Full Stack Whatever

MAYKEL:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to the 6th episode of Full Stack Whatever. For those of you who are new, Full Stack Whatever is a podcast about the work behind the work. What does that mean? It's the psychological, emotional, and rational work that we do as creatives and technologists when we think about our work, our careers, and ourselves. This week, I'm talking with Pete Hunt. Pete is an old colleague of mine and one of my favorite engineers that I've ever worked with. He's one of the people that brought you React, a past startup founder and now a serial CEO. Please enjoy episode Six the no Fun Rule with Pete Hunt. Hey, Pete, welcome to the show.

PETE:
Thank you. Pleasure to be here.

MAYKEL:
Good to see you. I'm super excited that you're here because we've crossed over a bunch at Facebook since we've said to friends, and we have some opinions about the web and platforms and making things, and the whole goal is, let's run through your career. And let's talk about what were these really important moments where you've started thinking differently, either about the work or yourself in relation to the work or your skill set or whatever. Obviously, you're very well known for React. You were a startup founder of a company called Smite that was acquired by Twitter. Now you are working at Elemental. Where did it all start? What was the genesis of your career?

PETE:
Probably like, Star Trek 07:00 p.m. On UPN in the 90s.

MAYKEL:
Okay.

PETE:
I grew up watching Star Trek, and I thought it was really cool that people were doing sciencey stuff, and I wanted to do sciencey stuff, and my parents wanted me to do science stuff. And then I actually started learning about science, like chemistry and biology and stuff, and I actually hated it. But my parents brought home, like, one of these green monochrome computers when I was, like, nine years old.

MAYKEL:
Whoa.

PETE:
Yeah. And I just started playing around with it a little bit, and that was back in the day. Q Basic was on every computer. For whatever reason, I started why did I do that?

MAYKEL:
Was it like 80 go to ten, that kind of stuff?

PETE:
Yeah. I remember I got this maxis catalog of games.

MAYKEL:
Okay.

PETE:
And my parents said, you could get one game. And I was like, I'll just learn to program, and then I'll just make all of these games myself so I can play them all, and it'll be way cheaper than that, and I don't have to settle for just one. I think I was looking at SIM ant.

MAYKEL:
This is your first build versus buy decision.

PETE:
So I never ended up making a game that was any good, but I did start learning the program, and it's a lot of fun. So I would say that's when it started, when I was I learned to code when I was a kid, and that became just, like, a really fun hobby for me. And I just continued it throughout college and to now. I can ramble for a long time, by the way, but I don't know.

MAYKEL:
Yeah, I know. So did you do CS in college?

PETE:
Well, yeah. That's funny. Can we swear on this podcast?

MAYKEL:
Yeah.

PETE:
All right, cool. So I had learned to code when I was a kid, and all throughout high school and middle school, I thought I was, like, hot shit because I was, like, the best at computers. And then I got to college, and I thought I was hot shit until about day two, and then I realized that there was, like, a bunch of people there that were just as good as me. The coursework was really hard. Yeah, I had been programming for a while, but nobody had actively challenged me. And so that was definitely a little bit of reality check. And so I basically went in and skipped a bunch of the prereqs because I thought it was really good. And then it turned out, like, when you get to the more advanced classes, you start to need every bit of information you got in the prerequis. And so I was, like, missing certain pieces that you would learn in a classroom context, but not on the job. And so that basically ended up with me not getting a CS degree, because even though I enrolled for CS, there was one class, like Scientific Computing, that I audited it, and I wasn't really feeling it because I missed some of the early material. So then I delayed it, and then I couldn't get it scheduled in time to graduate. So I actually ended up switching majors to Information Science because I could hit the requirements for that degree, but not for CS. It was pretty cool because I ended up taking, like, a lot of cognitive studies and more liberal artsy types of courses to fulfill that requirement. So that was cool, but did not end up actually with an undergrad CS degree. I did stick around for another semester. There was, like, this program at my school where you could take your undergrad credits and then do another semester or two and get a master's degree. So I ended up actually with a Masters in CS because I was able to get that course scheduled and all that. But it was funny, like navigating that.

MAYKEL:
Sometimes you just got to hack your way around the system.

PETE:
Oh, yeah.

MAYKEL:
And so coming out of college, what was stop number one for you?

PETE:
Well, this is funny. I did not like college very much.

MAYKEL:
I was actually wondering, if you weren't getting the CS credits, what were you doing with your time in college?

PETE:
Yeah, it's funny. I was going to visit my high school friends. We had this abandoned high school, and then we kept it going in college, and we progressively got more serious to the point where we were opening for national acts at college shows around New England. And so I was gigging maybe every three weeks, which was not good for academics specifically. I had one semester that was pretty rough. That semester also happened to have my machine learning course in it, which is super funny because I ended up building entire career off machine learning, sort of. But long story short, I ended up at Facebook after college. But the journey there was really interesting because number one, I went to the career fair and I gave my resume to Cisco and they asked my GPA at the time. That was right after that rough semester. So my GPA was not a 40, let's leave it at that. And the Cisco recruiter just gave me my resume back and just said, not interested, schools. Yeah, well, it's pretty motivating looking back on it because I'm like a competitive person. So ended up my junior, I think it was. Oh, yeah, you know what, it was my senior year, I was actually playing to internships because I was doing this master's thing and I had that experience with Cisco. I applied to Microsoft for an internship and got like one round through and they were like, no thanks. So I was not on the path to an amazing career at that point, right? I ended up sticking around for an extra semester. I get that master's degree. And my roommate had gotten this offer from Google and it was for like a ton of money. And I was like, holy shit. I did not know that you could make that much money by moving to California. Because I was going to go intern in Boston, where I'm from, which at the time, people that want really excellent tech careers, they don't go to Boston, right? They go to San Francisco and San.

MAYKEL:
Francisco in Palo Alto and Mountain View.

PETE:
In Palo Alto and San Jose, maybe. But yeah, point stands. So that was a wake up call. And I ended up studying super hard. And I went through the entire separate UC Berkeley CS algorithms course to prep for interviews. And by the end of that process, six months after that disastrous career fair where I didn't get any offers or anything like that, I went seven for seven on my interviews, which was really cool. And I got a call from Google before they would give me an offer. And they were giving me shit about that one semester where I had low grades. You give them your transcript and you expect them to be like, okay, check the box, give us the transcript.

MAYKEL:
We're all good.

PETE:
But they actually dug into it. And I was like 22. I was like, this is fucking horse shit. And then the Facebook people never asked for a transcript. They just gave me an offer after going through a really rigorous interview process. And so, I don't know, I felt like coming into Facebook, I felt a lot of affinity for them as an organization. I still feel like a good amount of loyalty to the company to say, I know the company's changed a lot over time, but I had a great experience there from the pre offer stage to when I left.

MAYKEL:
Yeah. And so what was the first thing that you ended up doing there?

