Behind the Fail Whale, GM and Apple: Unfiltered Leadership Lessons from Mike Abbott

Transcript

[00:00:01] Mike:  One of the things I think is really important, I think, in particular for people in senior roles when they join, is to ask a lot of questions and listen. The common failure mode for instant body rejection is I come into general mode. Well, Apple, we did this. At Twitter, we did this. Everybody be like, who cares? Like, this is General Motors. I would say this to the team over and over. I’m not gonna turn in General Motors an Apple. Like, that’s stupid. But what we can do is learn. I can understand, like, why are things the way they are?

[00:00:28] Welcome to Signal to Noise by Riviera Partners, the podcast where leading executives share how they cut through the noise and act on what matters most. We go beyond the headlines to explore the pivotal decisions, opportunities, and inflection points that define their careers and shape the future of the companies they led. It’s time to cut through the noise and get to the signal.

[00:00:50] Ali:  Hey, Mike. How are you doing?

[00:00:51] Mike:  Hey, Ali. Great. How are you doing?

[00:00:53] Ali:  Great. Welcome to Signal to Noise. This is the first episode that we’ve done here. I don’t know. Have you ever been the first?

[00:01:01] Mike:  This is the first time I’ve been the first, but it’s also my first podcast. So I’m excited to be here, and thanks for having me.

[00:01:07] Ali:  Great. Well, uh, I don’t know if people know, but we go back twenty years.

[00:01:12] Mike:  That’s right. It’s crazy. We worked together when, uh, I had started Composite Software, and you helped us find some folks.

[00:01:19] Ali:  So, uh, if I remember, Mike, we were introduced by, uh, Jim Gower at Palomar Ventures, and, uh, he said, you know, when you meet Mike Abbott, he’s got these piercing eyes.

[00:01:30] Mike:  I don’t know if that’s good or bad. I guess he gave me some money, so that was I mean, it worked, whatever whatever it was.

[00:01:36] Ali:  Yeah. There was, like, nothing about composite or what you guys were doing, just about you gotta meet this guy. He’s got piercing eyes, and I’m like, okay.

[00:01:44] Mike:  I’ll take it. Whatever. All I know is that, like, over these last twenty years, like, you’ve helped me as well as people in my team find amazing roles, so I’m very, very much indebted to you. Thanks for the plug.

[00:01:55] Ali:  I’ll tee you up again later on. So you’ve been in some seminal places. You’ve been at Apple running cloud services there, GM running all of uh, software for GM, Twitter when that thing was on the edge of extinction. You had your own startup. You’ve been an investor. What are some of the common threads that are consistent through those experiences?

[00:02:18] Mike:  Well, there’s still a very nonlinear path that I’ve had, and I’ve been incredibly lucky to have some of these experiences you mentioned. I think when I reflect on, like, what’s common, I’ve never done the same thing twice. And I think part of it’s because I have this twisted enjoyment of being uncomfortable. Like, I like being in situations where I go, oh, shit. I’m not sure if I can do this. Whether it be something physically, like swimming across the bay with Escape from Alcatraz to you know, when I joined Twitter and we found out I I went after I joined that our current MSP that we’re in were was out of space and power, and we were enduring the highest growth in the company’s history, and yet the site was down all the time every time, uh, Japan scored a goal in the World Cup that summer. But the team did an amazing job and, you know, got us on and got rid of the infamous fail whale. And, you know, if anything, it just reinforces that, like, you know, having great people on your team is, like, just number one. It’s not even the number of people, it’s just having the right great people. Much better to have fewer people than a lot of people that are just super high quality.

[00:03:21] Ali:  Were the problems the same in those places? Were you trying to solve for the same issues? Or each thing was just completely unique and you had to go in there with a different playbook? I mean, was there any anything that you could use from all your different experiences at that time?

[00:03:37] Mike:  It’s a good question. You know, I think about, like, you know, composite software, which you mentioned I, you know, started, a lot of the challenges there were, how do we get the right product market fit? How do we get the right product? How do we build the right thing for our customers? Which was really different from when I went to Palm and led the team that designed and built WebOS, where this is, I don’t think, public, but, you know, I joined and for various reasons made a decision to reset entirely what we were doing with WebOS after my first thirty days, and I had to do that because it was apparent that we were not gonna ship on time to Sprint. So, like, that was a different type of challenge because I had certain people on that team that had been at Palm for a number of years that were content with not shipping anything. Now all of a sudden, we have to ship a brand new, not just an OS for a phone, but the cloud services and or the OTO. We were the first to ship over their updates before Apple, and the same thing happened at Twitter. I think a lot of times, you know, there’s a group there’s a set of people where if you put, you know, incredible challenges, they’ll rise to the occasion to go solve those. And I’ve been very fortunate to have those types of people around me to kinda thrive for it. Right? When fire starts, do you run to the fire or away from the fire? And I know I’m wired to run into the fire, and then I look for people around me that have that same mentality of, okay. Like, this is an interesting problem. Like, let’s go fix it versus freaking out and going, oh my god. I need to cover my ass because something’s not gonna work, and I don’t wanna lose my job. No. I never had that. And then most of the people I’ve worked with them all had that same attitude of the mission’s bigger than whatever the particular issue is. And so my partner, John Doerr, had this saying around, you know, we back missionaries, not mercenaries in venture. And I think that same thing applies in companies where you you really wanna understand, like, why is the person at Apple? Like, why is the person at Twitter? Like, what’s their motivation? Because having alignment around that mission is super important that I’ve seen. Because when someone’s at a job just for, like, money, as an example, at least in engineering, I’ve never seen that work out really well for that person or their company.

