## Intro [00:00] I have failed my way into success. That was Rahul Pande. I had gotten offers from all the big tech companies, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. He's a software engineer who went from almost getting fired through an acquisition. And they told me and said, "Hey, we are going to get acquired by you're going to do a full round of interviews next Monday to getting promoted to staff at Meta in his 20s." I interviewed him so that we could learn from that experience. The thing I wish I realized way way earlier in my career is that and he was very honest with his entire career story. I came in with like this attitude of like okay I should be like one of the best engineers and then getting rejected for the same promotion twice was a real setback. What portion of your career growth do you think was luck? ## Stanford to Startup (vs Big Tech) [00:50] The beginning of your career is unusual. you went to Stanford but you joined a startup immediately and it looks like uh a very small startup. What's the story behind you joining a startup right out of college? The story is in my fifth year at Stanford I was at the school for 5 years doing an undergrad and master's degree. I met in that fifth year. One of the reasons I actually decided to stick around for that fifth year is because I felt like I hadn't really made any faculty connections and Stanford just like any other top institution is famous in part because of amazing instructors and faculty who were doing groundbreaking research. And I felt like what a shame if I leave this institution and not really understand or take part in that. And so the fifth year I was a RA like a research assistant in a lab with a professor named Yuri Lusco who was like a rising star and I thought this is a cool opportunity and that led to a lot of the work we were doing in the lab. He decided to spin it out into a company and Stanford actually is pretty well known for being fairly generous or willing to allow their faculty to go out and do companies and like have this revolving door with academia. And so when that happened, I felt like it was almost too good of a story to pass up. Like I could be one of 10 or 20,000 engineers in big tech if I go join Google or Microsoft or Meta. And I I had received offers at all of them. But then I felt like, okay, this is a story where I had this connection relationship with the professor. He trusts me. I trust him. And it just feels like a Silicon Valley unique story that will it could go really really well in which case amazing or worst case it's a good story to tell. Yeah. Yeah. And so I felt like there was not an hour to use and that's kind of why I ended up choosing that route. Makes sense. And you're early in your career so if it fell flat you didn't have a whole lot of responsibility. How many people were were in that early venture? Yeah. Yeah. So there was a professor. He had one industry veteran who had been around the block and so it was like two founders and then there was one other person in the lab with me. So two new grads me and him and there was one more person. So I think I had joined technically aside from the two founders as like employee number two. So very very early on into the company's formation. Right. How did you think about risk at that point? Because I think a lot of people they're evaluating big tech and and versus startups and big tech is kind of the you know the high expected value path and then startups are kind of you know boom or bust type of path. So did you think about that at all or was it a no-brainer to go to the startup? Yeah, I did think about that. I think the couple things I thought about is one way door versus two-way door. Like let me try it out and startups. Most things in your career are two-way doors in the sense that you try it out, you learn something, you experiment, and then you can always back out. You can always decide to leave the startup and then go to big tech if needed. So that was one consideration. And the other consideration too, if I'm being honest, is that I felt like I had attained that level of success or that level of like approval from big tech. And if I hadn't had that, I honestly am not sure if I would have done the startup. But what I mean by that is like I had done an internship the prior summer at Facebook, right? Now known as Meta in 2013. And then after that internship, I had gotten offers from all big tech companies. I gotten five offers including what I mentioned like Google, Facebook and Microsoft, Twitter and Square. So five companies in total. And so that gave me a lot of confidence that okay I I can do it right I can hopefully with some preparation I'm hopeful or confident in my ability to go back and get that opportunity. So there wasn't it didn't feel like that much of a risk right whereas if I had never gotten that big tech offer I think I might have really thought twice well let me go get a stable job which is going to be much more kind of of a known commodity to other companies so that if and when I decide to move on from my first gig I can get a really good job on my second gig. But because I already had that insurance policy of Stanford on my resume along with these other offers, I felt like I could be a lot more risk on that early in my career. Right. Right. That makes sense. So when you went into the actual startup itself, would you say that it was a good outcome from the acquisition or was that kind of like a you know aqua hire maybe not the best outcome you're hoping for? Yeah, more the latter for sure. I think the thing with acquisition but I learned that acquisition is probably one of the most overloaded terms in Silicon Valley. What do you mean? Like you could talk about acquisition as in like the most famous might be or one of the most famous might be like WhatsApp getting acquired by Facebook for 19 billion. Right. Right. In 2014 that's like an acquisition and like everyone became filthy. Right. Right. Then you also have acquisitions or frankly the total opposite which is the company effectively failed. Yeah. And they're calling an acquisition to save the dignity of the founders. Um, I think what happened with Postay, the company I joined, it was somewhere in the middle. It was like a little bit, if I'm being honest, closer to the failure end, I mean, I probably shouldn't call it a failure. It was basically like an opportunistic bet that okay, the startup that I joined, like I mentioned, it was spun out of academic work, right? And so I think the bet that we were making is that hey we have interesting IP intellectual property. We have some interesting ideas that are more academic, but there's not really a clear pathway to generating revenue or building a product, right? And so when the startup acquisition offer came along, like Pinterest, this hot company, which already had 100 million users, when they came along, it's hey, pairing your technology and your technology knowhow with our core product and PMF product market fit that we already have, that could really create something where 1 plus 1 equals three. That I think was uh a really attractive proposition and so I think that it we never gave the company a chance to really fail like it just ended within like eight months of formation right and so I think to answer your question directly I think uh financially it wasn't like an Fri outcome like I'm never have to work again it certainly wasn't that I basically you can kind of think of it as me entering in Pinterest with a slightly higher package than what a normal new grad at Pinterest would have received So certainly, I mean, you can't complain. Like I feel like I learned a lot about Silicon Valley. I learned a lot about acquisitions, and I came in with like a financially better outcome, but it wasn't like a life-changing amount of money. Got it. Got it. Yeah. And I think one more thing I'll say, which I think is really often overlooked is that storytelling and the story that you tell yourself and the story you tell other people, the narrative that you can create about what you did, why you did it, and why it's interesting. That is incredibly powerful. Right. And I think honestly more than anything else I feel like me being able to tell this story of how I was a enterprising young engineer 22 year 22 years old and I took a bet on a startup and I did this crazy story. Honestly I get a lot of mileage out of that story. Like I mean genuinely I get like I learned a lot but also just like being able to tell that story and explain to people what happened, what I learned from it that actually has a ton of value. And so one of the things I tell people on taro or just in general when I mentor people is that if you have a choice between A and B and you feel like A is the one which will give you exposure to more unique opportunity, unique people, unique stories, that's a really good argument to pick option A because it just will broaden your perspective and give you that storytelling ability. So looking back on that, let's say I was a new grad and I think there's a lot in the audience. would you recommend that they pick this same opportunity if they had the the same decision to make? Yeah, I think it depends. So, a couple things that made this story unique and why I felt like it was the right decision for me at the time was number one, I had a lot of social proof on my resume already. Like I went to Stanford, I had done internship at Facebook, which is already a huge company at that point. And I felt like the founder of a startup was one of the best people in the field in the world. Right. Right. like undoubtedly this person knew more about recommendation systems and big data and you know we didn't call it machine learning back then but effectively machine learning back then so it's like clearly uh a really good person to just be around and and see how they operate and so I think if those things are true then yeah I mean I would encourage anyone who's that early on in their career go do the crazy risky thing which might fail but I will say that's honestly