PETE:
Let's see. I did my masters in distributed systems and with a focus on big data because that's what you're supposed to do. It's all about big data. And if you were doing web front end or full stack engineering, you were dummy or something. And all the smart people were doing.

MAYKEL:
Distributed systems and symbolic systems.

PETE:
I didn't even know what that was coming in, so I ended up going in expecting to work on the next big distributed database. And Facebook had this thing called boot camp where you had to go and do tasks on a bunch of different teams and then based on how much you enjoyed the team that you worked on and whether you did good work for them, that was the team matching process and the onboarding process. Right. So I would do a task for the cache team and the search team and the Photos team and the Async team. And the task I did for the comments team was there used to be this embedded comment box. Do you remember this thing? The third party comment box where you could have like your own blog and embed? Yeah, so they wanted me to do some task where you would send the owner a notification when somebody comments on their blog. And so I implemented it and got it code reviewed by somebody and then it shipped in their regular Tuesday release and there was some sort of bug in it where it sent these owners like thousands of notifications. And one of those people that sent notifications to was Michael Harrington, who was the editor in chief of TechCrunch. And so the day after that thing pushed to production. First of all, this is one of my first things that went to production, and I got paged and I had to roll it back. And second, I got a tech crunch write up about my stuff on the third week of the job or whatever, which at the time was sort of embarrassing. The company was cool about like, blameless incidents and stuff like that, but I was like, holy shit. Wrote about a thing that I did with code that's never happened before. So I ended up actually wanted to work on products and so I ended up joining the Photos team for like kind of the wrong reasons, I would say. I thought that experience was cool and I thought the people seemed like cool people that I wanted to hang out with. It wasn't like the most considered career choice where I mapped out what I wanted for my career and aligned that choice to that. Didn't do any of that stuff, but it ended up being great. We built a ton of products over the couple of years that was on that team. That was right during the time that Facebook was pivoting to mobile. And so a lot of the senior technical leadership, they onboarded me taught me a bunch of stuff, and then they left and they went to go work on mobile. And that very rapidly left me as the most senior member of that team after having, I don't know, a year and a half under my belt of professional experience. And then when you guys got acquired and started to get integrated in the company, they said, hey, Pete, you've been around for a while. You're like the tech lead of Facebook photos. You'd be a good person to go over there and be the first engineer to integrate into the team full time and build products with them. And I was like, yeah, sure, that sounds like fun. And then that's where we met.

MAYKEL:
That's where we meet. And also, I think that one of the weird things that I remember, and I don't know how accurate this is anymore, but you had made the video player and had a bunch of video pipeline knowledge while we were doing video on Instagram. And that was also one of the reasons why we were like, we have to talk to this person.

PETE:
Oh, I didn't know that was involved or that was part of that.

MAYKEL:
I think it was just a detail in it, but it was also like, oh, yeah, video pipelines. This guy is like the guy that probably do this.

PETE:
Yeah, I skipped over a bunch of stuff. I actually joined Facebook video, and then I was like the only person on Facebook video for a while, and that became part of the photos team, all that. And so, yeah, I did a bunch of video stuff. I rewrote Facebook video from front to back, and then we had to do almost literally the same thing, like June.

MAYKEL:
2013, I think, somewhere.

PETE:
Do you sell the wine bottle from that? I do, yeah, I saw that too. Yeah, showing my mom that the other day.

MAYKEL:
And the hatchet.

PETE:
Yeah, I have the hatchet too.

MAYKEL:
The baby axe.

PETE:
Yeah.

MAYKEL:
Oh, yeah. Only the people that know. Well, if you know so you spent a significant amount of time at Facebook pre Instagram, and you mentioned this moment in time where all of a sudden you were the most senior person on this team. Throughout that time that you spent in your Facebook stint, were there any moments where you started thinking significantly different about the job that you were doing? Let me wind it back and say you had this realization of wanting to go and work on product because there was something written up. Cool little dopamine loop. I want to work on the consumer front end. And at a certain point, you got to do that. And so you had a continuous set of launches under your belt, probably, and you end up being one of the more senior people or most senior people on the Photos team. How did that change your role?

PETE:
Yeah, I mean, to put in perspective where I started, there's this like memory that is seared in my brain from 16 One California Ave. The old office before there was the campus, which is now called Classic Campus because we're old. I had done like a couple of features for Photos. I was still very new on the team and I had screwed something up, something minor. Again, I did a lot of good things that were right, but you don't remember those things. But this one was funny because I had not gotten the margins right on the mock. So the designer, I think, was Bobby Goodlott at the time, he did a new mobile web photo viewer design. And the big thing was we were getting rid of the margins on the Photos and I didn't do it properly, it didn't match the mock pixel perfect. And I was getting very lightweight feedback from Sam Odio, actually the PM. And he was like, hey man, can you pay more attention to detail and like future meet? If you gave that feedback to me now, I'd be like, yeah, you're right. Thanks. I actually appreciate you giving me that feedback as opposed to sitting on that for twelve months. But I was heating up a can of soup in the microwave at the time and it exploded when he was giving me that feedback and I just, for whatever reason, got super self conscious about it. And so I was cleaning up soup that exploded all over the microwave while he was giving me feedback and I'm clearly distraught. And I was just super junior and super green when I joined Anne. I had a little bit of that imposter syndrome, right? Because that feeling I had when I got to college about not being hot shit eventually got over that. But Facebook was like the next level game. Everybody there was amazing. And they are still some of the best people I've ever met in my career in terms of professional capability, right, for sure. So the journey from there to Tech Lead was like a little bit funny because it happened really quickly. But there were a couple things that happened. It was the era of the Facebook IPO and so we had to redesign the photo viewer to basically it was marketed as like a design refresh, but it really moved the ads above the fold, which was going to increase revenue by some huge amount. And there was like three or four of us on the team that was doing that. And basically we said, here's the new design, ship it in four weeks and then we're going to IPO the week after that. I mean, I think it was not the week after that exactly. I think it was like, ship it in four weeks. And then there was a ton test period and then it's like the IPO, but it was basically super aggressive four week deadline that we had to hit in order to actually make this thing. And so there were two people that were more senior than me, and then there was me, and then there was this new kid that had just joined who was unproven, and his name was Christopher Shadow, A-K-A who is amazing engineer. And so we are all crunching, really hard to go build this thing. And this senior engineer, Beau Hartshorn, he was like, all right, the first thing we're going to do is we're just going to copy and paste all the code into a separate folder and we're going to call it like, Photo Viewer too. That's basically what we did, like, went against everything that was ever taught to me. You don't copy paste code, you refactor it in place, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I had asked about that and he was like, listen, that's what they teach you in school. But in practice, if the migration is only going to take a couple of weeks, it's way faster to copy and paste it. Like, that's just a thing that people who have been around for a while, they know how to make that trade off. And so I learned a lot from that. And we shipped and it was a very impressive and fun project. We were meeting with Mark Zuckerberg twice a week to review it. And so getting through that, that gave me a lot of confidence. And right after that project, a lot of those people moved on to mobile teams. And so that left kind of like me and Christopher Shadow and a couple of other people that were on the Photos team. I would say that was one of those moments that was a real confidence builder. I also got like a sit down mentorship session from our temporary manager. The other thing to keep in mind is that fast growing companies, every team always feels understaffed and there's always some kind of churn. So you're getting reorged or people are leaving the team or the management is changing or whatever. In my first year, we went through like six different managers on the team and one of them was Jocelyn Goldstein, who was a director, senior Director had no business like line managing this product team, but they needed her to step in for a couple of months. And so she gave some really good advice and she basically said, listen, no one can give you the title of leader or tech lead or whatever. It's just a thing that you do and then it gets recognized later and you get the label after you've been doing it for a while. And that really stuck with me. And she was just kind of like, you know how these people are supposed to act? Like, just act like them. And so that plus the Photo Viewer thing really, I think, transformed me from that kid that was blowing up soup in a microwave to someone with some degree of responsibility.