[00:05:35] Ali:  So composite, you handpick your own folks. At Twitter, you inherited a medium sized team. Apple, Palm, GM, You’ve got thousands of developers. How do you find those people? You can’t tell me that everybody in in the in those organizations is ready to go. I mean, how do you kinda figure out real quickly what you got before it’s too late?

[00:05:59] Mike:  Yeah. I didn’t realize this. You know, my career was kind of inverted maybe compared to some where I had done, you know, a couple different venture back companies and then went to big companies. And like you said, like, my first two startups, like, I grew engineering teams from zero to a 150. And like you said, I got to pick people. And then I went to Microsoft, but I was senior enough at Microsoft that, like, all the people around me were exceptional. They’re all the technical fellows, the distinguished engineers. So it wasn’t until I got the palm where I was like, oh my gosh. Like, there are people here that I wouldn’t have have hired, and yet I can’t get rid of all of them because we have to ship this thing in ten months. So, you know, then it becomes a challenge of, like, how do you get a c plus player to operate as a b player? And I’m not gonna say, like, that’s not fun, but I think that’s just the reality is identifying, you know, who are the people that have that intellectual curiosity and that mission to want to go drive towards whatever direction you’re going. And, you know, and that Twitter, Twitter was really a crazy growth experience, one that I don’t know if I’d wish on anyone. Because when I joined, the engineering team was, like, 50 or 70 people and really had not had a head of engineering. And, you know, when I left the team was almost 400. And growing that fast is also, I learned, kind of not very healthy. Now I think we had to do it because we had a lot of debt we had to go solve, but, you know, I kinda learned the hard way that growing a team more than 10 or 15% a month, it’s very difficult to do that in a healthy way where those new people can be productive very quickly. You know? Even at Apple, I mean, you know, great people at Apple, but, look, there was a reason why they hired me to come in and run iCloud. The service was not performing at the level that people felt like it was Apple level quality. And so it was a combination of finding the the diamonds in the rough who I felt like, you know, were incredible ICs. So I I always try to find, you know, who are the strong ICs and, like, really listen to what he or she says and then figure out what people do I need to bring in from the outside or promote from within. Now, you know, in a lot of places, like, I’ll pick on General Motors, I had to hire an unusual amount of people, I think, from the outside, uh, to come in, which is not ideal at all, but there just wasn’t the domain experience or expertise in shipping and delivering software. And Mary really wanted to build a larger presence out here, but, you know, you run into challenges. Like, in the case of General Motors, you know, now there’s, I don’t know, a 150 people out here in the Bay Area, and now there’s this California, Michigan thing. Right? Like, oh, the Californians get this and this, and they have a different set of problems. And I don’t pretend to have all the answers to these things, but this isn’t even on my LinkedIn profile. I got a minor in psychology just for giggles in my undergrad. And I’ll tell you, like, I think it would be really healthy if if more people study psychology because I think a lot of the these jobs are around social psychology and trying to understand and empathize with people.

[00:08:40] Ali:  What motivates I get it with Twitter. You know, you’re on a mission with GM. I’m not quite sure what the mission is maybe, you know, there, and, you know, Apple’s somewhere in between. How do you figure out how to motivate these folks? I mean, is it down to the each and every individual? Or

