through your talk of, I would have been a happier contractor had I fired some of my customers. So that's good advice.

Absolutely. All right, thanks.

So I know this is a tech event, but—

Hold the mic.

I know this is a tech event, but my question is, what would be good advice to put on the foundation of a company that has tech second? Let's say you want to build something that is digital, but the entertainment or the value that brings is not technical per se. What would be good advice to start thinking about that?

I didn't quite understand the question. Did you?

What type of business?

Let's say I want to build a digital companion that comes and says hi from time to time on your screens. And it's just a presence that it's virtual, but it's entertaining. And it's just like a virtual friend that pops up from time to time into your digital screens.

And then the question was how you set the— what's the tech stack for that?

No, no, like the tech is secondary to— in this, in my opinion, because the important thing is that you have this digital presence, but not the tech itself is the main point of selling. It's the feeling and the interaction with this avatar.

So I think tech is always selling.

secondary, right?

Yeah, like we're trying to serve humans, so we're trying to get humans to do stuff. But maybe if the question is about what is the balance between UE tech and, let's say, commercial, uh, relational—

No, because first, uh, you, you mentioned about that team that had like 100 engineers and then a sales team, one, one person for selling. So this is not starting from the, from the tech, but starting from, uh, from creating something, uh, that it's animated With—

so my— we probably have different biases and muscles in this regard. Anytime I'm starting a business, incubating a business, whatever it might be, I actually try really hard to not build anything. Because until you spend time with the customers, cobble together what you believe is the MVP, and get feedback on that and see if it's being pulled, you kind of don't know what to build. And you're probably going to waste a lot of your time if you just start building in the beginning. And you might be building something that ultimately you thought was a good market and it's great for the problem you had, but it's not much of a market. And so, it's a great question around how do you— or at least my understanding of the question is, how can you build and test before any of the tech comes, if an idea and a concept is resonating. And the really nice thing is, so much today compared to 10, certainly 20 years ago, you can actually build in a completely non-technical way, right? So someone like me, who— I haven't written a line of code in 15 years, I can sit down and set up automatic scripts to— or let's even simplify it further. My view of most software is it's either an intake form, it's workflow, or it's a database. And other people have built all 3 of these things. And so using Google Forms, you can have somebody sign up for something, you can use really basic workflow automation tools, and then you can affect whatever change you want. So you could send someone a text at random times just checking in on them, and then seeing what the user engagement is there. And then you can pick up the phone and you can call the 100 people using it, and you can say, what did you like, what did you not like, what were the times, what were the this, and then you can see the usage behavior. And then once you have all this data and you've kind of poked all around, You, you're not starting with one pinpoint, you're starting with 1,000 pinpoints, and then you can start building something. So I don't know if that's exactly what your question was, but that's at least my philosophy around it. Do we have one last question?

There was one. Yeah.

Thank you. So my question is more for Mark, and I'm curious, since you've, you've had a lot of experience as both a CTO and manager roles. I'm curious, what do you think makes a great resume or CV?

The question was what makes a good resume? So, right, so I kind of only use LinkedIn profiles these days, but I mean, those are the same thing these days, so that's fine. Obviously, there's resumes that come behind it. So what I like hearing is about impact. What I like seeing people saying is I did X, I did Y, I accomplished X, I accomplished Y. Because that's measurable. I can't figure out when they just say, I worked in the database group at MariaDB. I have no idea. But if it says, I implemented an algorithm that did X that sped something up. So resumes are really weird. They're these general things. But the ones I hate most is where everything's general. I love specific points where I go, if you did that, I could use you. And so it's weird, because you might only have 10 lines for that job. And you might want to say, I ran the query team at MariaDB. I don't care. I'm just using this as an example. But if you said, I implemented the Cascades algorithm, which was 3 times faster, and I did it using Rust, I'd be like, yeah, let's talk. So it's that mix of specificity and generalness which catches me. Because what I want is someone to come to work every day and say, I'm going to accomplish specific stuff today. Whereas there's a lot of people, frankly, in their careers who come to work and don't really accomplish specific things every day. And they kind of meander through their career.

I have one unsolicited suggestion there. If you put in the specifics, which is a fantastic suggestion, things that were failing, or even things that you failed at, you will stand out so much more than other people who said, managed peer group of— oh my God, I'm already asleep.

I have one more.

Right?

Versus failed to implement this at Y scale, ultimately chose a different vendor and succeeded at this. Holy cow, do you stand out.

Plus one, that's awesome. That's a great piece of advice.

All right, well, thank you very much, everyone.

Thanks, everyone.

Thanks, this worked out very well.

Yeah?

You have an amazing synergy.

Great suggestion.

Let's do it again next year.

Yeah.