MAYKEL:
Awesome. What I think is really interesting about that conversation that you had with Jocelyn is the lagging recognition, which lagging recognition is annoying in the moment, in a way, and a lot of people perceive it that way, especially earlier on in your career, especially at a startup. I'm doing the job, why am I not senior? Blah, blah, blah. But if you see how fast a company like that runs in general, in the grand scheme of things, you're still escalating extremely fast.

PETE:
Right, right.

MAYKEL:
And what I found really interesting, and this is funnily enough, timing wise, I just came out of our eight of us calibrating because we're in a performance cycle at Brexit. One of the things that I always use as a litmus test in the back of my head is if someone would get this promotion, if this person gets this promotion, would the people around them or the people across the company be surprised by this? And obviously, it's never about like, hey, what does everyone think? And not everyone has to unanimously agree on something. But if you actually get to a point where you say, oh yeah, this person is now a manager, or this person is now a senior designer, senior engineer, this person is now a staff engineer, and everyone around them is like, they weren't a staff engineer already.

PETE:
You know that, you got it right.

MAYKEL:
You got it right. But as the person you're like, you got it right. And I think that there's something interesting about the moment that you learn that, because then eventually you'll have remote culture. Now, we can do a whole saga about what I think about remote culture. But if you're in person and you have a tight knit office and you go and have a drink, post a couple of weeks or a couple of days, post that promo. You'll encounter people that you may not have even known, especially back at Facebook, that you may not have known that you see at all hands that would be like, oh, yeah, congratulations. I heard this and this. I'm super surprised that you weren't already, but like, super good. And I think that there was also this, especially at that time at the company, there was a supportive thing. It didn't seem from an IC level that political and that conniving in a way.

PETE:
Yeah.

MAYKEL:
Nowadays, I think that we've actually gone, especially with the frothiness of the market in the late 2010s. You've seen a lot of compensation through Title basically, where you're just like well, your title is actually not a you can't migrate your title as a property to the next company because if you are a staff engineer at a ten person company and you come to Facebook, you may well be an IC Four, IC Five or something, which is like a senior engineer. Or if you're ahead of design, like, for a company that has only you as a designer, you may well just not even be a senior in certain cases. Right. And so the transferable properties are your skills and are the way you carry yourself. Right. And I think it's a really interesting anecdote that you just gave us on that moment where you went from. Oh, yeah, I'm like, I have imposition because everyone around me is really awesome. And I totally remember that feeling when I moved to San Francisco as well, because back in the Netherlands I was like, yeah, I'm like 90th percentile, probably. And actually I started working remotely with Kevin sister and we would have a meeting and he would ask me a bunch of questions and I was like, I have no answers. And this is actually the first time in a long time that I can't even try and bullshit myself out of this conversation. It's like, no, I don't know what I don't know right now. I'm going to investigate this for you.

PETE:
And they're thinking a couple of steps ahead and you're like, you're answering the question. And then they've got the follow up immediately prepared and you know that they've already thought through that.

MAYKEL:
Exactly. I think that's a really cool anecdote. You had this like, important moment and you were then the de facto leader of Photos for a while and then were also the person that was deemed should go over to Instagram to be the first dedicated web engineer.

PETE:
Yeah, that's right.

MAYKEL:
Because before that it was like, I mean, I was even writing Python, which was not a good idea at all.

PETE:
It was even Shayne. Right?

MAYKEL:
It was Shayne. I think it was Mikey, obviously first, and then probably Shayne took on the web responsibilities for a while. And then when I joined, I learned a little bit of Django. Just enough to be dangerous.

PETE:
Right.

MAYKEL:
And then around when we did user profiles, the way that we were like, querying those pages and the way that we had to generate those pages was getting too expensive to do it server side. I remember having this really rickety backbone handlebar set up and that was about the moment where you stepped in and you also came with this little toy in a box and it was like, yeah, this is react and didn't come.

PETE:
With that, by the way. I mean, we were tasked with that problem. Right. By the way, I'm not convinced that was a real problem. Now that I have some grays in my beard, we may have wanted to push back and been like, hey, do we really need a client render this? I'm not sure we had to, but anyway, the situation was that was told to me anyway, was we want to roll out a web app. Rendering it server side is going to mean more CPU server side, and we can't add any more CPU server side because we're out of connections to Postgres. So Postgres has a certain finite number of connections it can handle, so that caps the number of web servers you can have. And there are ways around it. But at that stage, Instagram hadn't set that stuff up yet, but we were.

MAYKEL:
Just plugging into server after server for the next Justin Bieber post, basically.

PETE:
Yeah, I remember that. That was a super cool company, man. But that was the mandate, right? It was no server rendering. Do you remember I did a diligence process for this?

MAYKEL:
Yeah, you had to talk to I think it was Mike and Shayne. And you had to bring it to a couple of people at least.

PETE:
Well, no, I did a diligence process on the other side too, because there were like three competing JavaScript frameworks at Facebook. There was Bolt and there was React, and there was JS, HTML, and there may have been there was another thing called Javelin, but nobody thought we should use that. So there were those three. And I basically built like little Hello World applications in them, and I liked React the best. And so I did a little diligence process to just talk to everybody in UIE and product infrastructure in those groups. And they were all like, yeah, I picked the one that you think is cool. All of them were good. And I was like, thanks guys. I'll go with react. Jordan provided like a ton of support. And then the way I remember it was like, I was talking to Shayne and Mike and you, and collectively we all decided that this thing was worth trying. Is that how I'm kind of I.

MAYKEL:
Think that the technical prowess came from Mike and Shayne. And I looked at it and I was like, oh, I understand this. I could write this. That was enough.

PETE:
Really? Well, you were mostly doing the styling too. I remember we were working in kind of a mode where I was building the components and I would get a crappy version out there and then you would make it beautiful. And it started with you just like living in CSS world, and then over time going more in like a full on contributor.