[00:08:58] Mike:  Yeah. Well, I mean, let’s let’s take on General Motors. General Motors was like a crazy one, so I didn’t know anything about automotive at all going in. And Mary, who’s the number one reason why I went, I think she is absolutely a world class CEO. What she did is she just took literally every piece of software that was being built at General Motors from breaking software to airbags to infotainment to corporate email and said, here’s Mike. Here you go. 19,000 people. Okay? And I was like, wow. Okay. I think probably more people than we need, but trying to identify who, in my mind, knew what they were doing. And I mean that with the utmost respect because there were certain people at General Motors that were great people and were successful in other roles, but they were put in certain cases in roles that they weren’t set up to succeed. And I, as a leader, I have to identify those people, and either there’s another role or they may have to go. And that’s that’s a real bummer to have to go do that. But what I have always done too, and maybe it’s because, like, I did start ups before bigger companies, I really enjoy getting to know people and trying to figure out, like, how can I help them? So even at these really large organizations, like Apple was 2,000, this was 19,000, I would do these weekly sessions with, you know, not just my directs. It was managers. It was ICs. It was random people from all the organization, and I would get, like, 40 or 50 people either in in person or online. And I’d pick three categories. Let’s say culture, product, and process. And I’d say, okay. And across these three, I wanna hear from you. What do you think we should start doing, stop doing, or continue doing? So, you know, in person, we would use Post it notes, and I and I came up kinda hacked away with kind of a a shared worksheet, actually. And it maybe sounds crazy, but, like, what I would do is, like, okay. For the next ten minutes, we’re gonna do a process. Throw everything you think we should stop doing or continue doing or whatever. And then we go through the ten minutes, and then I’d ask questions like, what do you mean by this? What do you mean by this? And I did that weekly. I did this at Apple when I started, and it was incredibly helpful for me to just get a pulse of, like, what are people thinking about? What do they really wanna solve? Like, there’s maybe a view from my my perspective of what needs to happen, and I’m I’m getting the answer in your question. Trust me. I think when people feel like they’re being heard, it’s easier for he or she to jump on whatever mission you’re trying to drive. So, like, in the case of, you know, General Motors, the mission was, frankly, to elevate software because General Motors had been a hardware company for a century. And now it’s on software, especially with EVs. EVs are really batteries and software, but now software is a seat at the table. And so now it’s software’s driving requirements in the hardware. That’s a brand new cultural that’s a huge cultural change that’s gonna take years, like, to happen. But it’s, I think, you know, finding these people that can help scale your mission too, if that makes sense. I’m one voice. I’m not gonna know all 2,000 people or 19,000 people, unfortunately. That’s frankly why I think I personally prefer smaller companies. But what you can do is you can find those influencers, if you will, across the team and make sure they understand the mission that you’re on. Otherwise, one person doesn’t scale. And I also know how engineers think. Like, I could go do an all hands, like, every week, and there still would be people that say, I don’t know. I think he’s full of shit. Like, I’m not sure, which is fine. That’s with the nature of, like, engineers, which I love.

[00:12:14] Ali:  Were you kinda conscious of organ rejection? You know, you being a Silicon Valley guy, and then you bringing in your crew and, you know, you got the folks in Michigan. How did you navigate that?

[00:12:26] Mike:  Oh, very much so. Oh, yeah. Well, I think first, it kinda depends on the situation a little bit where if it’s, like, code red, you may just have to make decisions very, very quickly, almost faster than you’d like. But one of the things I think is really important, I think, in particular for people in senior roles when they join, is to ask a lot of questions and listen. Like, the common failure mode for instant body rejection is I come into general mode. Well, Apple, we did this. At Twitter, we did this. Who cares? Like, this is General Motors. And I I was I would say this to the team over and over. Like, I’m not gonna turn in General Motors on Apple. Like, that’s stupid. But what we can do is learn. I can understand, like, why are things the way they are? You know, I don’t think enough leaders do ask questions with the intention to learn or understand versus, like, listening to a question and just thinking about, like, what’s the reply? Again, I’m very open. Like, even when I did these exercises, like, I was clear with people, like, just, you know, there’s a bunch of things that we’re gonna start. We’re not gonna do all of them. But what I can tell you is at least now I’ve heard what you think we should start doing. And then, frankly, in that situation, I mean, coming back to organo rejection, one of the other kind of byproducts of me doing that type of exercise was I would do that for ninety days, my first ninety days, and I do an all hands, and I’d say, here’s what you told me. Here’s what we’re gonna do. And that was powerful because now I’m not just making assertions not based on data. Engineers wanna know, like, why are we doing this? It’s like, you told me this. This is why we’re doing it. And so, like, there’s nothing to reject. Does that make sense?

[00:13:51] Ali:  Makes total sense. Switching up topics here, I wanna go back to Twitter, and you started to hit on it a little bit. So Twitter here’s the plug. Riviera did the we did the search for you there. And I remember chatting with Peter Fenton, and we were having a conversation. And he said there’s probably 15 people on the planet that can do this job. And if we don’t get one of them, Twitter’s going extinct, you know, classic Peter Fenton pitch. What was it like when you landed? Because I remember the fail whale was all over the news all the time. Twitter was you know, we hadn’t seen growth like that for a consumer services product. It was really kind of the first one with that kinda hypergrowth. I mean, what were the the first thirty, sixty, ninety days of triage like for you when you, uh, landed? And I think when you landed in that place, there were maybe a 130 or 40 people in the whole company at that time.