more of the exception than the norm so if you're a normal like if you are the typical path, which is what I would describe as like you went to a pretty good school and you got a degree and you are like struggling to find your first job. Actually, I would recommend go and find the biggest brand name you can like the biggest company like reputable company and go work there because I do think there's so much value in just acrewing credibility. Right. Right. Like go work at Amazon. Go I think your first job was Amazon, right? Like that's a great first gig. Like go work at Amazon. go work at Google if you can get in. I think that will set you up well at a baseline for whatever else you want to do later on your career. And if you have this exceptional opportunity and you're able to justify it by like an amazing founder and you already have some of that kind of backup plan because of your background, I think then it makes sense. But for the most part, I would just recommend the standard path is probably the best because it's a standard like that is it's a standard for a reason, right? So like probably the gend path is what I'd recommend for most people. Yeah. Yeah, I agree with that. I think you know big tech versus startups comes up a lot and one of the big things about going directly into a big brand is instant step change in your credibility. You just immediately you have some prestige on your resume. Yeah. there's a lot of value and just even if you just went to big tech for like a year or two and then you left and even if your end goal was to go to startups I kind of feel like developing the engineering fundamentals while collecting that stamp is one of the highest EV things that you could do knowing now your your situation that makes sense you had an extraordinary opportunity and you already had the the stamps essentially Stanford uh Facebook you're kind of already in there so that makes sense you got ## Onboarding at Pinterest [10:58] acquired by Pinterest and So you're kind of uh it was a pretty big company at the time, right? Pinterest is maybe a growth stage startup at the time. Yeah, around 400 people. Well, 400 people. Okay. So it was bigger than a a true startup startup, but it was still much smaller than big tech. You know, when you got acquired, what was that like? Yeah, I think in the end I was happy with it, but I will tell you like it was very chaotic and very stressful in the process to get there because like basically the way it worked right the behind the scenes is that it was like my professor and this other industry veteran and they were like much much more senior than me and the other new grad who joined CO together and like you know they had 20 years or more experience clearly they were much more wellconed much more in the know and so the way it worked is that I came into work at Kos the startup one day and they told me and said hey we are going to get acquired by Pinterest. They want to interview everyone on the team. You're going to do a full round of interviews next Monday, which was like a couple days away. And so that was like a a big change in the company strategy, right? Obviously, I was like, we're really shutting down. We're going to get acquired. And then the last 48 hours, the next like 72 hours or whatever was extremely stressful because I had, you know, I was like out of interview prep for almost a year at that point. And as you know, you can talk about this later, but like interview prep is a very different skill compared to actually doing the engineering job. And so I was very worried that I wouldn't actually get the offer at Pinterest because I didn't do well in the interview. And in fact, that almost came true. Like I remember I did the full round like they took everyone basically immediately to the final round interview. Um so I had like five or six interviews in one day and they I was borderline. They called me back in to the SF office again to say, "Hey, like we know we still had some doubts or like we had some questions follow up for you." And I did two more interviews and luckily I nailed those. Like I did really well on those and then I got the offer. But like I was very worried because like there was a tech crunch article and there was like a big news announcement about how Pinterest has acquired this hot technology company and it would have sucked if I if it was like oh I joined the startup but I didn't actually take part in the acquisition and all my friends would have texted me or messaged me and like oh congratulations and I'm like ah well I got nothing out of it because I didn't get an offer. So it kind of worked out in the end but it really was pretty stressful process and it was rushed right. Had you vested any uh options in your in Cos at the time or Okay. So you would have gotten nothing because CO had only been around for about eight months at that point, right? Okay. So if you didn't pass that, you would have gotten fired essentially and had gotten no upside from any equity after that. That's right. Yeah. And so like literally like when I after that on this whole like on-site interview, I was feeling pretty nervous. So then I like messaged back my old recruiters at other big tech companies I get offers from and like start hey like are you still hiring or can I join cuz I was worried that that would be a backup let me go back to Google let me go back to Facebook right luckily it worked out and then I wanted to be part of that story and I I knew the people at COA so I wanted to kind of join with them so that was like a nice transition but yeah that was like it would have been effectively start from scratch and become like a new grad all over right was that leak code to to just a standard algo the interview loop. Yeah, that was a pretty standard like I think it was, you know, uh, leak code. They asked me like what I did on the startup, what projects I worked on. Yeah, I know it's like one behavioral interview, I think, and then a bunch of we code, man. Okay. You'd have a very different story if you failed that. Not nearly as good. Um, so, okay, so you get into Pinterest. What was the what was that like? Did they have a ladder system at that time? Did you get plugged into a certain level um in terms of career side of things? Yeah, they they they had just developed a engineering leveling system and I came in at L3 which is like their entry level engineer. So effectively they borrowed it from Google and Facebook. So L3 is entry level, L4 is mid-le, L5 is senior. So I came in at L3 and then I transitioned away from recommendation systems or like data engineering which is effectively what I was doing at the startup and I transitioned into mobile development. And so I kind of did a career reset in some ways by joining Pinterest and then that led to kind of a longer ramp up time and I actually ended up getting rejected for promotion which we can talk about if that if that's interesting. Yeah. But yeah, I basically came in at the L3. I see. So um you mentioned that you were working in a different space. How did you choose what you were working on at Pinterest and also maybe you can tell us a little more about what you were working on too. Yeah, I mean uh the way they put you into teams is they actually modeled it off of Facebook. So Facebook has a thing called boot camp. At least they did back in the day where it was like a six week program where you like learn about engineering fundamentals and you pick a team. They had something called base camp is a d like a a play on that. And the idea of base camp is that it's like a bridged version like two or three weeks where you learn about different teams at Pinterest and you decide what to go work on. By going through the base camp process and talking to a bunch of teams, I kind of made the call that I didn't want to do things that were more backend. I wanted to be closer to the product. I wanted to actually be able to build something which I could deploy either at Pinterest or on my own. Actually, one of the criteria for me is I wanted to be able to build things on my own end to end like side projects. I felt like I wasn't able to properly do that with my background in like recommendation systems which I had kind of built up an expertise in at Stanford and at CO. You wanted to do that because uh you had aspirations to start a company someday. Yeah, I mean I think vaguely I did have some aspirations like I think at Stanford like everyone has a vague aspiration to start a company. So I there was some element of like yeah I want to just at some point do the entrepreneurial thing. I think there's also just like a more fundamental itch of like I want to build something and I felt like you can obviously build things on the back end too. Like I I did want to be an owner of the actual user experience as well. That was important to me. I just like I wanted to dabble. I wanted to build things. The idea of being able to have my name on an app in the Play Store, like the Android app store, that was really compelling. And like my whole family was on Android, so I could like go home and show them here's this app I built and like thousands of people could use it. some that was like really compelling to me, right? And so I felt like if I could just learn Android professionally at Pinterest with really good people that could help accelerate my side project endeavors because that was not an option at Kosa. There was no such thing as a mobile team. Like we were only like three, four people total, right? So I just wanted to leverage the benefit of a bigger company to be able to like double dip and do well professionally hopefully and also be able to do things on the side that I thought were interesting. That made sense. When you actually went through with it and you you ended up on this client side uh uh team, did you learn what you wanted to learn or were you surprised that it wasn't what you were expecting? Yeah, I think I did end up learning what I wanted to learn. Like there was a really good staff level andor engineer who got hired a couple months after