MAYKEL:
I think that the thing was also, on the one hand, I was running ahead at the time, photoshop, still getting the next design ready, while then also doing a bunch of cleanup, because my way of thinking about this and was, and then still is, like whenever someone asks, hey, should designers code or something? It's like, well, it depends, right? It depends on if this comes natural to you and if you enjoy it, and if you can have impact that way. And my way of thinking in our relationship early on was, I know all the nits of this design. Me explaining that to you, and me writing it down in a CSS file or in line or wherever, it was probably. Roughly takes an equal amount of time and the writing of the code and seeing it come to life is something that makes me very happy. And that's why I ended up just spending a bunch of extra time doing that, because that made our whole process way more efficient, because you could really focus on what is the behavior everywhere.

PETE:
Right.

MAYKEL:
And how do we set this thing up from a holistic perspective, and how do we pull off the next stunt after the next stunt? How do we deal with embedding when video came out and all of a.

PETE:
Sudden we wanted to embed about the embed project? That was funny. Do you remember there is this really funny story from the embed project, by the way, where we basically met with a Facebook embed team, which I think was like one person and we were like asking him how to what are the best practices for like, an embed?

MAYKEL:
Yeah, that doesn't get blocked by things.

PETE:
Doesn'T mess up the host web page. And so literally, he left that meeting early because there was an embed incident that happened where somehow we had pushed a change to the Facebook SDK that was redirecting window top to Facebook.com. So the entire Internet, wherever there was a like button, the like button problem, it was literally the day we were meeting about like, hey, how do we do this safely? And so New York Times was mad because you would type in Nytimes.com and it would just redirect you to Facebook.

MAYKEL:
Good growth hack.

PETE:
Yeah, I mean, numbers went crazy on that one, but yeah, I thought it was a good working relationship, for sure. There was like a time when we were doing that that it was going so fast.

MAYKEL:
We shipped profiles in two weeks from the vetting of React to launch was two weeks. And then we did Feed in three weeks or four weeks. And then we redid all the photo pages afterwards and added writing and commenting to them. Right, and that took like four to six weeks or something. Just completely redoing those. And also getting these crazy large comment feeds to load on the page as well because pagination.

PETE:
I remember being a pain.

MAYKEL:
Oh my God. Yeah, that was your thing. You were like, well we need the Pagination. I don't know if you wanted this or if I wanted this, where it was like, if you're on a profile, it should be a modal, but if you refresh, it should actually be a photo page.

PETE:
That seems like a thing I would have wanted, because that was how Facebook worked.

MAYKEL:
Yeah, exactly. So from your profile or from Feed, if you would go into the photo viewer, it would be a lightbox and your URL would change, which at the time was nontrivial.

PETE:
Right.

MAYKEL:
But then if you would refresh, you would get like a dedicated photo page because it was a permalink page.

PETE:
Right. And I think there was also a legitimate technical reason for that, which was we needed the photo pages to be Seoable.

MAYKEL:
Yes.

PETE:
Wasn't there some sort of SEO static HTML thing?

MAYKEL:
Yeah.

PETE:
And we were trying to deploy React server rendering in like, 2013, when React didn't even support server rendering yet. I think that's how no, it must have been before 2013.

MAYKEL:
No, it was 2013. It was very early in the year, probably.

PETE:
Yeah, I remember because we were trying to deploy server rendering. And like, number one, Jordan, basically what had happened was Jordan had built a React prototype and it supported server rendering. And then a bunch of other people, including me, were working on it and shipping product on top of it. And then at some point, it didn't support server rendering anymore because people just start landing code and then shit happens. I think we ended up getting server rendering working, but the infra team at Instagram was like, not super thrilled about deploying Node JS version 0.7 to production. Oh, yeah, something like that.

MAYKEL:
Yeah. There's also a really cool other aspect of this where we were running so fast that we were breaking small things the whole time. And so you ended up building this thing called Buxley, which was a headless browser that would take screenshots and throw them in fabricator with the diff. And so if there was a diff in the screenshot, then you would know that you had made a visual change to a certain page.

PETE:
Yeah. So that was very high tech. First of all, at the time, that was Facebook's most successful GitHub project. Do you remember that?

MAYKEL:
It was also the first one that we easily just threw into the wild even before React, I think.

PETE:
Yeah, it was pre react. It was just a thing that I don't even know how we got approval for that, man, but that was pretty useful. I think we probably weren't the first to do it. I had heard of people doing that before, but I had never found anything open source that could do it. So yeah, that was when I started hating CSS, because do you remember what the problem actually was?

MAYKEL:
There was like a race condition. No, the problem was it was the importing, wasn't it? Like it was like a cascading race condition.

PETE:
Yeah, I guess it was a race condition. There was a specificity conflict. We had two selectors named the same thing on the photo page and the profile page, and depending on which order you visited the pages, one would win out over the other. There was that one that was a pain, and then the second, which now I would have given feedback on the design and we would have changed. But there was a do you remember the rounding error? Yeah. We probably should have just put an extra pixel somewhere that was not in the middle of the page and really obvious. But I didn't know about sub pixel rounding errors. At the time, so my bad.

MAYKEL:
You live and you learn, basically.

PETE:
Yeah.

MAYKEL:
So how long have you on the team? You were like, two years, maybe.

PETE:
Can I open this so that can mess up all you?

MAYKEL:
These are pretty good, by the way.

PETE:
Yeah, I like that. It tastes like beer but is not super heavy.

MAYKEL:
This episode is sponsored by the Athletic Brewing Company. Non alcoholic brews upside down.

PETE:
A golden nail. How long was I on the team? Well, I worked at Facebook for three and a half years.

MAYKEL:
Oh, okay. So one and a half before and two after, something like that. You left in like 2015, I can see that. Yeah, that's right. Did you immediately start work on Smite or were you on like a little Eat, Pray, Love tech quest for a while?

PETE:
No, I wanted to leave in time to get a customer to then apply to YC and say that I had traction.

MAYKEL:
Okay.

PETE:
And so I left, I don't remember when exactly, but a couple of months before the YC deadline with the intent to start trustee as a service startup, basically, like, I'd always wanted to start a startup and for whatever reason, it seemed like a good time to do it. React had gotten off the ground and was starting to get really successful and I had really enjoyed that. I was managing a team at Instagram. Looking back at the time, I was like, Facebook doesn't seem as fun anymore. I was 26 and I was like, I'm getting old, I should probably start. The Collins and brothers did it when they were 18, so I got to get on it. So I ended up leaving to start a company, but looking back, I was not enjoying management 100%. That was what it was. I think it ended up being like a good positive outcome, but just looking back on how I was feeling and what I was doing at the time, it was pretty clear that I was really trying to like being a manager and I just didn't. Now that changed later on in life, in some contexts, not others. I got a whole set of opinions about what manager should and shouldn't do and when you should manage, when you shouldn't. But I think at that time, managing a team like that was not what I was wanting to do, but I didn't even know it at the time and I actually see so many people in their careers that they don't even know they're miserable. Have you ever seen this?