[00:14:45] Mike:  Total. Yeah. About half of that was in engineering. Well, keep in mind, I was coming from working on WebOS at Palm with John Rubinstein. And, you know, John, he did the iPod at Apple for a long time, and I think he really tried to bring a lot of the Apple culture to Palm. I can tell you that out that culture is about the polar opposite of Twitter. Apple, very secretive, Palm secretive, Twitter, everything was very transparent, very open. And so for me personally, I had to do a lot of unlearning from just behaviors I thought before and really kind of try my best, uh, ending with a growth mindset to learn and try to identify, like, what are the areas that are code red that need help today? And, you know, I mentioned one that, you know, we were out of space and power with our managed service provider. So, you know, despite all this growth, we would go we were down all the time. And one of the things that I had to go this is a little bit later. It was about five or six months in, but I had to go to the board. Well, I talked to DEC first, but then I had to talk to the board and basically explain to them our current situation is a no go. The data center we were supposed to move into, by the way, is leaking. I don’t have all the answers, but, like, here’s the plan.

[00:15:49] Ali:  Physically leaking?

[00:15:50] Mike:  It was physically leaking. Yes. And the people who were on that, if they listen to this, they will verify. But I had to sit down with Dick and say, listen. I don’t think the company we we can’t ship any new product features until we move into our own data centers and stabilize the service. And I said, we’ve gotta change the narrative that availability is an amazingly important feature. And it turns out, like, better than any kind of new shiny new thing running, that’s what’s gonna help our growth right now. And to his credit, I was very supportive. People were too excited when I got up at tea time and say, like, for the next five months, we’re not gonna be shipping anything new. We’re just gonna be focusing on availability. But it was something that we we had to do, and I think the engineering team appreciate it because, you know, we have a bunch of product managers, they wanna ship stuff, understandably. But there’s times where sometimes you have to go slow to go fast, and that was an intense example of that. Because as you can imagine, we were down all the time. You know, we would do tea time every weekend. You know, for those of you in infrastructure, you know, typically, the only time you get the the light on you is when it’s not working, and so that’s when you’re on stage. And so we really worked on, like, how do we start having recognition for infrastructure that works? And, you know, that was a it was just a really important thing. And, you know, even subsequent jobs, like, even at Apple, it’s the same thing where no one really says anything when iMessage is running or iCloud’s working. But, boy, if it stops working, I get a note from Tim or whatever. Understand it, like, what’s going on? But, you know, I think as a infrastructure leader too, like, recognition in the space is one that is a tricky one. I’d love to learn more. I’m sure other people got a lot of great, uh, approaches with that as well.

[00:17:23] Ali:  What were some of the, uh, scaling marks? What kind of numbers were you guys going through there, if you remember?

[00:17:29] Mike:  Oh, boy. I wanna say when I started, I think we’re doing about 75,000,000 tweet today. And when I left, I wanna say it was 02/25, and I think today, it’s 300, just to give you a sense. Like, maybe I’m wrong on the number. Don’t quote me on today’s because I don’t know what today’s numbers are. But, like, it was stunning growth. And literally, as I said, like, initially, one of the largest user bases was, uh, were people in Japan. And, like, literally, at one point, the president of Russia came and visited our offices, uh, at Twitter, Medadev. And the site was during World Cup going down, and he wanted to send a tweet. And I’m like, oh my god. Like, it’s not gonna work. And I don’t know if he even knows this today, but he went in front of the company and did a sent a tweet, but it wasn’t really in the a real tweet. We stubbed it out because, like, it was down. And, you know, those, uh, and I could tell you other stories with, like, Snoop Dogg visiting or whatnot, but, you know, those scaling things, it’s, uh, I there’s obviously a lot of different metrics, so of of driving that. But, you know, it’s certainly it was really a privilege just to be a part of it and see it, especially when you had things like the air sprint spring and, like, seeing the role that Twitter was playing in it or even with the tsunami in Japan and people using Twitter to get medicines out to people because the cell network was down. And so, like, that that was awesome. I don’t think anyone in us anticipated what Twitter would eventually become. There’s a lot of dandelions and flowers, I guess, when I was there.

[00:18:57] Ali:  Right. Right. Right. And this was all pre hyperscalers. Right? You could you couldn’t just go spin up a couple more. You had to plan and build this.

[00:19:04] Mike:  Yeah. It was only it was kind of a tweener right before I mean, it was on the edge where you could’ve maybe say we could’ve gone to AWS, but it would not have made sense costlier at that point in time. And I think, subsequently, we’ve used a lot more public cloud, and that makes sense. Gotcha.

[00:19:18] Ali:  So, uh, let’s talk. I’ll I’ll give you some, uh, I love to hear your philosophy around, uh, leadership here. So what models did you have early in your career? Obviously, you have an approach and a framework to leadership. How did you develop that?