me. I learned a lot from him. Like that was a huge kind of pivot I would say in my career. Like I was able to just get a ton of mentorship. But I will say for the first few months it was kind of rough. I didn't know how to properly learn. I had not learned how to properly learn at that point in my career. And so Android, especially at at a somewhat mature company where we had, you know, I think hundreds of thousands of lines in the Android app at that point already. It was not a small code base. I think I really did struggle like as someone who had never done Android professionally before. The first few months of transitioning were really difficult for me. And I think I like that that's kind of the reason why I think I didn't do well when I initially went up for promotion at Pinterest is that I was very slow to ramp up and I felt like I like read a lot of documentation. I read a lot of code but I didn't actually modify I didn't write much Android code in the first few months and that was that was rough but I think eventually I got to the point where I felt comfortable. So what was the key change that took you from not landing code and not being effective in your onboarding to learning how to learn and being effective? Yeah, I think a lot of it honestly was just being surrounded by really good people. In particular, this like L6 staff level engineer who had come from Facebook who joined Pinterest like I think that person really like we start to to pair program and that was I think a really big change in how I approached the work and I think just in general like having a team where you're accountable to something. I think I did work pretty hard. So like it's not like I was fooling around and I didn't know anything. I was spending a lot of time and I think when you have a team of people who are like kind of holding you accountable or they're going to judge you which is really what was happening I think that was a really good fire under my butt to actually learn it properly and eventually it kind of clicked with the combination of mentorship and just enough time in the role. Got it. So for people who are looking to join a a team, they're making a similar decision of like what team to join. Maybe they already passed interviews. What do you think is the most important thing in picking a good team? Yeah, I would say maybe two things. One is the people part of it again is like the amount that you learn is going to be dominated by who you interact with and like what kind of discussion or interaction you have with them. And then the second thing I would say is how important is that team to the company. So one of the reasons actually additional reason why I picked Android at Pinterest is that one of the big initiatives for Pinterest in 2015 when I was working there was international growth and you're trying to grow a consumer app internationally the number one way you do that the key is going to be Android is dominant outside of the US and so I knew that the company would allocate a lot of smart people a lot of resources a lot of money frankly into that domain and I felt like if you're adjacent into or operating in an area of high growth, you will inevitably see some of that growth too, right? So, I think the combination of those two people and where the company is growing, I think matters a lot in team selection. Common advice I see is a rising tide lifts all boats. I've seen some people's careers where they they went from, you know, new grad to director in five years because they were working on the one of the most important things for the company and they were really delivering. So the impact was insane and typically career growth's proportional to your your impact. So going into the career growth side of things, you came in as a as a L3. You you mentioned that you had a failed promotion. Can you talk me ## Failing IC4 Promo Twice (then landing it) [21:29] through how you eventually got the promo and maybe the story behind what you were talking about there? Yeah, I mean it's a pretty difficult journey, honestly. So I got I got the failed promotion. I got the feedback. I think honestly that was probably legitimate. I think it was a year after I was at Pinterest and I wanted to go off a promo and it got rejected and it was like valid feedback. Okay, you've only been doing Android professionally for like you know nine months at that point and you haven't really added you haven't really banned that much. That was fair. I went up again six months later and I got rejected for the promotion again. So that was truly demoralizing because I I came into Pinterest with like this attitude of like okay I came in through an aqua hire an acquisition and I should be like on top of the world. I should be like one of the best engineers and then getting rejected for the same promotion twice was a real um setback. So luckily what happened in the second time is I they had like an appeal process at at Pinterest. So then I was able to work with a manager to appeal the promotion and I got I actually ended up getting it. So Oh, interesting. That was valuable. One of the takeaways I learned in that second time is a big feedback for me for the rejection was that oh on one of the projects that you listed in your promotion packet, you said that you've been working on it for like 16 months and they the promotion committee this anonymous promotion committee interpreted that to mean that I wasn't working with urgency or with deliberation enough and that was like not true. like in the frame like I think the framing of it had that framing because they kind of interpreted this like long duration of the project. But then when I clarified that with my manager and they were able to like uh kind of advocate for me or put up a appeal, it it ended up working out. But I think that kind of showed me the value of like you really need to be clear about what you think you're saying. It may not always be interpreted that way. And so especially for things like career growth or like a one-on-one document or a promotion document, you have to really be clear about get it reviewed by people who have been around the block and like understand like be open to feedback on how things might be interpreted differently because you want to avoid the situation that I ended up in. Yeah, it's it's interesting. You talked about duration of the project and how it being longer hurt you because I've heard the opposite as well. If you have a a project that is longer, it's perceived as larger scope potentially and therefore maybe a bigger undertaking. And so I've heard some people say actually sometimes it can be advantageous for a project to be longer durations. Of course, there's no um one-sizefits-all thing here. It's all about the context and how the story is actually told. The color behind it matters a lot. Yeah. And this is why I think like you have to be really clear with your manager about what narrative, what story are you trying to tell, right? You have to make sure that you're aligned with them on that and also ideally get feedback from other like tech leads or other people who are in positions of influence because the same project if you've been working on for 16 months, it could be really impressive. Or if it's like this minor experiment that people assume should have taken you three months, but you've been working on for 16 months, that could be held against you, right? So I think the devil is in details and you have to be really like you I I guess like the the learning I had is that you can't make assumptions about how you are going to be evaluated or judged right based off of your own interpretation. Like software engineering is like social endeavor like you have to be able to work with other people and figure out how are they judging you? What do they think are your areas for improvement? And make sure you figure that out ahead of time so you're not surprised during a performance review. One of the last things I want to go over for this this u leg of your career is usually from L3 to L4 it's all about engineering fundamentals and technical growth and you mentioned a little bit that having a really strong mentor was one of the key things that helped you level up here in terms of your skills. Was there anything else that you did that helped you you know have a lot more impact or really develop those skills quickly going from three to four? I think one of the things I learned from this mentor which was also incredibly valuable for me when I was doing my own side projects or like publishing apps was this willingness to just operate outside of the codebase. Like for example I mentioned how the Pros codebase even though it was still relatively early it was already quite mature like compilation like building the Android app and deploying to the phone it took I think sometimes between two and five minutes like it took a long time to actually do all this compilation. So it was like a very slow and painful debug cycle. One of the things that the mentor showed me is that hey, you can actually create your own like mini Android app and make changes and like copy over themes as needed, but then you can have this sandbox environment where the debug cycle is way faster, right? And I think that was really eye opening for me cuz it it felt like making a new app that's like so much work. It's like this big ambiguous thing. I don't know how to do that, right? But when you actually get into it, it turns out it's not that hard and it will actually meaningfully increase your velocity and that fear I had I think of like being able to dabble and like break things and you know copy paste code and modify it over here and see what happens. I think that went away after a while and which is also like of course very valuable for a side project because you don't have training wheels you don't have any code to already modify for a side project right so it was very valuable for that and I think that change of attitude of like just being able to go in and make things and break things honestly was probably the biggest mindset