MAYKEL:
I mean, I've been it yeah, but I think what's important about it is you start kind of going from this mode of resilience it's like, oh, well, I'm going to be uncomfortable. This is new. Now. I don't know if this is uncomfortable because I'm not good at it, or if it's uncomfortable because I really don't like doing this right. And I think it totally is deserving of a quest as much as it is deserving to join a very specific type of company or a type of industry or take a gap year or something. I think that going into management, and I've gone back and forth between management and I see now I think that we need to be more flexible in the way that we think about this path. Because there are moments where I really want to focus on supporting others and mentoring others and having impact through influence, basically, and seeing this come to life by this orchestra of humans. And there are moments where I want to grab the tools and just go sit in the corner. Right. And COVID specifically for me has had that kind of hermit effect where I was like on Sabbatical and COVID and just ended up building shoebox from scratch, where I could have probably there were ways of interacting with people and being like, oh, let's do this together, or reaching out to folks.

PETE:
But Mark Hang was very popular.

MAYKEL:
Yeah, the park hang was very popular. But there was this mode where I was just, this is a perfect time for me. I had a couple of months of feeling sorry for myself and feeling burnt out and not having energy. And then there was this moment where I was like, what the hell are you doing? This is a perfect point for you to just do a thing. What is the thing that you want to do? And for me, in my darker times, I always go back to basics. And the basics are I started as a hybrid designer engineer. And so I was like, well, let's go investigate, let's go start building some smaller things. So I rebuilt my personal website and then used like Next, JS and Versailles for the first time. Then it was still called Zeit, and then started building Shoebox from going serverless to going onto Heroku and building a little app server using Express and literally just learning the whole stack from scratch, where my last stack was Django Python. Right? And then before that, even for all my side projects, it was just a lamp stack. And so the whole world had changed. Just taking that time to same way as like you go into a management quest, if you can figure out that you really like it, or you can figure out that, oh, there's parts of it that you liked. And you either start to realize that as you escalate in your career, you are liking your job equal amount or more, very often you don't. And the thing that you started on, which was the core of your passion early on, is completely not what you're doing in this new role. Right. And regardless of you ending up there, I think that the investment of time in figuring that out is worth it. I don't think that doing it for half a year and then saying I don't like it is what most people should do. I think that a lot of people, maybe they're actually not managers and they're going in there for promo reasons or like bad faith reasons and then yeah, get the hell out. But if you're really going to dip your toes and do it for a year, if you're really miserable, you'll know, early on, if you're miserable, maybe that is because you're uncomfortable.

PETE:
Yeah. And I think there's definitely value in pushing through it because otherwise you're never going to grow. I actually ended up pushing through it and enjoying it later in my career.

MAYKEL:
Plus you learn a lot, especially at a company like Facebook, which had a very rigorous calibration performance structure that you bring with you to the next thing.

PETE:
I learned a ton and it gave me a bunch of superpowers, which was really great, but it was just not really for me at the time. I think there was another thing going on too, like the switch from B to C to B to B. I was managing the team building B to B tools, which is basically tools for advertisers. And I'm motivated by different things now, but back then, big part of working at Facebook and Instagram was like, it was really cool and tools for advertisers, like I couldn't show my friends, I just didn't care. Whereas I could in the past be like, hey, we got new Instagram, like news feed on the web and people would actually use it. That I knew there's a bunch of stuff like that. But one thing I never have been is a promo chaser. I never even really knew what my level was or what a staff software engineer meant until honestly, pretty later in.

MAYKEL:
My career when you had people asking you for the staff title.

PETE:
Yeah, I had been CEO for a little while and people were like, so am I a staff engineer? I'd be like, Let me get back.

MAYKEL:
To you on that Google. What is a staff?

PETE:
A staff engineer is an E six.

MAYKEL:
So you started a company, it ended up being called Smite. Yes, for a while it had a name called Offbox, which was terrible, which was not great, but I remember making like a very early mock for it just to have something to look at.

PETE:
Yeah. Do we owe you equity or something?

MAYKEL:
No, this is totally good. I'll talk to Elon about it.

PETE:
Okay. It says now.

MAYKEL:
Yeah, I should have probably asked that earlier in life before it was burnt down. I think it was like a really interesting time. Right, because there were a lot of people building new services. Post a wave of airbnb. Instagram pinterest the nine to like 2011 wave of new products. Every single one of them had been dealing with spam and site integrity issues. Instagram internally, I think it was like the fruit attack or something where we had like fruit emojis everywhere. And so coming out of a company like that, one of the most interesting things that you've seen come out of facebook is you grab a bunch of internal SAS that we've built and you actually just productize that is that kind of how asana, I think, was built.

PETE:
In, like yeah, asana and statsig.

MAYKEL:
Now probably most recently, Turana was another famous one.

PETE:
Yes, I think they're now called scuba.

MAYKEL:
And so you went the site integrity direction, because facebook obviously needs a very heavy site integrity effort, and other people also needed a very heavy site integrity effort.

PETE:
Yes, that's right.

MAYKEL:
How was the transition for you going from being an engine manager to being a founder and CEO?

PETE:
Yeah, that was on the side. That was interesting. I mean, it's kind of the most San Francisco story in the whole world. Which was? Well, first of all, for a variety of reasons, I wanted to start a company. I had been on the lookout for an idea for a while. I had noticed that we had acquired instagram, and the first project was to plug into sigma and sentry, which was the internal rules engine and spam classification system. And that always stuck out to me as like, matching that pattern. Right. This is some proprietary technology that facebook had. Clearly this independent company needed it. Wouldn't it be great if we could offer this to the market or everybody democratize access to this type of thing? I had no experience in spam abuse, really. I had plugged into the system now and again at facebook, so I knew how the APIs worked, but I didn't really know how to solve the problem. I had been living right by Alamo Square in this building with a bunch of people. And the apartment below us was a bunch of girls. And we had a Halloween party, and one of them brought up their boyfriend. And we were hanging out, and we had been talking, and it turned out that he worked on Google Antispam. And so we became friends, and eventually I was like, hey, I got this idea for a company. What do you think? And so we ended up spending all afternoon and all night whiteboarding ideas and talking about it. That was really the genesis for, hey, this thing could actually be a reality. That gave me a lot of confidence. We ended up talking to a couple investors before leaving, and one of them was Michael cybel at YCombinator, who the reason why this is the most, like, San Francisco story ever was like, remember the rewrite of the photo viewer early in my career? That lead engineer that did that copy paste, michael cybel's roommate, of course. So it's like asking people that I knew that were cool, like, hey, how do I do this startup thing? He was like, oh, you should talk to Michael. He's really smart. He gave me some advice and tried to recruit me to socialcam, which I.

MAYKEL:
Didn'T, as you do.

