Hey everyone, welcome to today's episode of Developer Tea. My name is Jonathan Cutrell. In today's episode, I speak with Venkat Venkataramani. Venkat is a CEO. He is a co-founder and a CEO at Brockset. We talk about ways to lead people through difficult times. And man, have we had some of those this year, both in the United States and around the world. So I hope you enjoy this interview. This is a two-part interview, so make sure you subscribe so you don't miss out on the second part if you enjoy this episode. Let's get straight into my interview with Venkat Venkataramani. Venkat, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thanks for having me. I'm very excited to talk to you as a CEO of a successful company. And really, today we're going to get into a lot of topics surrounding leading teams, especially leading teams through difficult times. But I want to start out with a question that I ask everyone who comes on the show. What do you wish more people would ask you about? What do I wish more people would ask me about, really? I wish more people would talk to me about one of the foundational kind of philosophies that defines a lot of what I do is around this whole concept of growth mindset. I think it's almost cliche now. This is some in a work done by Carol Duac. A lot of people would have probably read that book, the growth mindset book. I wish more people would talk to me about it because it's so applicable in so many different situations, both in my personal life, how I work with my kids to boys we have, to how we build teams and how I approach problems all the way. And I think a lot of what I bring to the table is about the perspective. And I think it kind of like growth mindset is probably the best way to think about that. And I wish more people would talk to me about that and not confuse learning from failing. I think that's the essence of the growth mindset that I think if more people understand the difference and when they feel the same, when you're learning something, you're falling off a bicycle that you don't know how to ride yet and failing, they kind of like have a very similar feeling when you're going through those motions and I wish more people would talk to me about that because I have some opinions about that. Well, that's good because I love talking about this topic. So we're going to talk about it a little bit here. And I think I'd love to hear your short definition of a growth mindset. And if you will contrast it to what isn't a growth mindset, I believe Carol Dwatt calls it the fixed mindset in her book. But I'd love to know, can you contrast those two things and give an explanation, especially for people who don't know about this topic very much? Yeah, for sure. I think the way I understand it and I apply it is the way I think about growth mindset is when you're doing something new and you don't know how to do it yet and you have a growth mindset, you want to learn more. If the challenging it gets, the harder you focus, the more commitment you show and you get better at it over time. And the fixed mindset is the opposite, which is when you try something for the first time or the second time and it doesn't work and you're like, well, I'm not cut out for it and you're very quick to dismiss it and move on to some of the things and you never get better at that particular skill ever because you're, you think you're not cut out for it and somehow you won't, your own mind becomes kind of like a blocker that limits your growth and limits your, you'd be able to unlock the potential that might be within you already. And so that's kind of like at a high level, how I understand it. The flip side about attitude, one thing that I always say is, again, don't confuse learning from failing. The other one is often mistaken as humility, right? Like, oh, you need to be humbled to know what you don't know and admit it. I almost come, I say it's kind of like you come from confidence that I can learn, you know, if I put my head to, you know, head together, if I can really learn something and get better at it. And if you're very confident about it, then you're not really afraid to say, well, I actually don't know, I have no idea how to do it. And I think that's kind of an important aspect of a growth mindset because it's actually not humility. It's often, you know, comes across as humility. It's actually confidence that by admitting that I don't know something, I am not, you know, suddenly becoming less of a person in front of my peers or anything like that because I'm pretty confident that, you know, if I, if it's really important, I will learn it and I can become good at it if it's really needed. I'm kind of blown away right now because last night I actually recorded kind of a monologue episode about exactly this. It was exactly this idea and the idea of accepting that there are some things that I wouldn't trust myself to do, right? I wouldn't trust myself to go and play a game of pick up basketball because I'm just out of practice. I know I can confidently say that I'm not a very good basketball player. That's, and I'm okay with that, right? And the interesting thing, what I asked listeners to do was accept two realities. One, that we don't necessarily trust ourselves in every single endeavor possible, right? I wouldn't trust myself to know, you know, every programming language as a simple example. And the second thing to accept is that you can change it. There's two kind of really important things. And that the driver for this, the marker of somebody who is truly confident is someone who can stand up and say, I have no idea about that thing, but I really do know about this other thing, right? I really do have experience in this other thing. I can trust that more than I can trust somebody who appears to be experienced in everything. Would you agree with that? Absolutely. I think the more, every expert in the field that I've had the pleasure of working, the more they know, the more they expert they become, the less certain they are with everything, right? If you ask a five-year-old, what's going to happen if I have a glass of water and I just fling it in the air, the five-year-old will say, oh, duh, it's just going to fall on