shift that led to the L34 promotion. Yeah, I think a lot of that promotion too is about contributing more code and having one of the most important things for that is like a very fast iteration loop. So, okay, you you ## Senior (IC5) to Staff (IC6) at Meta [27:10] got the promo at Pinterest and I believe at this point you you left to Meta. Is that correct? Yeah, I left in mid 2017. Got it. What made you want to leave Pinterest for Meta? I a couple things. One is I think Meta was a much much bigger company and I felt like frankly the engineering brand of Meta was still quite a bit stronger just in terms of like name brand and being a huge company and it was value in that they were paying more and I felt like in terms of immediate growth at Pinterest I didn't see a clear pathway to okay like here's how my career is going to rocket ship from from where I am now. And so the combination of those three led me to Okay, let me look around and see if I can get a meaningful bump in my career promotion or compensation. I do think in general early on in career, job hopping is more effective at that. Later on in career, job hopping is actually counterproductive. Oh, what makes you say that job hopping's counterproductive later in career? And as you go up the career ladder, most of your impact is going to be derived through the influence you have on other people rather than actually just coding all day every day. It is it is rare for like for example a staff or principal engineer to just crank out so much code that it justifies their impact at the company. Usually what's going to be happening is you're creating frameworks or tools or systems that allow other developers to do productive work. And so for that kind of work, you need to be in a company long enough that you have those relationships and that trust built out. If you are a like staff or principal engineer, it's very hard to job hop your way beyond that. You have just kind of build out that trust and relationship and then you get promoted. Whereas early on in career as long as you show the competency of hey I can write high quality Android code I can write highquality production code that's that might be enough actually for a company to bring you in at a higher level or at least a higher compensation. I think that aligns with my experience as well. I think my my promotion from senior to staff I think was unusually quick because I had a lot of relationships already. A lot of my peers had switched companies like very very fast but I'd stayed in one place one team for a long time. So actually that leg came a lot of it was from influence and people trusting me and knowing I could get a job done at a staff level and giving me those opportunities which I was lucky to receive. But yeah staying at some place for a long time gave me more opportunities for influence and and that kind of luck. One thing I want to ask you about cuz you mentioned one thing about Meta was uh like more social proof, more prestige. Your resume was already pretty loaded at the time in terms of and Pinterest is not a bad brand. You had Stanford. Um you had already been at at Meta. So do you feel like there was additional value in another stamp or was it more for the the other aspects of it? Yeah, that's a good point. I do think part of it was like I still felt Meta as a much bigger like everyone in the world had heard of Meta or at that point it was Facebook everyone had heard of Facebook not everyone had heard of Pinterest so part of it was maybe like this ego of like it's a more well-known brand both for the common public and also in terms of engineering but I think you're right that that was not the highest order bit of what I was optimizing for because like I had already technically had the Facebook name on my resume I had already had these other somewhat well-known names on in my resume. I think it was more I think focused on this feels like a place where I can grow my career a lot faster at Facebook compared to where I was. When you switched from Pinterest to Meta, what were the cultural differences that immediately jumped out to you? I'll start off by saying I think they were actually kind of similar. Like a lot of the Pinterest culture was influenced by a lot of ex ex Facebook and ex Google people. So it was similar in that sense, but Facebook culture was my internship and from people who had joined Pinterest from Facebook. And you could tell at Facebook was like the authentic like taste of it had gotten but on steroids. So for example like at Pinterest I remember the culture was every code review every change would be reviewed by at least two people and they would actually have these thing called herald roles where if you modified a particular part of the codebase it would automatically add reviewers and they were blocking reviewers so you couldn't land the code until they took a look. At Facebook as you probably know like it's actually very rare for that to happen. Usually all you need is one accept, one LGTM, one green check mark and you can land it. And so I was actually kind of shocked at wait people are just landing code that quickly without all the other like checks and balances. So then that was one big difference. I think people were more direct at Facebook. at Pinterest. One of the common criticisms of the company was that it was kind of too nice, which is kind of a weird criticism, but like I think what they meant to say was that people weren't saying the difficult thing around feedback or prioritization and then therefore projects or people who had no business actually staying at the company, they stuck around a lot longer. M whereas at Facebook I think they were actually quite I I don't want to say like they were more mean but they were definitely a lot more direct around hey this doesn't make sense why are you doing this let's cut it or kill it and I think there was a lot more aggressive like pip culture for example at Facebook compared to Pinterest right right how about the technical stacks like when you switch from Pinterest to Meta did you have any issues learning Meta's very custom stack I mean it's kind of interesting because like on paper it was quite similar like both as Android dev both were using Java there was no Cotlin really at the time. So Java there and it was still using like Android tooling. But I think one of the things that was interesting is that Facebook was operating at such a scale that they had like workarounds for a lot of things. They had their own customuilt system called buck right that was relative. That was very easy for me. And then a lot of the ways of doing compilation for Android at Facebook was different from what I had learned which was exacerbated or like made even more pronounced by the fact that I was working on a hardware team. So I joined a relatively unique part of Facebook called Portal. And it wasn't called portal all the time. It was called building 8. It basically was a forked version of Android along with like 30 different custom Android apps sitting on top of this custom operating system. And so the building the build system the tooling for that was actually very very different not just for Pinterest but also just for core of Facebook. So that took some time like probably it took me like four or five months to understand how that even how that worked. Got it. Yeah. And for for people who don't know, Portal is the standalone device that's a video calling device that has a screen on it and it it sits stationary. It's almost like a Google Home. That that's the thing that you're talking about, right? That's right. I mean, initially you would have like we had like literally like an Android tablet because we didn't have hardware when I first joined. But then yeah, like eventually we had custom hardware which had our own OS. We it was like you call it flashing. You'd flash the device with your own OS and on top of that you would then put o over optimize build of the 30 apps but then you're not going to build all 30 apps. That would take like literally three or four hours. Then you would take the app that you're working on like I was working on the calling app. So I would just build that app and then put that on the device. So it's a very kind of unique process even for Facebook which took a long time to understand and actually that was an opportunity like you can talk about this later if you're interested but I built out this like debug tool which was just for people on the portal because of how unique the setup was and that actually led to a ton of impact because I was able to understand deeply how the workflow was different compared to other internet engineers and I was able to build something to help with them. How many engineers did that speed up? By the time I built that tool, like portal had grown dramatically. So I think by that point like hundreds of engineers in the portal org or adjacent orgs were using that tool either every day or every week and it was probably saving like hundreds of hours of engineering time every month. Yeah. So I mean to me that sounds like IC6 impact or staff impact. So maybe we can talk a little bit about career growth at Meta. Did were you hired as a IC5? So senior or Yeah. Okay. I was hired as IC5. Yeah. Oh, so that was probably a big part of moving as well. Sounds like you got a promotion from switching from Pinterest to to Meta. Yep, that's right. Did you have to do anything special to to get that that job hop promo or you just did the interview and that was what they proposed? Yeah, that's what they proposed. I mean, I think I I knew I had done the interviews really well. Like I came out thinking okay I felt really lucky or I felt really good about okay I pretty much nailed every problem and I came in in a position of strength in a sense I I already I already had I think a couple pending offers at that point there's a com and I had interned at Facebook I like had worked at a respectable company before which was Pinterest and I think the market was hot for Android developers so the combination of all of that led