PETE:
Yes, of course. I think through that, we got introduced to some investors and they were like, hey, that's a great idea. We would write you a check if you were doing this full time. And so that was a huge confidence booster. So I ended up saying, I got three months of living expenses allocated to I'm going to plan on losing three months of money. And then I quit my job. I told Julian, my co founder, that guy from the party, he was a little skittish about leaving. He's got a good thing going. They don't want to leave their job. And I was like, listen man, I'll leave my job first. We'll apply to YC. Either, like, we get into YC or we raise a traditional venture round and I will make sure that you're an equal co founder. But you don't have to leave your job until basically the money is in the bank, which I think a lot of people would be like, I took the risk, so I deserve, like, a bigger slice of the pie. But I think one of the things that separates Silicon Valley, which is, I think, now more of a mindset and a culture than it is a physical location, is a real appreciation for the size of the pie and power law returns. And it's like, listen, the Incremental 10% that I could have over this guy is not worth locking down a really good co founder and having him feel super engaged and work really hard to make this thing successful. I firmly upstand by that. I think that even if a cofounder comes in six months later, it's often worth giving them an equal share if you can. And so I announced that I was leaving, and then one of my coworkers at Instagram, Josh, he was like, hey, I'm like, miserable at this big company. I am a startup person and I'm going to quit and it's just a matter of time. And so I ended up giving him the same deal. I said, listen, I'm going to go quit, we're going to go form this company and then you can have your equal share. And there was a little bit of a higher stakes for him because of H One B visa, and it is possible to solve those. You can form a start up and transferring H One B to it. It's possible. There are arrangements that you can do to make that happen, but it's just a little bit more work. So, yeah, we ended up doing that and that was really fun. Yeah, I could ramble forever.

MAYKEL:
But now you're the person in charge. You're not just working on the thing and you're not the line manager, effectively. What was the first lesson that came along, like, in the first half year?

PETE:
Well, the time is measured differently. I mean, you probably felt Facebook slow way down during your time, right? And I even felt it start to slow down a little bit, even in 2015, it was starting to get much bigger. Especially Instagram got way bigger really fast, and suddenly the scope was reduced and you had to get more approvals for things. I think the first thing is that your perception of time changes, but most importantly, you get no feedback for a really long time, and that can really fuck with you. Am I building the right product? Well, you can talk to customers and you can talk to investors, and they will say certain things, but you're only going to meet with them once every couple of weeks, probably because they're busy and you don't really know until they pay you. And even if they pay you, you don't know if that's going to be a really successful business. And you just walked away from a great job and you don't know what the future is going to be like. And so that can really mess with your head. A lot of founders go through this where you ask them like, hey, what does your company do? And they can't even answer the question at that early stage because they're so in their own heads. A good example is we weren't even sure what the company was going to do because were we going to do an authentication in a box? That's why the company was called Off Boxes. We were going to try to be like off zero type of thing. And then we realized that there were a lot of competitors out there for that. And then we were like, okay, is spam and abuse really a big problem? Do we need to do credit card fraud detection? And there's just all sorts of questions like this where you get conflicting answers from people and it becomes very hard to know whether you're pointed in the right direction. And one of the themes that you've been poking at here is like moments where your perspective changes, right? It was a three and a half year long moment, like going through this whole thing, but after having been a CEO and started up and raised a couple rounds of funding and then selling and going through a pretty challenging acquisition, no one is prepared for that. There has never been a CEO that was ever in their comfort zone in that. And so when I started early and I would go to these YC dinners, what they would do is they would have these big dinners every other week, and people would go in and just hang out. And I think the point of that was you've got a bunch of founders in one room and they can go and build each other up and swap best practices and stuff. But the effect that it had on me was like cranking up that imposter syndrome, because I think partially we were very new and other companies had a little bit more built out. But also what I realized was founders are always selling their company a little ahead of the roadmap or a little ahead of where they are. And so there was like a ton of posturing and I was really intimidated. And so when you combine like not really knowing if you're in the right direction with that level of intimidation, I was like, wow, like these people must have had like way more experience than me. Maybe I should have stayed, maybe I should have more mentorship or whatever. And that part was probably true. But when I got to the end of that process and landed the plane, I realized that nobody knows what they're doing at the beginning. And it really is about developing a set of patterns for handling situations where you have no reference points for anything. The common thing that would happen is a new situation comes up, maybe someone is asking about their title or whatever and you have a problem and your first instinct is to sit down and think really hard about it and try to reason your way through it. Maybe do some Google searches and stuff. Now, when I see a problem like that, where I don't have a pattern that I can apply for experience in it, I just say, okay, who has seen this problem before and how do I get them to take my call and answer my question? And that changed my life. Now I feel like I can do I mean, I can't actually do everything, but I do feel like I have a playbook for doing almost anything because of that type of stuff. You know what I mean?

MAYKEL:
I was talking with Rasmus on one of these and he also mentioned the ability to especially when you're early on I think he was talking about spotify the ability to sit next to someone who is further along than you or has a different spike in their skill profile and then just sitting next to them and working together with them or having them show it to you instead of someone telling you, hey, yeah, this is what you should do. Having that immersive moment of someone really showing you how you should do this is so much more of a compressed way of learning than reading or trying it out yourself. And then I think the next step is probably having someone explain it to you in great detail and not showing it to you. And then the third one is probably reading and trying it yourself.

PETE:
Right, right. But especially for people early in their career, watching a pro work blows your mind because a lot of these early career people, they don't know how to set up their IDE or photoshop or whatever their tool of choice is, whatever.

MAYKEL:
The hacks are that you have set up, whatever your extensions are, all this kind of stuff.

PETE:
Yeah, you'll see that the pro programmers, they're not pointing and clicking with their mouse very often and students coming out of university often are. Right? And so you realize that there's just like a certain base level of productivity that you can unlock by not doing anything smart, just learning your tools a little bit better. I'm totally with you on that. And I think another thing is that the student should not be intimidated because sometimes when you watch a pro work you're like, how am I ever going to learn all that stuff? But you know, you're putting in 8 hours a day at least on this. You'll pick it up not much quicker than you think.