the floor. You go and ask somebody who studies chaos theory and fluid mechanics and whatnot and say, what's going to really happen to this fluid that's in the scope? And they'll be like, no mathematical equation in the world can exactly predict what it is. What exactly is going to happen in the next 72 milliseconds or whatever is going to take from this to drop the floor? And then he'll be so uncertain about that whole situation. And that's what makes them the expert because they actually know what can actually, all the possibilities and I have studied it deeply and anybody else. So I think it's really, really important to never confuse that. And I think it comes from insecurities, right? I think you, people are afraid to admit that they don't know something because they're like, oh, somebody's going to judge me and I'm going to come across like a fool and they want to trust me to be able to do the next big project and, you know, whatever. And I think this was, this is why I say it goes back to confidence. I think confidence comes not just from within, but also from your mentors, your managers, people that you look up to. If you're the CEO of the company and you, in all hands, you have no problem admitting, I actually have no idea what this is about and I'm going to go find out and you find out and you give a good response a week later. Then that's not a taboo. If it's okay for Venkat to have his job and he's not, you know, the board hasn't fired him yet. So, and he says, I don't know a lot. Okay, so maybe it's okay. Maybe I don't have to pretend that I know something. And so, I think it actually comes from both, you know, self-confidence, but also the environment that you're part of where pursuit of excellence, you can never really learn something new until you admit that you don't know it yet. Otherwise, you will never actually learn something. I have a specific question about this because I've certainly seen teams that agree with this, right? We've seen the study from Google and we've talked about it on the show before about psychological safety. We know that that's a marker of healthy teams and I believe that, you know, as these kinds of things kind of become stylish, invoke, that leaders try to adopt them at face value in some ways without really understanding them thoroughly. So I want to ask you a specific question. Have you ever encountered a leader, whether they're a manager or somebody in higher level leadership who'd say, oh, you know, I don't know. And I have this kind of sense of humility, but they wouldn't expect their team to be able to have that. In other words, it's kind of like a privilege of leadership to be able to, you know, be the person who doesn't know and to act like that's the ideal state. But then they don't really follow through. They expect their, for example, their individual contributing engineers to always know. Have you seen that kind of leadership happen yet? I've probably heard of them. I've seen in kind of secondhand circumstances, but I have to say, you know, like I've been extremely fortunate to be part of, you know, teams that never had that kind of attitude. Just very fortunate through every part of my career, all the managers I've had and all the environments have been part of to never have that kind of like duplicity or hypocritical managers and whatnot. So I think, honestly, it's a blessing. I know a lot of your audience are very, very technical and I think one thing that goes with a lot of Developer That I've worked with is they have an amazing Bullshit Red Art. And so even what could fly in other teams is not going to fly in when you manage a technical team, which is almost always what I've been part of. And so they have a, you know, they almost have a very cynical view in many, many, many different situations, often rightfully so if I were to agree. And also, I think, you know, there's just a very, very good Bullshit Red Art is just very common. And so I think in these kinds of environments, especially engineering teams and technical teams, I think this is hard to get by in my opinion and I haven't really seen in first hand. But I can totally see in teams where it's not about some technical, you know, back in, you know, like our engineering team, it's like, you know, where there's a lot of, lot more kind of nuance to decision making, you know, in other making strategic bets and what have you. I can totally see how in all these things creep up where, you know, it's okay for some, you know, the leaders to do it. And I can see how an environment could easily be created. But I personally have not seen anything. I don't as far as I, you know, as long as I'm part of a rock set that will never be part of our culture. It's encouraging here, absolutely. I think it is something for leaders to stay aware of the idea that, you know, these, these ideals that we espouse for our teams, sometimes don't get practiced or played out to their fullest extent. But I'm very glad to hear that you have seen it the other way that generally, you know, developers have been willing to call it out. And I do agree. I think that engineers typically tend to have, you know, a little bit more of a free opportunity to speak their mind partially because, you know, for the most part engineers tend to have job security. And so, you know, since we can go and work at another company, for example, then if we're not happy with what we're currently experiencing, either we can leave or we can speak our mind and things will change. And so I find it to be a unique scenario to be in because even though you're not in a position of leadership, engineers tend to have a leverage point in some ways because they are in demand. Would you agree from your perspective that engineers are kind of in that seat? It's a great, very, very interesting perspective. I've never thought of that before. And it comes actually from a position of job security. I always associate that with like a more kind of like a very mathematical mind, you know, a political mind that sees things for black and white and right and wrong and very quickly tries to like categorize things in or see the world that way. And so it's easy to spot bullshit, you know, when you have that