[00:19:33] Mike:  I think this is gonna be probably not the normal answer because I didn’t have a a mentor from day zero and whatnot. Uh, a sport that you and I both played was rugby. And, you know, I think when you play sports, it doesn’t matter what sport, but any team sport, you tend to develop skills around leadership. And I don’t know about your team, but, like, you know, our rugby team, we had a quite a diverse group of people. Like, you know, we had folks from ag, and here I am, like, this nerd that’s gonna go do a PhD. Like, we’re, like, all over the map. But I learned later that, like, that was one of those valuable skills, which is, like, everyone’s different. You gotta meet people at where they’re at. Okay? When I started my career, because I was doing a start up, I had no idea what I was doing, and I really didn’t have a mentor. So I just kinda made it up. And what that resulted in was certainly making probably more mistakes than I needed to, but I leveraged a lot of what I learned in sports. And, And, you know, subsequently, I remember talking to my my partner, Mary Meeker, about this because we realized that at Kleiner, every partner maybe minus one at the time had done sports in college. And I think it’s just interesting. And I’m not saying you have to do sports. It’s just one of the areas where I think you can develop these things. For me, I didn’t really have a true mentor until Twitter. Actually, it was Bill Campbell. He was part of my interview process, and, like, he like, oh my gosh. Like, this guy is legendary. He’s one of the reasons why I went to Kleiner Perkins. Like, you know, he he agreed to come visit weekly as we tried to change the the firm, but, um, he by far had the biggest impact.

[00:21:01] Ali:  I think to give some folks a little context around Bill if they don’t know him, he, uh, didn’t he run marketing for Apple back in the day?

[00:21:09] Mike:  He ran marketing, yeah, a big part of sales for Apple for a while, then he was on the board of Apple from late eighties till when he passed away. But then he also he also coached Larry and Sergey and then Eric, like, weekly for years on the board of Intuit. He’s the he’s the one that really connected Jeff Bezos to John Doerr for Kleiner’s investment there, just like a true godfather of the Valley. If you haven’t read A Trillion Dollar Coach, the book, please go read it. It’s great. And it’s all about Bill, and I did not write it, so I can say it.

[00:21:40] Ali:  By the way, he’s a rugby guy.

[00:21:41] Mike:  Yeah. Because he used it. Well, you coached football at Columbia. Right? And you played, and then Yeah. You always had hilarious stories about it. When I was younger, I was always kind of wondering, like, do I tell people I played rugby or not?

[00:21:52] Ali:  They look at you. They think you’re a mutant.

[00:21:54] Mike:  That’s true. Like, what the hell do you think you’re doing? Running around hitting people out ads.

[00:21:58] Ali:  So, uh, in all these places, is there one critical hire that you look to make or that you you make sure that person is in the right seat?

[00:22:07] Mike:  I think it’s maybe not even the hire, but it may could be existing people, but you have to have people around here that you trust. You know? And so it’s easier if you’ve already had history to have trust. And it’s not to say you can’t build trust with, you know, your employees, uh, which is important too, but I think it’s trust, but also that alignment on, like, why you’re there. And I’m not judging there’s different reasons why you do it. There’s no right or wrong. Like, some could say, like, I’m doing this because I need to get paid to pay rent. Totally legit. That’s a real need. That’s a very different notion than, like, why am I doing this? It’s like, I I wanna go help the world communicate with each other or whatever. It’s just different. So I always encourage, like, founders to, like, when you’re hiring, especially those first 10 people, because that sets the culture. It’s like, you gotta like yeah. Still gonna go hire smart people, know to peer science, etcetera, etcetera. But, like, having that alignment, like, why they’re there is, like is just so critical. And I find that, like, it’s hard to get the answer to that in an interview, like a traditional interview. Like, you need to get them outside of the office, either for a coffee, going for a walk, or whatever. Like, you know, because you wanna try to understand, like, who they are as people.

[00:23:13] Ali:  How do you keep that bar high over time? You know, as these organizations get it’s easy when you got twenty, thirty engineers.

[00:23:20] Mike:  You know what? So another flashback that you just mentioned. So at one point, Benchmark or Matt Koehler asked me to spend some time with Kevin Systrom. Because Kevin, at the time, we actually helped Instagram a fair amount when they first launched because they were having scaling issues and whatnot. So there was a couple engineers that actually helped out because Kevin had interned actually, um, at Twitter. But Matt asked me to talk to Kevin because they were starting to have a real hard time hiring. There were, like, seven or eight people at the time. And, you know, one of the things that I learned, at least in the zero to one fifties, is, like, an engineer who joins at, we’ll say, number nine or whatever, tends to like, the person who joins at twenty is very different than the person that joins at nine. And it’s not lowering the bar. It’s just that the shape of the bar is a little bit different. And so because it’s always a word like, oh, yeah. It’s just different. Like, it’s not it’s not a judgment call.

[00:24:09] Ali:  How is it different?