MAYKEL:
Oh yeah, it's little by little and incremental progress ramps up very quickly. Like the accumulated skill and productivity you get out of that. And I think that's also a really interesting topic as a whole where a lot of people there's a friend of mine who he said something when I was like 21, 22, he was one of the people that worked with me at the first company that I founded. And we had these part time students that were doing machine learning at the local university basically. And they were doing front end websites for us. Basically they would have some extra time and they would be really good from a programming perspective. We would often over engineer things, which is obviously great or not. But he was also at the time like a cyclist and a runner and he ended up being a triathlete. The first time that I felt like inklings of Burnout I was like 22. We were doing this company for three years already and for some reason what I wanted to do and what the company was doing wasn't aligned anymore. But I was still grinding the hours and somehow your battery doesn't get refilled. Burnout is a whole separate topic. But one of the things that I was like, well, maybe I should just go exercise, I should go run. And I was having a conversation with him and I was like, I'm not at all in any shape of running and so this is really annoying to me. And his response was, anybody can run a five k. Yeah. And I was like, no, I could never run a five k. He's like, Anybody can run a five k. It all depends on how fast you want to run that five. If you do a light jog for 5 km, you can do that right now. Is it going to be fun? Probably not, but you can do it. And I took that and I was like, wow, that's actually a really interesting insight. Let me go try this. And I ended up not doing it. I ended up doing like a two k walking kilometer and doing a two k. But two weeks later I was doing like a three k and a short stop and then the 1.75K or something and all of a sudden I was doing a five k. And that takes a couple of weeks of just perseverance and consistency. And I think when it comes. To these things, like the automatism, the muscle memory of using your IDE or getting the setup right, or finding the quick hacks. And these, like, how does at the time float left clear? Both. And now it's flexbox and all kind of stuff. You get used to those things. The more reps that you get in. And as with working out, as with running, it's all really about reps, right?

PETE:
Yes.

MAYKEL:
And you got a lot of reps of being a CEO in two and a half, three and a half years.

PETE:
I'm a CEO again.

MAYKEL:
You're a CEO again.

PETE:
Now, that was three and a half years, and now I'm on month three of the new gig. So yeah, we're pushing four years of CEO experience.

MAYKEL:
So in between you, you were a design leader at Twitter?

PETE:
Nope.

MAYKEL:
Was an engineer engineering leader at Twitter. Wow.

PETE:
Yeah.

MAYKEL:
We're not even going to cut that one out. We're just going to keep that one in. You were an engine leader at Twitter, focusing on a bunch of trust and safety. I think we can do the whole okay, how was that, Delta? And what did you learn there? But what was the big lesson from your three or four years there?

PETE:
I had three or four totally different jobs there. My first job was like the first six months to a year. It was land the team into the company and make sure that everything gets integrated smoothly. That acquisition certainly was an adventure that I was not expecting, and I learned a lot from that. But I think that's probably a separate podcast. But once we consummated the transaction, we landed in Twitter HQ. And so there are tons of things that you need to address when you're doing an acquisition. Now, what was really nice was I had been on the other side of the transaction at Instagram, so I knew that there was this kind of balance that you had to strike where you had to keep the team's identity, but also over time, merge into the parent company. If you want it to work, you need to really balance those things, because if you're totally independent and at odds with the acquirer, that's just not going to work for anybody, and everyone's going to get fired.

MAYKEL:
And it's not pleasant, and very few get it right.

PETE:
Right, exactly. I think for a while, Facebook was good at that, I thought. I thought, like, Instagram, at least for me, it was pretty positive.

MAYKEL:
I think keeping the leadership team on board for, I think, seven years or something, that's a feat.

PETE:
I didn't really just stay that long.

MAYKEL:
Yeah, that's awesome.

PETE:
So that was the first job I oversaw, basically the original Smite team, which was around 20 people, and then they gave me a couple of other teams where we merged the equivalent Smite teams in with Twitter teams. And so managing like all right, so here's a list of things that you have to do in this job. Number one, I realized that I don't like my title. I thought it was good, but now I realize it's not. Number two is my team uses story points and Sprint planning, all this stuff, and I don't want to do any of that bullshit. Or this team is really disorganized. We need more structure like story points and sprint planning. How do you balance those? Oftentimes those cultures can really clash, even if everybody on the Smite side and the tour side really, really nice and really collaborative and really smart. So it wasn't the interpersonal problem, but the working style thing. Even if you're the nicest friendliest people in the world, you can still have clashes and working style and could still piss people off and just be bad for everything. So we had to navigate a lot of MNA integration stuff. So that was like my first six months. Then we got My situated and we grew it, and we built up a pretty big team. You can think of us as like growing the Smite organization from 20 to 60 while I was there. It wasn't called smite anymore. It was divided into a couple of teams. The organization was called Health, but it was this antispam team, basically. And I know there was still spam on Twitter, but we made a lot of improvements while we were there. I had run that group for a while, and we made a lot of really big impacts, had built out a lot of good tooling and infrastructure, and I had actually focused mostly on fundamental infrastructure and internal tools. Then a couple of things happened. In 2021st of all, there was a global pandemic. Yes. And a rapid shift to work from home. And our tools were not really designed to be secure. Operated out of your home offPREM. Yeah, so we had to go figure that out very rapidly. The second was like, twitter got hacked in a major way that year. I'm not sure if you remember all the blue checks tweeting out, crazy stuff. There was basically some teenager in Florida hacked a bunch of oh yeah, I remember this. They were using the tools that we had built, but they actually had popped a two factor authenticated account. They had a bunch of safeguards in place, but they still got through them. That triggered a bunch of work that I had to do. And so we were working super hard. My was really cranking. I was on meetings for like 10 hours a day during the pandemic, and that ended up wearing on me a lot. And I was a manager at that point, but it was like much broader scope and a lot more fun because you're managing managers, you're having a really noticeable impact. So I learned a lot from my first management experience. I applied it throughout the start up and then at Twitter, and that all worked really well, and I was having a lot of fun with that until just the amount of risk management stuff that we were doing, it started really getting to me. It's a trust and safety team, so it's mostly about risk management. And I realized that we're not really pushing the product forward, we're just like holding the levy back. And long story short, I ended up doing a little stint as an IC for a while because I wanted to recharge. And so I ended up basically doing the lateral move, but it actually ended up being, it was like a lateral movement than a promo to be the tech lead of tools for a while. And so we did a bunch of modernization and hardening of the tools while I was TL there. Cool, yeah, it's fun.

MAYKEL:
And then you joined Elemental as the head of engineering and now you're CEO.

PETE:
Yeah, simple as that.

MAYKEL:
Anything that you look back on, for example, experiences might that you now are doing differently?