kind of a thought process. So I always associate it that with the thought processes as opposed to job security, but I think there is some truth through it. I think the more the way you say it, I think it's probably a combination of a bunch of factors and I think job security is definitely one of them. Yeah, it's a good point. It's a good point. And I do believe, you know, that engineers have the opportunity to use some of that analytical bias, maybe, right? A biased towards analytical or logical approach to point out when there's inconsistencies in a culture. And I'm curious, you know, with speaking of cultures, you know, one thing that we kind of discussed right before we started rolling is the idea that there's all different kinds of stressors, all different kinds of crises that we can go through as teams. And what I'd love to do is to hear your perspective on how a growth mindset could help us kind of weather the storm. How can a growth mindset help you deal with a crisis on a team? Very interesting. Very interesting question. How do you help your team deal with the crisis? I think crisis comes at least in two different forms for a team, for a company. You know, one is like the roof is on fire, you know, there is a, the service is down, you know, we, you know, previously I was managing online data infrastructure at Facebook. And so anything that can take, you know, the site down is the set, you know, is what we used to call a set one. And so all set ones are all hands on deck. And you know, now we're building a, you know, real-time database in the cloud, rocks it very similar when there is, you know, any kind of a set, it's kind of like a roof in, you know, roof is on fire type of a crisis because production applications are affected and our customers will be affected by that event. And then there are crisis like COVID, right, where our market crashes and things like that, where there are forces beyond your control that are working against you. And how do you help your team through that? And so for the first one, I think it comes down to really having the discipline in my mind of being able to support the team, shield the team, you know, when we're fighting a set and we have kind of a war room, if anybody says, I told you so, this is why we should have done this in the first place and start post-mortem, you know, starting doing post-mortem post before, you know, we are even in the clear, I kindly go and stand next to them and say, hey, I think you need to leave the room and you can come back later when we actually do a post-mortem. And so keep the people, support them, there's no finger pointing, there's not, you know, blaming going around and support them in a way where you anchorage and keep them, you know, help the team to resolve the issue as quickly as possible because it's an extremely stressful situation and you don't want to be there for too long. And once it's all done, then you also support the team where, you know, try your best to not create a, you know, this team is bad or that particular individual, you know, does not know how to write code or anything like that, it should be really coming down into, this is what happened, this is how it should, you know, this particular component and this particular module or whatever should have been tested better and here are the follow-up items that we need to be able to do so that this kind of issue doesn't happen again. And so we even tried to write post-mortems without people's names to force ourselves to keep the discussion around what happened from a technical point of view and what can be, you know, done to resolve that. And so here, I think the growth mindset is kind of like baked into the process if you had to think about it, right? We're not really, you know, trying to, you know, say, oh, so and so is bad and they can't do anything about it and as opposed to really approaching this as a learning experience for how to make the company, the service and all for teams better. And if you have a process where every time you slip and fall, you get stronger, then you'll stop slipping and falling, you know, very quickly and you'll get very, very, very quickly. And but if every time you slip and fall, there's a lot of, you know, blaming and kind of like, I'm stuck here, nothing can be done. Type of a fixed mindset and you never get better. And so, so I would say that's the, you know, the analogies or the comparisons I see from how, you know, you deal with like short term, you know, roofs on fire, put it out as quickly as possible type of a situation and how you deal with crises. When the crisis is more longer term and strategic, I think then in my opinion, it goes back to the growth mindset on, you know, going back to your team and saying, this is bad for us and we have no idea how we're going to face this and deal with it. Being able to even openly say that, the reason is because the best ideas on how to cope with it might come from completely, you know, you know, unexpected parts of your team, right? You're not like, you know, the best ideas, you know, could come from anywhere and from any member in your team, it doesn't have to come from, you know, some CXX person, you know, some big wig at the top. And you don't really, you know, can create a culture or, you know, if you don't have a growth mindset, you'd be, you know, afraid to admit that that this is bad for the business and this is going to have these kinds of ramifications. And being able to openly say, you know, what? This could be bad and it could even get worse and I have no idea how we're going to be able to meet our quarterly goals. But if anyone have your ideas, please, you know, talk to me and talk to the relevant person and we can figure this out together. And so, see this in confidence, you know, dealing with, you know, the crisis together as a team and having a very transparent culture so that, you know, everybody in a team understands what's working and what's not. I think would probably be, you know, help you find innovative solutions to deal with situations like COVID, which might not, you know, might be very creative and might come from anywhere in the team and not necessarily from the, from the upper management