[00:24:10] Mike:  I think for someone who comes in at nine, like, they’re in for the the journey. They’re in the trenches. They will do nights and weekends. Like, they their their their move is like but at 50, that person can be just as committed. Like, they probably have a life, which is not a not the worst thing or and so there’s just balance, and it’s like, that’s okay. And and I think over time, you wanna have kind of a real real mix of that. And, you know, what my first investment at Kleiner Perkins was into a company called Gumroad that, um, Sahil Labanjia, like, started, and he was 19. And it was interesting, like, seeing and and trying to help him. Like, you know, he was a 19 year old, and at the time, it was very unusual. Now you see a lot of it, but, like, this is in 02/2012. And helping him build a team and also, like and he’s he’s a very, very mature, smart guy. Realizing that he started having he’s bringing people with families. And, like, how does that change his culture when you’ve got not everyone’s below the age of 25, but now we’ve got some people that have other considerations? And how do you evolve how you do things? Like, I think the the best founders see that and they adjust, and it’s not about lowering the bar. I think that’s the kinda misconception a little bit.

[00:25:17] Ali:  Do you think there’s an age bias in Silicon Valley? I mean, how would you how would you describe it for start ups, and do you think it’s necessary?

[00:25:27] Mike:  Yes. I think there’s an age bias in all directions. And what I mean by that is, I think right and right now, in particular, I think you’re seeing it really heavily. So, you know, I teach a class at Stanford, an undergraduate class in the in the computer science department, and there’s about 300 or 300 kids this last quarter. And I don’t know what the exact number, but let’s say at least two fifty are just, like, exceptional. And I’ve been helping some of those students get internships this summer, which I think for all grads have been quite difficult. I was talking to this one student who’s a freshman. And if you saw what he’s accomplished by his freshman year, the term freshman’s not even appropriate. Like, it’s like a it’s like an antiquated label. So, like, that’s one end of the spectrum of, like, hey. In this world, like, age is not necessarily the best metric. Now if you go to the other end, I think you have to think about the mindset. There are people who are old that act old, and they don’t wanna basically, they’re not curious, and they don’t wanna go learn, and they’re stuck in their ways. And I think they’re in deep with a lot of these advances in AI. As I’ve gotten older, what I’ve noticed is, like, it’s easier for me to find problems and things, but I don’t like because it’s like I’m I’m an optimist. You know? Yeah. I think you really you have to have that intellectual curiosity to want to continue to go learn. And I think, sadly, a lot of people as they get older, like, that goes away. But there are a lot of people who are older. Like, I was just on a call right before this. A guy named Mohsen, I worked with at Microsoft. He was a technical fellow. I don’t know what his exact age is, but, like, you know, he was a senior IC at Microsoft, very senior, and they, you know, senior role at Meta. And, you know, he’s not 25, but, like, he has tons of amazing experience and a good plan. He just wants the right software, which is awesome.

[00:27:00] Ali:  Well, I I I think the minute you stop being curious in this in this town, I think you toast no matter what.

[00:27:06] Mike:  I strongly agree. And in this world right now with AI, like, it’s like no joke. Like, not only do you have to be, it changes, like, week to week. I mean, as we all know, like, it’s awesome and scary as at the same time.

[00:27:18] Ali:  So how do you see it changing development organizations going forward? Do you need less developers, or you still have the same amount of developers? They’re working on more stuff. Is it different level of developers? I mean, how how are guys like you thinking about that?

[00:27:33] Mike:  Well, you know, you as you can imagine, a lot of these students were asking questions too, like, you know, what’s the number me? Because I do think these entry level software jobs are going to wane.

[00:27:43] Ali:  So when you say entry level, Mike, what do you mean by entry level? First job out of college program?

[00:27:49] Mike:  First job out of college. Yeah. But I think what’s also happening, though, which which is countering some of that is that, like, that student I mentioned, who’s a freshman who like, if you looked at his LinkedIn, it looks like two years past school, kids are doing more interesting things much earlier in life. When I was 17, 18, I sure as I wasn’t thinking about submitting a paper academically to go present all these different things, and it’s like, wow. So, like, that’s I think that gives me a lot of hope. Now that’s not every student, though. And so, you know, it remains to be seen. I think with these tools, I had General Motors, they had about a thousand people trying out Copilot, like, 31% of the code is being generated, etcetera. We found that, actually, those tools tend to help more senior people than junior people, which is a little bit counterintuitive. But in a way, it kinda makes sense. But there are a group of, uh, like, I was talking to someone the other day. There’s also a category of people, and you mentioned age that, you know, they get so locked into using Emacs or, you know, VI that they don’t look at what is cursor enable, and they they almost be resistant to that change, which I think is the other risk of, like, yeah. Okay. You got a bunch of senior people, but are they gonna actually use the tools in the way that you want them to? And so, you know, there’s this this real balance of getting these kind of AI native employees, which I think are really important, these folks coming right out of school, but ensuring that, like, your more senior talent, like, Emosin has that intellectual curiosity to want to go learn and unlearn maybe what things worked before that may not work today. I think the net of it all is that, like, I think for tech companies, I think the impact’s gonna be smaller than for nontech companies.