to just like they wanted to give me a compelling offer right you went from senior or IC5 to to staff. Yeah, maybe you can talk a little bit about what you're working on. I mentioned I'm work I work on a thing called Portal which is a standalone hardware video calling device and so prior to Portal existing Facebook already has a long history of doing video calling primarily in the form of doing it through messenger. So Messenger, the Facebook Messenger app already had a fairly mature ecosystem or infrastructure around supporting crossplatform video calls between desktop and mobile, Android, iOS at different with different codecs, different qualities, different audio video codecs, things like that. And so I think a lot of the challenge was, hey, the step zero is just effectively fork off of Messenger and do our own thing because we were just kind of an experimental project. But then once portal had launched and we had you know hundreds of thousands of people who were using portal every day then there was a need to now kind of come back into the normal infrastructure because like you know obviously the RTC team like the video calling infrastructure team at messenger they were constantly making improvements and it would always be a challenge of how do we now stay up to date and so the main project I I worked on was moving the core infrastructure back into what messenger had already developed. So migrating the old infra to the new infra while maintaining compatibility with all the custom features that portal had and adopting a lot of the new features that the RTC infra had enabled for us. So like kind of navigating that at a product layer and also the tech layer that was the main project. I think one thing I tell people is at the staff level you can have one big project. I think some people have that, but for me I think having a portfolio approach worked out really well. But that was like the main thing that was really crossunctional and frankly a lot of like bureaucracy where it was managing people from the messenger team, managing people from portal leadership like getting everyone in line, PMs and so I think the other project that I mentioned earlier which was a debug tool that was purely engineering driven. I knew exactly who I was building for which was me and other engineers on the team. I think the combination of those two led to a pretty clear promo case when I was able to go up for it. It sounds clearly like IC6 scope. You're you had to influence across teams. Sounds like a pretty big shared infrastructure initiative. I've heard a lot of other people getting IC6 promos off of shared infra because that central team probably made it so much better in the interim when you were branched away. So when you merge together, it's almost like you unlocked all of their engineers's work in this new product surface. So were you intentional about your growth to IC6? Like was that something you you kept talking to your manager about? You said, "Hey, I want to get there or it just happened naturally?" Yeah, I mean I think the way you phrased the promotion conversation matters a lot. So like I think for the first year at Facebook, my goal was really is let me make sure I do well, right? Because I think a big turnoff and I learned this when I was on the other side as a manager later on, but like if you have someone who just joined the company and they're immediately asking you, okay, like I want to get promoted, can you help me? Right? It's a big turnoff because even especially for someone like me who had felt some level of imposter syndrome of like, hey, I came in at a fairly high level. There's a lot of expectation. My first priority for the first year was really let me just nail it. let me make sure that I'm exceeding expectation or at least meeting expectation for E5 or IC5 senior level before I think about promotion. So after that year and I felt like I now had developed some trust and I landed some good work then I started to have a really clear conversation with a manager about what does it look like to grow on the IC ladder? What does management look like? Because even back then I think there was some element of I enjoyed talking to people. I enjoyed mentoring people. So there was even discussion back then on what would it look like to be a manager. I think the conclusion we came to and I think it was the right one was let me first go up the ladder as a IC like an individual contributor and then maybe later on try out the management path which is what happened but it was a pretty like thought through deliberate conversation. You mentioned that there were two kind of big efforts that helped you get promoted. One of them was the the tooling that you made which sounds like that was a bottoms up initiative. You knew it was bad. Yeah, you saw how many people it could help and you just went and built it. For the the other the shared infrastructure initiative, did you create that scope or was that something that maybe your manager came to you and said, "Hey, we got to do this. Could you lead it?" How did you get that opportunity? Yeah, that one was more of like a it it was kind of obvious that that had to be done by someone. And I think I had been around the team long enough and I had enough of a seniority and relationship with the RTC team, like the messenger team, to make it happen. So it kind of felt like a natural fit of okay, I can just step up and and do it rather than it being something like I'm going to create scope. It definitely was like a obvious thing that both the RTC team wanted and the portal team wanted. It was a question of who could step up and try and be the point person for this initiative. Got it. And you were naturally that person because you had been delivering. You had all the relationships and you'd been there for long enough. Is that right? That's right. Yeah. Yeah. I think it was kind of very clear to everyone that if I wanted it, I would probably be one of the better people to take this on or maybe the best person to take it on just because I had been around long enough and I had I knew the context of what each team was trying to do and how to make it kind of compatible, how to make ## Management (vs IC) at Meta [41:32] it work together. Okay. And so you you talked a little bit about management and I know you got the IC6 promo and then later you switched to TLM and I was kind of curious. I think a lot of people want to make that same decision for their their careers. So what was your reasoning for wanting to switch? I mean I do think genuinely the whole point of like my company now is to try and help people. So I think manage good managers I think genuinely have a desire to help people like they want to see people grow and then I think as a byproduct of helping people grow you also can actually have a lot of impact managers are generally quite senior and respected at at most companies right so I that was the initial motivation and again going back to the idea of like I had a lot of context I knew a lot of people so again felt like a kind of a natural transition in some sense like you have a growing team and you want someone to give them feedback and make sure they're working high impact stuff okay, do you want to become a manager? And so it was a very it again it didn't feel forced at all. It kind of felt like oh a very natural like is something you've expressed interest in in the past and also this seems to be a natural fit here or the organization needs it. Do you want to try out management? Right. So let's say someone's decided for themselves they they definitely want to try management. What are what are those concrete steps that maybe you took for instance that got you to actually become a manager? Yeah, I think a couple things. One is just ask ask yourself the question of do you enjoy helping people? Do you enjoy working with people? Like if you hate one-on-one, do you dread the one-on-one with your manager or one-on- ones with other people? You're going to have a really difficult time thriving as a manager because a lot of your time is going to be one-on- ones or even just like ping like reacting to pings. And I do think one of the hard parts about management is that you become more of a firefighter or you become more reactive rather than proactive. Like you can't guard your time as much. So the step one is like are you willing to do you like people enough and do you want to help people enough that you're willing to give up some of the autonomy or flexibility that you might have had as an engineer. If you've clarified that with yourself and by the way you should test that too like don't just like intellectualize it. I think it's worth actually having one-on- ones with people and like start doing some of that motion now even as I see if you think you might want to become a manager. Another big part of management honestly is having opinions. You should have opinions not only about the fe feedback of like what quality of work people are doing on the team and like how they could do better. That's one part of the having opinions. Another part about having opinions is how should the team and organization change based on different priorities of the company or of of the or if you feel like you haven't done that reflection or if you don't want to do that reflection, I actually don't think management is again like it's not a good fit in the sense that you wouldn't do well. I think the best managers are the ones who come in with a very strong point of view and they're able to effectively bend the organization to help them achieve what they want. And so I think the combination of those two like do you number one enjoy helping people and like testing out testing it out with one-on ones and like meeting leading meetings and things like that and then number two do you care and do you want to be part of like those kind of broader organizational decisions around what the team or what the org should do? I see. And when you say have an opinion, okay, I'm thinking from the IC perspective. So for someone to kind of get a sense of if they like that kind of work, it sounds more of like the directional work and the kind of like tech leadership work is the best simulation of that. Is that right? Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think even a senior a very senior IC effectively becomes part of the expectation is that you should have very clear opinions that you can articulate and convince people of about what the team should be doing for the next six months or next one year. And if you feel like you would really rather not have those kind of negotiations with other teams or other people about what the team should do and you just want to be more of like a I want to just execute and write code and like feel productive then I think management again is like not a good fit. That was actually one of the big challenges for me which is like when I became a TLM. TLM in particular is difficult because like you're kind of straddling the line between doing IC work and management work but I remember feeling a lot of the time where at the end of my day I was like what did I actually achieve today? And really the way I spent my time was in meetings doing one-on ones trying to figure out the road mapap for something. And if you are approaching your job with the mindset of let me just crank out code and let me ship an experiment then you might not be satisfied with how your day or week is going if you don't do any of that stuff. Was there anything that surprised you when you switched to management? I mean so I think in my case in particular because I was a tech league manager or was like a hybrid role. I think that job was tough because it's okay to be a TLM as a transitory role where like you're deciding whether you want to be a full-time manager like a full-time M1 or M2 or you want to be a full-time IC, but it's not a good place to be in terms of long-term sustainability because like you kind of are not really clear about are you being judged or evaluated on your IC work and your ability to strip a lot of interesting code or are you being evaluated primarily on for people leadership, right? And so that was difficult for me. I I think I I was surprised how taxing that would be. Yeah. Um Yeah. And I ended up switching teams like after that. Oh, interesting. Yeah. I I I switched to TLM too, kind of in a trans transitory state to EM. And I asked a lot of people before I switched, you know, what they thought. I talked to other TLMs and every single TLM I talked to told me, hey, it's not a good idea to to stay long-term. I have not heard one person tell me that, hey, you should become a TLM and it's a great idea in the future because you kind of just become this, you know, jack of all trades, master of none. You're not specialized and growing long-term in one of the two paths. And also, it's like unsustainable to try to do two jobs at ## Leaving Meta to Start a Company [47:29] the same time at this point. Okay. You got to staff TLM, you switched teams, and after you switched teams, you you ended up leaving Meta. You left Meta to start your own company. I'm kind of curious about the the story behind that. What what made you want to leave Meta and how did that happen? Yeah, I mean I think like I mentioned before like I think as tempered there's like in the water somewhere there's like this kind of like everyone thinks about starting a company or talks about starting a company and so I had definitely fallen into that and it just in my mind starting from like I would say 20 2016 like fairly early on I always had this idea like okay I'm I want to do a company just a question of when. Yeah. And I finally felt like I was ready for it at Meta for a couple of reasons. Number one, probably the biggest reason is I felt like I found a co-founder who I wanted to try and explore an idea with. I trusted them. I enjoyed working with them and that was a huge unlock is I I finally find someone found someone who we have validated our relationship and we like working with each other and we have similar timelines. I think the second thing was I felt like I had reached a level in my career where I felt satisfied or maybe the maybe negative framing of it could be like I felt like I had plateaued so it's okay. made it and now like it's harder to see a pathway to like a director or like something very senior. So now is a good time just to leave. And I I mean I also felt like I mean you get well paid as an engineer in general and I think I got lucky through a combination of promotion and just stop growth at Meta that I felt like I didn't have to work for a few years. So that was obviously important in terms of optionality like I didn't have to worry about finances. I could cover my life for a couple years. And I think the third and final thing was like I call I had some signal of like I had been doing tutorials about Android actually at that point. I've been publishing them on YouTube for a few years starting in 2019. So I go like that was another input. But there seems to be something here. I enjoy teaching. I enjoy working with developers. Can we build something on it? Can we see what happens? So the combination of all three of those led me to feel confident about leaving. you had already built up that base of skills, money, a much stronger foundation to start a company off of. You know, co-founder is a big part of the equation. Where did you find your co-founder? Alex and I worked together on Portal in 2017. When I first joined the company, he was literally in the same exact team with me. He ended up switching actually relatively quickly, but he we worked together pretty closely for like a few months and then we stayed in touch when he moved over to Instagram. So, we probably met every week in person at Facebook pre-COVID and then once COVID happened, we started talking like almost every other day. Wow. Just like talking about different ideas and different things we want to try out together. When you ended up quitting, did you already have something built? Yeah, we had nothing built. I mean, I think what we had done before we quit was we had commit we had commitment to each other that we would work on it for at least, you know, 6 months or a year. The second commitment we had to each other was that we knew kind of the broad domain area that we wanted to operate in because a big part of that was what we've been doing for maybe like six months prior to us quitting is we were just doing community building and like research like during co we ran these free webinars talking about different elements of career growth and those actually did quite well like I think part of it was just like people were really itching for interaction social interaction at home and so we had these webinars of like literally 800 people who joined it was a huge number of people who just joined to hear us talk about different elements of career growth. And so we felt like, okay, we are committed to this broad domain. We're committed to working on it for a certain amount of time. And we had this ambition of like, let's figure out how we can get funding or at least build something once we quit. That was that was the idea. I see. And so you guys ended up applying to YC and getting fundraising through that avenue. Is that something you'd recommend to, let's say, I'm a big tech employee thinking about starting a company. Is YFC the best way to get fundraising or is there more behind that decision? It depends. Like when you say start a company, it's kind of like what we talked about earlier with acquisition. Acquisition is such an overloaded term. Start a company is also a very overloaded term, right? You could start a company which is like I'm going to build utility apps on Android which just get a million downloads and then you make no money, right? Or you could build small apps on on your phone which make like 5K a month. That's a pretty cool thing. Or you could just cover your living expenses. or you could try and make like a billion dollar company, right? And so if you are in that latter category where you have some ambition to make a huge company, then I think yeah, YC makes sense as like a funding vehicle, I do think that it depends on like your network. If you're a first-time founder and you don't have that much of a network, then YC is a no-brainer. Like it's such an obvious decision that you'll get credibility, you that money, you get the accountability of YC. But if you're a repeat founder or if you already have a network of other VCs like you already know some of the top tier VC firm then maybe you can make the argument that you know YC is not worth it. So comparing and so now you've been working on your startup for some time now. What do you see are the biggest differences between the startup and that you're running for yourself and and big tech? Oh there's so many differences. I mean good and bad. I ## Big tech vs Startups [52:33] mean I think one of the big changes which is both good and bad is like I think the structure accountability is like you are in charge of it right there's no boss there's no deadline me Alex and we're a team of three so we're still actually quite small we're three full-time people and so we try to manufacture urgency we try and manufacture deadlines but unlike a company like Facebook or Pinterest or any other company really where almost always you have like a cadence of a quarterly release or some like big launch coming up that you have that going for you. You are in charge of creating that structure for yourself when you are doing a startup, right? There's no manager, there's no boss, there's no one looking out for you. So that is both empowering and also very scary like you have to work with urgency otherwise you could spend five years you know just like twiddling your thumbs and that's not a good outcome. So that's one big change. I also think that there's kind of related there's a lot more ambiguity what to build like even now I I feel like it took us a while to get to where Taro is now. Initially the idea was just focused on let's build something for developers and we