PETE:
Oh my God, there's a lot. I guess first of all, I ended up leaving Twitter pre all the Elon stuff. I was just ready for a change. And I ended up joining my friend Nick Schrox start up Elemental, the Mcdagster Open Source Data Pipeline Tool. And I actually had some opportunities to be CEO at Series B companies, but I ended up going to this one because I've got a whole pitch for this by the way, which I will spare you. But basically data pipelines were a huge mess at Smite, then at Twitter, and Elemental was trying to fix that. And I had known Nick, I had worked with him for a long time and a lot of respect for him. So I joined as head of engineering. It's like right in my comfort zone. I've done that job, I was doing that job at a similar scale at Twitter and I had been CEO at Smite and it was an engineering led company, so right, my comfort zone. And so we had a hell of a first quarter and we shipped like our 100 and our generally available cloud product and stuff like that. And then late last year, Nick comes to me and he says, hey, basically he wanted to really lean in on technology and product and customers and the CEO has to run the whole company. And oftentimes you don't have time to do that, especially with an open source project like Dagger. You got to put your hands on the keyboard and sit next to your customers and work with them. And as CEO of a fast growing startup, you got to think about go to market strategy and scaling up your sales team and what bets are we going to make on our headcount plan for the next year and things like that. So I had done the job and he asked if I wanted to be CEO and he would step into the CTO role. And so we ended up doing that and it's been a lot of fun. There's been a bunch of things that I learned from Smite that I'm applying here, and also things that I learned from seeing how somebody else did it. A good example was we have an operations team of two people who are really good at Elemental, come from, like, consulting backgrounds, and we do all of our books in house and things like that, like, really smart, sharp people. And at Smite, I had an outsourced bookkeeper and part time CFO and didn't really have any operations people internally. And so when it came time for us to do a fundraiser, sell the company, I thought it was as normal and like the CEO's job to pull together the data room and take point on all the due diligence and stuff like that. I did not realize how much work that was, especially at an acquisition. And that was like, crazy. And I think Nick had a little more forSay than I did and put it in operations team. And so now it's much more of a collaborative team effort and I can do what I'm really good at, and operations can do what they're really good at. I would say the first thing was I learned from him was, like, if you're a founder, don't be afraid to have an operations team. Have an EA or whatever it is to help you stay focused on what you need to do if you're a venture back. Frankly, that's what the investors want you to spend money on anyway. You might feel bad, like, spending money on someone to help you do something that you could do yourself, but at the end of the day, you're just trying to do the right thing for your employees, you and your investors. I think that's important. The second thing was I have this internal motto for myself that I call I don't know if the motto it's called the no Fun Rule, which is, if you're having fun at work, you probably shouldn't be doing that thing.

MAYKEL:
Wow.

PETE:
And that is terrible, terrible, terrible advice for everybody. So don't follow that.

MAYKEL:
That's the title, the no fun rule.

PETE:
All right, but can I defend this for a second?

MAYKEL:
No.

PETE:
I can only say that when talking about being a CEO as like an engine manager or head of engineering or whatever, you can never talk about the no fun rule because your reports will hate you. But the no fund rule is, if the project you're doing is fun, you have to pause and think about your own biases. You are probably biased to think that project is impactful and there is a decent chance that there's something else that you should be doing instead. I think with Nick's founder CEO, he had written most of the code. He was very focused on the technical and product stuff. And I'm an engineer, I naturally gravitate towards that stuff too. But I have the no fund rule and I basically say, listen, for the most part. That's nick's problem. That's our head of products problem. That's our lead engineers problem. My job is like, channel channel growth, growth, growth, sales, turning this thing into a business. I had made this mistake of not investing in marketing early enough, because engineers are like, nobody likes marketing. Marketing is like, our product will just grow by itself.

MAYKEL:
But actually, it's the twilio sign ask your developer. Which they finally changed after, like, a decade, I think.

PETE:
Oh, really?

MAYKEL:
It's like the twilio billboard that was on the one on one going into SF.

PETE:
Yeah, there's something about that billboard that pissed me off. Just like your developer, as if I don't know. Anyway, I just got, like, a real urgency around selling the product and realizing that if you polish it forever, it's never going to come out. You can polish something forever, then ship a polished product, but you weren't getting feedback from the market the whole time. So actually, hiring sales early and doing an enterprise sale nice and early, that sales process gives you a ton of user research coming out. So that's a lot of stuff that I've really taken to the new job, and just generally, I don't freak out about anything anymore. I'm often pleasantly surprised by things. For example, we set a goal at one point, and we missed the goal, and a lot of people on the leadership team were pretty bummed out that we missed the goal. And to some extent, goals are just things that you make up, and when you actually benchmark where you are versus where you should be according to what the market thinks, you can actually be pretty pleasantly surprised. I tend to be much more positive now, because I know most founders don't know the dirty laundry of their competitors or all the things that are going wrong at other people because they're going to the YC dinner and everyone's talking about how great everything is. I had done a start up. I knew the things that were working really well there, and I knew all the terrible things that were not going well. And so you can kind of like, with that extra information, manage your own mental energy a bit better. So that's been a huge unlock for me. I'm like a much more confident CEO than I was at the last company.

MAYKEL:
I love the piece about trying to answer that question of when is the right moment to push this out the door? And I think that now, in hindsight, 2020. Facebook probably pushed some things too fast, but also that is a legendary moment in time that a company was able to do that in a way. I've also seen companies that I've either invested in or advised or been close to in a way, shift way too late, and then run out of runway to actually prove out and find product market fit. And I think the other way that you just called out is to get early feedback.

PETE:
Yeah.

MAYKEL:
And I think that the whole thing about fail fast is a really important aspect of if you fail fast and you fail early and you fail often, then the size of your failure is never going to be that large.

PETE:
Right.

MAYKEL:
Because you can learn the lesson and the next failure is going to be not that big of a failure. Learn the lesson instead of not failing because you didn't try for six months and then falling flat on your face and then having to not just deal with that failure, but having to deal with the mental repercussions of yourself and all the people around you to get the ship back going, get the sale strapped up again.

PETE:
Yeah, I was going to say if you're not used to failing, if organizationally you're not used to failing, it can be pretty hard to recover from.

MAYKEL:
Well, I think it's a really great thing to end on with your no fun rule. We'll just end with no fun.

PETE:
Well, no fun rule is not it's just a trick to adjust for your own cognitive bias. It's not a philosophy of life.

MAYKEL:
I really appreciate that, though, because I like to say everything is always its exact opposite. Sometimes when you find yourself getting feedback from somebody and you're like, that sounds really wrong, or you have an emotional response because your soup can just exploded. If I can catch it fast enough, I'll be like, well, everything is the exact opposite. So I'll turn it all the way 180, I'll look at it and be like, this could be true. And then my response is way more measured. It's like when someone doesn't respond to you, you were in like a full conversation over text message, all of a sudden they fall off a cliff. What happened? Well, they must hate me now or something, right? It's like, no, they're probably busy. And so the flip side is, I actually really appreciate you. Something else came up. They're going to be back. Or if you get feedback from someone that you deem is like both in bad faith or with ill intent, but instead they're actually trying to help you grow. Something like the no fun rule to me is actually a really good reminder of, okay, clearly this is going into a direction that I'm aligned with, but it does that mean that bias is actually keeping me from doing the thing that's actually most impactful? I really dig it and it's going to be the title.

PETE:
All right, well, here we are. Great.

MAYKEL:
We have a caretaker of ideas and we have the no fun rule. So I would just want to say thanks again for coming by and I'm really excited to get this out and have people listen to this because there's some good nuggets from the past, but there's also some really good lessons from right now and from your experience as being a CEO.

PETE:
Well, thanks for having me. See you.

MAYKEL:
Take care.

PETE:
See it.

MAYKEL:
Thanks for listening. We could have easily gone for a couple more hours and maybe someday we'll do a follow up episode. I really hope you enjoyed it and tune in next week.