[00:29:22] Ali:  Interesting. If you’re, uh, coming up to the ranks and you’re gonna be you know, you wanna be the next Mike Abbott with those piercing blue eyes.

[00:29:30] Mike:  I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s what you wanna be, but I think my wife might say something different.

[00:29:35] Ali:  How does it change, like, the skills you have to acquire to kinda get I mean, does it change, or does it like, what’s the VP of engineering look like in the future?

[00:29:45] Mike:  One of the thing I tell my students, which I think, you know, I think it goes in any issues that, you know, if I look back, one of the things I wished I would have done more of early in my my career is is to network. And, you know, I always tell students and other folks too, like, I’ve never had one even LinkedIn message that I get where if someone’s asking for help that I don’t answer and say, sure. And I think that’s what sets this valley apart is this pay it forward attitude. And I encourage, like, folks who are in my career, like, leverage it. People wanna help. I think it’s, like, innate. People wanna, you know, advise or whatnot. And, you know, there’s there’s certainly some bad actors, but I think for the most part, like, people are pretty genuine with wanna do that. So I think networking is super duper important. The second is when I was coming up, there weren’t these open source projects. And so I think in today’s world, you can get you can start building your track record through open source contributions without being employed. Now who knows? Like, I think you can also make an argument with some of these tools that’s making it, you know, even cheaper to start companies, so maybe you start a company. One of the reasons why I started composite software, which I’ve never told you this, is, know, electron economy, which is the company I was at before, um, I had to lay off a 180 out of 02/20, sell it. And this is now at the February, and it wasn’t like there was tons of jobs. So it was like, what am I gonna do? I might as well start something. And that takes a lot of students. I’m gonna do that because, like, oh, there’s no jobs. Start something. There’s nothing wrong with that.

[00:31:07] Ali:  Right. So, uh, that reminds me. What’s some of the toughest conversations that you’ve had?

[00:31:12] Mike:  I think the most difficult conversations are is when you have to do a layoff. Or a ref. And I say that because when that happens, that’s a failure by the company, not the individual. So, I mean, I’ll never forget in 2001 when I had to I got left holding the bag for this company. I had to lay off this one person, which I’ll never forget. It was, like, my dad’s age, and he was crying in my office, and I’m 20 going, oh my god. Like, this is horrible. Actually, those are just conversations which are just not fun. And then there’s, like, there’s no real great way to do a layoff. I think there’s probably one good way, and there’s many bad ways. And I think we’ve seen a lot of bad ways these last couple of years, which is I think it really bums me out because I think there’s a way to be respectful of people and to try to handle it with grace. And I don’t know if a lot of companies have handled it with grace.

[00:31:57] Ali:  If you were to do anything over in your career, do anything over looking back?

[00:32:01] Mike:  I don’t know. I’ve been I’ve been pretty lucky. I’ll tell you a fun fact, though, since we’re, like, sharing. And I don’t regret this, but it’s something I so in at the February before well, right after I accepted my role at Microsoft, Mark Zuckerberg offered me the the role to run engineering at Facebook, and I didn’t take it because I had met my now wife. But that was always one of the things like, oh, like, what year is that? February. And so, um, it was one of the reasons why I was so excited about doing Twitter because, like, oh, I didn’t do that. Like but, but, you know, in general, like, I’m not a person that lives with regrets. I mean, look. If I had gone to Facebook, I wouldn’t have my amazing daughter in life. So, like, you know, it’s all good.

[00:32:38] Ali:  So, uh, I’ll ask you a couple more couple more questions here. So you had a stint as an investor. Do you think being an operator and a technologist helped you or hurt you?

[00:32:47] Mike:  One of my motivations of going into venture at the time was from my bad experiences from investors who had never built anything telling me what to go do in my companies. Now I realize that in today’s world of venture, like, a lot of that’s gonna change, but, you know, in 02/2011, however, that was relatively new. I’d like to think that helped. It’s a bit it’s both an asset and a liability for investors. So it’s an asset because and I had entrepreneur feel like, oh, he or she, like they’ll be able to empathize and understand my pains, which is all true. The downside is, like, I like to fix things, and these things are not my company, though, so I can’t really fix things. Like, I’m I’m not just on the sideline. I’m, like, way up in the stadium. Right? And Billy still always told me this. He was like, Bill’s sore a lot. Right? So I’d be like, you know, like all the board members, he’s like, 70% are dumb 20% don’t do anything, and then there’s 10% that actually help. And, you know, I think he’s probably right. Like, I think, you know and so to come back to your question, I think being a founder and then becoming an investor is a little bit of a liability because you always believe you can fix everything, and you’re an optimist. And there’s the best thing is this is a strange balance between, you know, dreaming the dream, as Mary used to always say, and but at the same time, like, you have to find just one reason to say no to an investment. And, you know, that’s that’s a just mindset wise, I discovered too late that, like, investing’s not not for me. It’s a very privileged stroll. Amazing to work with the entrepreneurs that I got to, but, like, I think there’s a different wiring, in my opinion.