thought a dev tool could work like something in I don't know reviewing code writing code things like that but then we felt like the community angle was more powerful so we started going more into community and that ended up going into courses and now we have like this pretty robust course platform along with some community elements that product management thinking is something that a lot of big tech engineers in particular have no idea how to do like talking to users iterating on the feedback looking at data you have to be willing to just dive into a new area and like learn something a lot more obviously when you're a two person threeperson company compared to when you have a worldass data scientist or UXR person or you know whoever else sitting next to you. Let's say you were I guess giving advice to people who are in big tech and they're they're kind of thinking about it. At what point do you think you would advise someone it could make sense to start a company? I mean I think this depends a lot on what you define as success, right? So, here's the thing. Like, you can have a very, very amazing life if you just stick around and you climb the ladder and you get to like director or higher at Meta. Like, that's an amazing amazing life and you're in the top 0.1% of the people in the world. But I think if you want to have a lot more control and autonomy over what you do and what you build, and you also want an outlier outcome, outlier meaning like you want to have a small small chance of a huge outcome. It's actually very hard to have that happen in a big tech company because like a big tech company, I mean, I could be proven wrong, but I don't think Meta is going to like 5x in value in the next 5 years, right? It might double, which would be amazing, but it's probably not going to 5x or 10x. And so, if you want to have something which is 10xing in value, then I think that could be like a time. So, like I would say like when you have the stability, this foundation laid, that's how I think about it. like you've worked in big tech, you have the credibility, you have the finances. Now, now you can go for a bigger swing, then that could be one input into doing a startup. And the other thing is what we mentioned before, which is like you have to really get along with your co-founder. It's like a marriage. And so if you find someone who you really feel like you get along with and critically the timing works out because that's the other thing I noticed is that sometimes people have the their dream co-founder in mind and they're kind of just waiting and they're never on the same timeline where it's like oh one person is waiting for a bonus or a vesting period. So they're going to wait for six more months and the other person when they wait six more months they have a kid and now oh now my kid is like I'm going to wait until they're in daycare. they wait two more years or whatever and then the other person in two more years they're now like oh I have to get married. It's like having the alignment on the timeline and like your commitment to how long you want to do the startup that is you dare to find as well. Yeah. I had a I had a friend who was at Meta and then he left to go do his own company and I asked him his motive and he said he felt like he would regret if he looked back on his life and he had did that big tech trajectory the whole time. he would just regret that he didn't have a a story worth telling. So yeah, there's so many different ways to look at it. I think ## Career Reflections (Advice for Younger Self) [56:41] the last things I want to ask a little bit about I guess reflecting over everything looking back on all the different legs you had a little bit of startup big tech a few legs of big tech and now you're back in startup but as a founder rather than engineer what period of your career did you feel like you had the most skill growth or or career growth? I would say when I found that really amazing mentor at Pinterest, that was one period of dramatic growth where I was like pair programming and finding this person and like it's there are a lot of things you learn by osmosis that you don't get taught but just like seeing how he operated and made this separate mini app that we talked about that was like eye opening for me like you are empowered to change your environment and do things that was powerful I think at Meta when I started or Facebook before when I was there when I was actually meeting a team and doing this migration that was powerful and along with that the um debug tool, this like tooling change I made, that was the first time I felt like I built something, especially in the big tech environment where like I was creating value. Like I felt like I was creating value for the first time, which is kind of odd to say, but I felt like a lot of the other things I had done, I felt like a worker be, right? You know, like I felt like, okay, this is like something which is being sent up, sent down from above. I'm going to be like a good Android developer or I'm going to be a good you know recommendation system engineer and just like do it and for the first time I felt like I an idea that I had come up with like it was my baby and I was able to actually put out in the world and people were willing to adopt it like that was I think a crazy eye openener again for me which probably led to like why I felt confident also doing a startup and maybe the third thing I would say which is not really maybe relevant to a big tech audience but I felt like the two months or three months of YC when we were doing like the actual YC period where you had a group check-in every week and you talk to people every week about what you've done. That was also very intense. But I learned a lot in that process just cuz like if you don't perform like you're kind of being shamed and like you have this intense pressure to like get things done. And what about looking back? I think this is something people are always interested in is if you if you look at everything, is there anything that you regret or that other people could learn from where you think, man, I wish I changed that? And if so, what what would it be? That's a good question. I feel like the startup I joined in 2014, I think that I don't necessarily regret it because I think I learned a lot. I have a good story to tell from it. But if I'm if I'm looking back at the reason I did it, honestly, I'm not sure if it was the best decision because a lot of it was I maybe somewhat ego-driven of like I don't want to be one of many people in big tech. I want to do the special thing. I want to go do this thing which is unique to me. And it was unique to me. So that was true. Like I I think I felt special doing it. But at the same time, I feel like I don't know if I had enough maturity as an engineer to really handle this scenario. like I I did I think flounder or struggle a bit both at the startup and also when I joined Pinterest. So I think maybe going into a more structured environment would have maybe been a better bet for me in terms of my maturation as an engineer. So that's the one that comes to mind. But I think in general I I would say I don't really have that many regrets. Like I just feel again and again in my career I've been so lucky. Like it may that's weird to say or think about but like there have been so many jobs where I've been rejected for which honestly if I had gotten the offer I would have taken it and that company completely exploded like a year later. Which one? Um, and also even in the VC world, like there were a couple VC firms that strung us along so badly with Taro and they were like, "Oh, we'll invest in you at this valuation. We'll give you this amount of money." And it didn't work out. Like we we effectively got rejected and then I look back at like how Taro has progressed and what we've been able to do and what pressure we would have felt with those VC firms on our cap table. And again, I just feel so lucky. Like I feel like in this weird way I have failed my way into success. Like I just gotten so lucky again and again with um getting or not getting opportunities and that's led me to where I am today. Right. You know when people see a career like yours, they're going to say something like it was luck. I guess my question to you is what portion of your career growth do you think was luck? Oh, I think a lot of it was luck. I think I think yeah super lucky like um with the opportunities and the people I came across I will say like you can manufacture luck in the sense of being curious about the people and the opportunities around you. I think a lot of the ways I would been able to find my co-founder, find that startup in 2014, get the opportunities at Facebook is I think one thing I do a relatively good job of is keeping in touch with people. Like I try and just be friendly with, oh, you know, will you take that class together? What do what have you been up to? What do you like about your new job? Or, you know, let me know if I can help out with this particular project that you're working on. Right? I I feel like that's something I've always enjoyed doing. And it turned out that that has career value as well because you're able to get exposure to projects, people, ideas that you wouldn't know otherwise. Even like the things that we talked about in this conversation a couple times, like that debug tool I built at Meta came from me talking to a bunch of people and just like understanding their workflow. Me doing a lot of the job hops in my career have come from just again being kind of in the know on what are the people doing that I respect. And so I think that can be a repeatable algorithm or repeatable process that's not dependent on luck. I guess just change your approach to networking I guess or or like talking to people and that's a really good way to manufacture luck. And I think actually, you know, one thing that's just like maybe come present day and I think both me and you are pretty active on social media, right? Like we post a lot, maybe too much. And so I feel like part