Mok Oh - CTO at Mercari

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. I am very excited. Some special news today. We just finished recording our first master class, which covers the five biggest actions you can implement today to kick start your leadership transformation and is jam-packed with insights that you can leverage to propel yourself and your team forward. Visit leaderbits.io.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:22) You can click on it. It's on the homepage, and it's absolutely complimentary. Today, we are talking to Mok Oh, the CTO at Mercari, and we discuss going beyond engineering to understand the why, optimizing your relationship with your venture capital partners, and the difference between a good engineer and a great engineer. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:51) This is the Modern CTO podcast. I was looking through your profile. You've had an amazing career, man.

(Mok Oh at 00:01:08) Yeah. It looks like that on paper.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:14) Right? When I get introduced before talks, they say all these great things, and I'm like, that sounds good, but that's not how I feel inside.

(Mok Oh at 00:01:26) Yeah. It was, yeah, it's a lot of ups and downs, of course. I think each of them had their own little stories, and I don't know. It was a good journey so far.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:43) It is. So you ended up now—was PayPal or Samsung, which came first?

(Mok Oh at 00:01:49) PayPal came first.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:51) Okay. And I'm assuming you were in that little room with Musk and his brother, showering at the YMCA with them.

(Mok Oh at 00:01:58) Oh, no, no, no. That was, I was way after. So I went to PayPal via an acquisition of a company called Where, W-H-E-R-E. It was actually a startup from Boston, and that acquisition was in early 2010, 2011, somewhere there. And Where was a company that was around before, of course. And what we did was a lot of location-based services. And at that time, smartphones were coming up, and GPS was not yet embedded into our everyday lives like in our smartphone. So lots of different tinkering with hardware, GPS hardware, from pet tracking—definitely ahead of the times, of course. We did a lot of mobile location-based advertising. There was a feature phone application that we did for AT&T. It was very much like Yelp. So we could find places on your flip phone, bunch of stuff that was done there. And that whole technology and mobile team were about 130, 150 people. We were bought by PayPal at that time, and then I ended up moving to San Jose after the acquisition. And then I was there for about a year and a half or so.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:37) Very cool. And then you were like, I need to go make TVs.

(Mok Oh at 00:03:42) Yeah. I mean, PayPal was doing amazingly well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:48) Are they still doing amazingly well?

(Mok Oh at 00:03:50) Oh, yeah, I think so.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:53) Okay. I don't follow it.

(Mok Oh at 00:03:55) What's that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:55) I don't follow it, but I kept hearing there's, they were doing something with eBay, and they were coming together with eBay, and now they're separating from eBay. And so that's the extent of my experience. Whenever they make a headline, I hear about them.

(Mok Oh at 00:04:07) Yeah. I mean, anything online payments, PayPal is still the king. When we got acquired, eBay and PayPal were the same company. And of course, at the executive level, there's constant discussions about should PayPal be separated or not, and there's always debates and healthy debates about it. Of course, I left, and then they got separated, and PayPal is just shooting way up in terms of just if you just look at the market cap versus eBay right now, of course. I mean, they're much bigger. They're three times bigger right now, actually. Before, when it started, it was basically a split, and it's fairly the same size. And then now, you know, PayPal is doing, I think, quite well. I mean, there are challenges, of course. There's all these other challenges coming into that space constantly. Things are constantly shifting around. Different types of cryptocurrency are coming out. And there's never any kind of ending to, I guess, innovation that's happening in the fintech space. But I feel like, having looked at what PayPal is capable of, I have all the faith that they will continue to be a significant player in the fintech space for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:31) Nice. And so you're not a stranger of money either because I saw that you have some experience with venture capital. You're an entrepreneur in residence somewhere. Tell me a little bit about that. Are you super active? Do you just provide advice to some of the founders?

(Mok Oh at 00:05:48) Yeah. I think for me, it's more being in the arena more so than investing. That's fun. It's hard to be a coach without playing for me. So I do want to play. I do want to be involved. I want to operationalize companies. And that's really what I think makes a difference between a good company and a great company—is actually being in there and making sure that, you know, you add value every day, and you've got to earn it every day. I think that—I really believe that's an important aspect of making companies awesome. I think there are a lot of venture capitalists, of course, that are amazing. And sometimes, I mean, you have to be patient in that game because there are a lot of misses to hits, of course, and it's hard. I'm sure a lot of people who are VCs now are—I'm sure they're itching to try to help, but it's more influence that you have as a lever than an actual action. And I think for me, I'm just too impatient for that. So yeah, I tried it out for a while, and started my own company, which was called Mojo Labs. Raised a little bit of money. It was in the social space, and it was really hard. You know, we ended up folding the company, but again, that was a huge learning experience for me. And you get to know about yourself more and more as you experience these things and go through really, really difficult times. And those are the times when I think I've learned the most. Do I want to ever do that again? Probably not.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:47) Oh. Yeah. I just finished—well, I didn't just finish—but in November, I finished raising my first round of money. First time ever doing it. I'd always been on the due diligence side, working with venture capital companies, just taking a look at their investments and giving my technical opinion from a how clean is this code base, is it scalable, what's going to happen if we inject capital into it, and, you know, are these people really that talented or not. And so that was my experience before. So I'd seen—I'd been around it and kind of been in the space, but I'd never done it, raised the capital. And so when I went to go do it, I was like, oh man, this is tough because you want to be back at the business, making the business better. But instead, you're at the business, and then you have to stop mentally and then go raise money. And yeah, and it was just this experience. Luckily, we raised, you know, enough money so that I didn't have to be constantly on the road. And—

(Mok Oh at 00:08:48) That's awesome. Congratulations.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:48) Thank you. And I had a really good partner with the whole entire process that was just really great. So it went about as smooth as I think it could go, but it was still hard. It was still really hard.