or whatever, whatever you know, call it. And so I think, I think it helps, you know, in every one of these situations, I think because you're constantly looking at, you're dealing with, in every crisis, you're dealing with a lot of unknowns. And again, a growth mindset would give you, would turn that into an opportunity to learn and get stronger along, you know, at the end of it, as opposed to weaker at the end of it. We're going to take a quick sponsor break and then we'll return to my interview with Venkatt Venkatt of our mind. Today's episode is sponsored by Linode. Whether you're working on a personal project or managing enterprise infrastructure, you deserve simple, affordable and accessible cloud computing solutions that allow you to take your project to the next level. And this is so true, Linode allows you to work at pretty much any size on that scaling chart all the way down to the smallest of compute and synthesis, for example. You can simplify your cloud infrastructure with Linode's Linux virtual machines and develop deploy and scale your modern applications faster and easier. And here's the important part, you're going to get $100 from free credit as a listener of Developer Teahead over to Linode.com slash Developer Teato find out more. Linode has 11 global data centers and provides 24 seven human support with no tiers or hand offs regardless of your plan size. The translation of that is that you are going to be treated like a human, even if you are just paying for a small amount of services from Linode. If you're just starting out, if you are a startup, you're going to get the same support that somebody who is much larger will get. Go and check it out head over to Linode.com slash Developer Tea. You can host your website, build your app store or backup media. It's up to you and it's all free with $100 in Linode credit. Just make sure you click the create free account button to get started. That's Linode.com slash Developer Tea. Thanks again to Linode for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Tea. You know, there's come two perspectives that I've seen and it's more of a range rather than two discrete perspectives. But the one perspective is the idea that everything I say is going to control this group of people. This is kind of the dictator style leadership and that I am responsible for every step that we take going through this crisis. It's not in the sense that they want to take responsibility, but rather they believe that everyone's actions are just responses to their own actions. And then there's the empowering or transparent leadership that you're talking about, which I think is so much more effective. And that is to say, hey, look, this is a hard situation. What do we do? Ask your people for input, right? Ask your team to be a team with you. If you're controlling the information, if you are trying to play all of the psychological games to make sure that, for example, people don't panic, then very likely you're going to end up with people in the end, especially when they find out the truth about whatever's happening. They're very likely to be frustrated that you didn't ask them for their input or that you were, you know, for whatever reason manipulating that information or you were holding back from telling them the real truth of the matter. And so I believe that your point about having transparent organizations, I think a lot of people don't even know what that looks like yet. And I really love to talk a little bit more about that. As a leader of an organization, I'm curious, what are the key, you know, what is maybe a red flag that you would tell, let's say an engineer to watch out for that, hey, if your company is doing this, then they're probably not a transparent organization. Yeah, I think you made a lot of good points. Like the panic, you know, I'm just trying to like not make sure my team doesn't panic or whatever. I think it's a, again, it's almost a lack of EQ from the leader, if you were to say, just how you say matters, not just what you say. If you say it in a way that, or you frame it in a way that this is what it is, it is what's happening. Here are the same ideas we're thinking about. And in a way to invite them to participate in problems solving. That's a very different reaction people are going to have, then say, you know, red flag, you know, you know, whole thing is doomed and you go and start like, start ringing all the, the sidelines, you know, it's just, it's just how you say what you say, you know, say and give people a way to participate and be part of the solution as opposed to just, you know, being, you know, panicking in their own, you know, little corner in their, in their office. So I think that's kind of really important. What are the red flags that engineers should look for? I think I have, you know, we have interviewed people that, you know, have been part of startups and I heard that, oh, yeah, you know, when I was there, our CD's be happened and so and so happened and nobody even knows who the investors are. What evaluation the company raised some more money and, you know, you know, I think, I think again, it goes back to like, again, having, it's a lack of confidence, but not here. I think the founders of the upper management ends up being, it's probably lack of confidence in the company and the future of the company as opposed to themselves. It kind of manifests their way in a very similar kind of a fixed mindset type of reaction. And so what I would look for is, you know, like, I would ask for things like, how many engineers know what was discussed in the last board meeting if you are an early stage startup? What were the key topics and what was the main point of discussion? And if you're in, if it's an engineer, you can answer that in a company that this was what the last board meeting was about, then you have a transparent culture. Otherwise, you know, things, you know, people are hiding stuff. Like, you know, how many people know how many shares are outstanding in your company, how much money you have in the bank. And these are all probably less important in a much more later stage because, you know, the business is much more well established and you don't have