of it is of course like just genuine wanting to put out some value in the world hopefully. But also part of it is like that's a way to create luck, right? Like you are putting out content and people can see it and resonate with it, help them, and then they'll think of you when it comes to career growth. They'll think of you for a certain opportunity. And so that's a good example of yeah, it's kind of blocked because you don't know who's going to see your post, but at the same time that was a very deliberate thing and we probably spend many hours per week or per month thinking about what that will look like and how we can help people. Yeah. No, definitely agree. And I I've heard some people call this, you know, maximizing your luck surface area. And I think yeah, social media is one thing too, but even just wherever you are, maybe like internally at your company, I feel like writing or putting things out or reaching out to people, that visibility just gets you more opportunities. Probably part of the reason why you got the project that got you to staff, the one where you were helping with the big shared infrastructure initiative, you were you had relationships and credibility already because of you talking to people. you putting out writing that says, "Hey, I'm the person leading this initiative and hey, it was successful." That's essentially giving people reason to trust you and give you future opportunities, which increases your luck. I think one thing you said was about how you're good at, I guess, like reaching out to people and it sounded like what you were doing was really natural and I think when people talk about networking, it feels a little bit more manufactured. So, do you have any tip on how to quote unquote network with with people? Yeah, actually that's that's a really good call out. Like I I actually hesitated to use the word networking because I never really thought of it as networking for what I've been doing for most of my career. I think the things that I think about when I do it is one genuine curiosity. Like I genuinely am interested in what you're doing. How are you doing? Like how are you enjoying it or not enjoying whatever you're up to? That's part of it. And the second thing is being thoughtful about what are you sharing? I do think that one of the best ways to develop a relationship with someone is not just by asking a ton of questions or like asking for mentorship. A really good way to develop a relationship is say, "Hey, here's something I've worked on which might be interesting to you." The best way to get inbound is like to show off. Not maybe not show off is not the right word, but like to showcase um what you've been up to and like here's why you have a unique insight or a unique project that turns out to be a really interesting way or a really compelling way for people to like you create gravity. Like you gra people gravitate toward you because they want to get your opinion on things too. So it's like a two-way street. And if it's always if it feels like you're the one always asking and it's not reciprocated, then it could just be that person is not interested in you and that's time. But it could also be, hey, could you make yourself more interesting? And that that actually being a really good way to network. Yeah. Yeah. I remember when I was a new grad, people would say networking so important. And I thought, okay, so I'm supposed to, I guess, reach out to people and connect to them and this and ## Career reflections [01:05:32] it felt really artificial. And so I never really did it. And then more recently, I have all these these side things that, you know, I'm writing content or I'm I'm building like a keyboard on the side, this little project. And I've noticed that it has made conversations so much more natural because there's this unusual interesting side mission that I'm doing that people kind of checking in on. Also similarly like you have so much stuff too that you're working on that even when I just meet you we could probably talk for hours just going over the stuff that I'm curious about that you're working on. So I guess the the last thing that I'd like to go over and this is something that I ask everyone is if you were to go back to yourself at the end of college you're right about to enter the industry and you're going to give yourself some advice knowing everything that you know today. What is something that you tell yourself at the beginning of your career that you think would make the biggest difference? I think the thing I wish I realized way way earlier in my career is that there are no gatekeepers. Like you don't need permission from anyone when it comes to learning a technology or trying out something new. Like I think in school like I I did well in like high school. I did fairly well in college. Like I I think I was able to do that because I was very methodical and stious with whatever I was given. But I don't think I was as creative or like as exploratory as I could have been. Like for example like your project of building out a keyboard. That's so cool. Like you didn't need permission. You didn't no one told to do that. You just did it. And those are the things that I think are the most interesting. Even okay, build out a mobile app for fun or like I had this recent project now where I'm building out some extensions for a app launcher on my Mac. Like it's like random things. Like I think if I had learned earlier that you are empowered and you should feel like this desire to do something unique based off of what you care about rather than just doing what everyone else around you is doing or what the instructor or the manager is telling you to do. That is how you get an outlier outcome. And I wish I had tried harder to cultivate more creative interests, I would say, earlier on or at least allocated time to those creative interests in a much more deliberate way than what I did for most of my career. So, and it sounds like in the second half of your career, you started to take more of that initiative and kind of just will your way into creating the tools or this new company that you've been working on. And so, it sounds like that's made a big difference. Is that right? And you wish you had done that sooner. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I feel like I got there eventually with like, okay, I made tutorials on YouTube and I I remember feeling so much joy when people started commenting on my YouTube tutorials like, "Oh, this is such a magical, helpful tutorial. Thank you for making it." I love that feeling. I published Android apps. I um started doing these like webinars with 800 people. Like it felt like someone lift off the blindfolds and like you can do anything. Like you're not going to be ready to go start a company. you're not going to be ready to go like publish an app. You're not going to be ready to go teach people. Just do it now. And I think I wasn't this like wait and let me get better, let me get smarter, let me I don't know. So that's something about like just me being way more passive early on in my career. And until at some point I'm like, hey, I'm old enough. I've I've done enough. I like got a job already. Like what am I waiting for? Let me just go do it. I wish I had adopted that mindset way early. Even in like middle school or high school, I think it's not too early. But you can just start having that same mindset of creative expression or just like pursuing things that you care about way earlier way earlier on in life. Right. So it's kind of like the um the main character energy versus the NPC energy. Is that right? Yeah, I like that. Yeah. I mean it you don't have to be a main character in every domain of your life. Those kind of people might be kind of annoying to to be with like in certain domains. Like I think it's good to try and be the main character in like certain parts of your life at least, you know, like for things that you care about or things where you have a unique take. I like that. That's maybe a Yeah, don't be the NPC. Just be the main character. Awesome. Well, that's Yeah, that's everything. Thanks so much for sharing all this. I think there's so much gold in here for the audience. I really appreciate it. And at this point, if you want to plug anything, yeah, now's the time to do it. So anything you want to mention to for the audience? I mean we touched on it for a bit but like I mean I am working for the past two and a half years on this company called Taro. It is born out of my own experience in the tech industry like how do I grow my career? How do I figure out how to feel more confident, productive, get paid more money? And so if people are interested in that kind of stuff they want to get feedback or advice from really smart people who I respect. Like I've been working on that every day for the past two and a half years and I'm I'm really proud of kind of the knowledge that we've been able to accumulate. So people can check that out jointaro.com or you know just follow me or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm happy to do whatever I can to help people. I'll put all the links to Rahul's uh YouTube to Taro to his LinkedIn as well. So you can see that in the show notes. Thanks for for for coming, Rahul. Yeah, thanks for having me. This was super fun. Hey everyone, Ryan here. Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed the conversation with Rahul. I really appreciated how transparent he was throughout the entire conversation. So, I hope that it was really helpful. You can take a look in the show notes. I left a bunch of links to him if you want to get more from Rahul. And if you have any feedback about the show, anything that you liked or that you disliked, I'd love to hear it. You can leave comments on YouTube. That's where I've been checking for feedback. I'll read every comment that I get. Also, if you have any requests for future guests or maybe questions that you wish I would have asked, would also love to hear that as well. Thanks again for listening and I hope to see you in a future