[00:34:13] Ali:  Yeah. I think, you know, as an entrepreneur, you just kinda jump in there and do it. And I think, you know, as entrepreneur, I I mean, I don’t know, but I suspect it’s a lot more getting people to do things through influence, which you have to do as an operator too. But, you know, you’ve got a strong founder on the other side. Right?

[00:34:29] Mike:  I think the thing that is kinda common, which is interesting is, especially in engineering, like, you know, if I say, hey. We’re gonna go do x. Everyone wants to know why are we doing x. They’re engineers. And so instead of just saying we’re gonna go do x, you have to say, you know, observation a, observation b, observation c, therefore, x. And then people go, oh, they can come to their own conclusion. And that influence that applies. It doesn’t matter if it’s in on the investing side or on the operating side because most companies are not command control organizations. Like, I hire senior engineers because they’re smarter than I am, and they’re gonna go they wanna go solve problems. If I’m telling them how to solve the problem, they’re not gonna stay.

[00:35:06] Ali:  This is weird. So, uh, reminded me of something. You said most organizations are not command and control. So what what made Apple great

[00:35:13] Mike:  at the end of the day? Command and control. It’s the only place I’ve ever been. I’m I’m a kid. It really is. I it’s not my style personally, but, uh, it works very well for their products, and it makes sense. Like, there’s a set of trade offs. Right? I mean, command control works well if, you know, the people that are on the command side make yeah. You have the right decisions. Right? Then it’s, like, great. But, you know, I won’t name names, but there’s other companies that are much more consensus, which while might feel warm and fuzzy, like, then it’d be you never can make a decision. So, you know, I think that that the reality is there’s, like, a balance of both. I know in my career, I’ve done both. I think it really depends on the the context and what’s the decision that, uh, needs to be made.

[00:35:53] Ali:  Are there any great consensus driven companies out there versus or are they the majority of a more command and control, would you say?

[00:36:02] Mike:  Well, let let’s rephrase it. Let’s not say consensus. Let’s say companies that wanna look at inputs from many different places to make a decision. I think Mary Barra does a very effective job at that, but then she’ll also draw a line of, like, when decisions have to be made. So I’m sure other people have much more insightful comments than that on that than I do.

[00:36:21] Ali:  But Well, we’re gonna wrap up here. I’m gonna give you a couple rapid fire questions.

[00:36:25] Mike:  Let’s do it.

[00:36:26] Ali:  Let’s go. So best piece of leadership advice you’ve ever received?

[00:36:31] Mike:  It’s about the people.

[00:36:32] Ali:  One tool, book, or framework you think every leader should know?

[00:36:36] Mike:  The Art of War, Sun Tzu.

[00:36:38] Ali:  I like that book. I read that one. What’s your personal leadership mantra or go to operating principle? Make fast, good decisions. In one word, what does great leadership mean to you? Empathy. What one piece of unconventional advice would you give the next generation of leaders?

[00:36:57] Mike:  You probably can do more than you realize in areas that you’re not comfortable with. And what I mean by that is, like, when I first started composite, I was the CEO, and I was very open with, oh, I don’t know anything about finance. I don’t know anything about sales. It turns out, like, you can learn those things. Like, it’s not it’s not like rocket science. And so it’s like a kind of reminder that, like, like, humans in general, not to not because I’m special. I think human in general can do more than they think they can. I think sometimes, like, we as a society talk more about these, like, constraints, and I think these tools in AI are gonna even make this this more profound where it’s democratizing so many aspects of just company building.

[00:37:35] Ali:  Love it. Well, Mike

[00:37:37] Mike:  It was fun. Thanks so much.

[00:37:38] Ali:  Yeah. Mike, I totally appreciate your time, and thank you for being the first.

[00:37:42] Mike:  Uh, listen. Again, Mike, I owe you a lot, so this is fine. I always will always help, uh, Rivera. So take care. It was great to see

[00:37:48] Ali:  you, dude. Appreciate you. Likewise, take care.

[00:37:51] Signal to Noise is brought to you by Riviera Partners, leaders in executive search and the premier choice for tech talent. To learn more about how Riviera helps people and companies reach their full potential, visit riviera partners dot com. And don’t forget to search for Signal to Noise by Riviera Partners on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere you listen to podcasts.