to worry about all of that. But, you know, when it is 20 people, you know, when it is like, you know, two people in the garage, it's obvious that they will have, you know, both of them will have a full understanding, even when you're around like 10, 20, 30, less than 100 people. It is really very, very important to, you know, that's kind of like where you get to define this. And that's where I would say, that's where rocks it is right now. You know, we are, you know, 30 employees strong and trying to grow as quickly as we can. And, and, and, you know, every time after a board meeting, the next all hands, which we do weekly, we go over the entire board deck and we go every slide and look at, you know, summarize what discussions were had and what was presented. So, so yeah, I think, I think you have to really invest and be very thoughtful about creating that. It just doesn't happen organically. And there are, you know, if, if a, if a, during the interview process, I think you can ask some simple questions like what I, you know, a couple of examples I gave that can easily help you figure out whether, whether or not the company has a very transparent and empowering culture as opposed to something that controls the information flow and, and it's quite suffocating. Yeah, I think, I think that's fantastic and advice and, you know, maybe a heuristic question that engineers could ask is, what do I not know about my company? And, and to be fair, there are some things that you don't know, you don't know, right? Just certainly the possibility that things that are being kept from you, you wouldn't even know to ask about, right? But there are, I think every company has some things that are kept kind of close to the chest and for good, you know, for better, for worse, it's, it's at least worthwhile to ask what things are not being shared. So there are some healthy things to not share. For example, sharing highly personal information, right? You wouldn't expect your manager to do that. That's not the same thing as having a fiscally transparent company, right? Those are two completely different things. Yeah. But it's worthwhile to say, are the things that are being kept private, healthy or unhealthy? That's right. I think that's a great dichotomy. I think there are things that need to be in confidence. So if you're doing your job properly, like a char information, it's like, you know, if you're doing your job properly, this is not public knowledge and it's intentionally, right? Like, you know, health information or, you know, other comp information and things like that, that people, you know, think it needs to be kept in confidence. On the other hand, you know, there could also be, you know, business development kind of deals that are happening where the whole thing needs to be done confidentially. Otherwise, the whole thing goes up in flames and the other partner will walk away. The minute it becomes common knowledge and their company does know that, you know, that this is happening or whatever. So there are definitely situations where it's required, confidentiality is required for the appropriate person to kind of like do their job properly. And that's not what is under question here at all. That's because it's black and white. It's very clearly stuff that needs to be kept confident with a few people. I mean, to the extreme example of this is like, you know, insider trading. I mean, there are laws, you know, preventing from certain people knowing certain things at certain time. You know, it's illegal. So it's not even a question of ethics. It's a question of, you know, law and order and legality. So, and so I think those are not under real question. I think the real questions are the ones that are the great Indian middle, right? You know, which is where I think you get to actually draw that line for every company. And that's what defines the culture. What's okay to talk about openly and what is not okay to talk about openly, right? And what is celebrated? What is cool? And what's a taboo? If I openly raise a red flag and if it's a taboo and I'm always going to be like, you know, alienated in the society, you know, not going to get included, then I'll nobody will ever raise a red flag ever about even obvious things that are right in front of them. And so you get to define the culture by defining where you draw that line. And that's what we intensely think about and talk about. And if somebody, you know, you know, brings up a red flag, I mean, the first thing you say, if you want to encourage that, because that's what, either you believe that that's making you stronger, even though immediate response for that is, oh, I'm uncomfortable. But if you really think about it, two things are true. A person wouldn't bring up a red flag and put themselves in that spot if they don't really care about the company or about the culture. So they're actually putting their reputation, maybe even their job and their happiness in work and their professional career at stake by raising that red flag. And you know, and you say, thank you, and you work with them. And if they're motivated enough to bring it in almost every case that I've worked with, they're motivated enough to be part of the solution. And you just have them, and support them and actually commit to addressing the issue. And it invariably makes the company and the organization stronger if you have that mindset. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea, the first part of my interview with Venkat, Venkatanamani. I hope you join me for the second part of this interview, which will be the next episode of Developer Tea. Go ahead and subscribe if you are listening in a podcast player right now. For example, you can subscribe in that player. So you don't miss out on future episodes of this show, just like this one, including that second part of this interview. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. This episode was produced by Sarah Jackson. Of course, this episode was sponsored by Linneau, head over to Linode.com, slides to Developer Tea to get started with $100 worth of free credit by creating a free account on Linode.com. My name is Jonathan Cutrella and until next time, enjoy your tea.