(Mok Oh at 00:09:02) Yeah. It does suck up a lot of your time and energy. But then you're mining for oxygen, and you die without it. And I know—it's you have to breathe, and you've got to get to the next level. But the other thing also is that I think finding the right investors as partners is a very important piece. I think a lot of entrepreneurs would think that money is money, but that's—I don't think that's true. For me, the relationships, the doors they can open with a single phone call, some of these just magical things that they've just stacked up over many decades of experience—that's truly, truly, I think, invaluable. So oftentimes you go for less money, but more about the relationship than not. But yeah, and of course, that might lead to some more oxygen, and it can keep going after that as well. But yeah, it's a necessary—I wouldn't say evil. It's a necessary, I guess, experience and tools of the trade that you need because, again, I think you'll never run out of not needing money. You always need money. So, you know, I think raising money is—for some, it's fun. For a lot of us, it's a pain in the ass, but, you know, you've got to do it, got to do it well. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:34) Yeah. It's different than you imagine. At first, you—I guess, I don't—I haven't had to articulate this before, so I'm just going free here. But at first, it's like you imagine you go, you present, you get money. But that's not it at all. It's like you get introduced, you start building a relationship, you develop this relationship over a couple months, they get to know you, you get to know them, things start to get more serious. Due diligence happens. They talk to your customers. They vet your stuff. Then you start talking about some money and some terms, and it's—and then the actual point where the money happens is when the financial transaction occurs. It's not done until you sign the shares, they're purchasing the shares. And so it's this entire process, and you never know it's done till the moment it's actually inked.

(Mok Oh at 00:11:25) And yeah, that's right. That's totally right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:28) Yeah. It takes a lot of faith and relationships and trust on both sides. And then, you know, you have to do what you say you're going to do. That's the most important thing. It's like you take the money to do A, B, and C, you better report on A, B, and C. But then what I guess, the really great people—all the relationships I formed. And get this: So I did a—the theme of a technology leadership company, right? It happened because of the podcast. People were saying, hey, we hear you talk to great leaders. How do we make our leaders great? I said, I don't know. Good luck with that. And then they kept asking. So I said, all right, well, people are knocking on your front door for a lemonade. Open up a lemonade stand. Right? So technology leadership, it's an education online slash mentoring space. Right? This fund I got introduced to, the five principals behind it all had technology education exits.

(Mok Oh at 00:12:23) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:24) And I was like, whoa, what are the odds of that? Right? And so I said, all right, even if you guys don't invest in me, just tell me where I need to be going because you all—five of you got together from selling your technology education companies, and I need your help because that's what I have.

(Mok Oh at 00:12:40) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:41) And so they've been so useful. Every, you know, 45 days, I call them up, ask for more introductions because they don't give you everybody at once. You ask for an introduction or two, then you wait, then you—there should be a course on optimizing your relationship with your VC partner.

(Mok Oh at 00:12:58) Yeah. No, absolutely. I think that's why there's, of course, board meetings, but also I think constant communication even outside of that makes sense because as you're going through a specific problem or an issue, and as you talk about them, you know, they'll be like, wait a minute, I know so-and-so who did so-and-so, and they were trying to solve similar problems. Maybe you guys can talk. So there are all these serendipitous things that happen, and the only way to make that happen is for you to act upon it. You have to make those—be proactive about reaching out, proactive about communicating, proactive about asking for help. I think those are just important aspects of not just fundraising, but just building relationships and, of course, leading too. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:48) I read Cesar left you a very nice endorsement on LinkedIn.

(Mok Oh at 00:13:55) From Samsung?

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:56) Yes. Okay. Yeah. Cesar. Yeah.

(Mok Oh at 00:14:02) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:02) And he was talking about your ability to create change within an organization, big organization, but you gave the team an empowered small feel. Talk to me a little bit about leadership, how you run your teams.

(Mok Oh at 00:14:16) Boy, that's tough. There's no single formula that works because every single interaction with every different person is different. But I do believe in one thing—is that having a strong opinion helps. I think Andreessen Horowitz, Marc Andreessen said his meetings are held with strong opinions loosely held, which I thought made a lot of sense to me. So without just talking about things that are maybe irrelevant or not that informational, I think having people have a strong stance—I think that's a good place to start. And then I like the loosely held part because it's not like you hold on to that and that's the best thing and you're trying to convince everyone else. And the thing I like is you have a stance. I'm like, I think this is a strong stance because of X, Y, Z. And what do you guys think? And I'm waiting for some gems to come and tell me I'm wrong or tell me how to improve that model or something. And I think those are the important conversations that, you know, leaders should constantly have. For me, I think leading also is asking the right questions more than knowing the answers. At this point, there are just way too many things from technologies to different platforms to topics and subject matters that I will never be an expert in all of them. So then what do you do? How do you add value? And I think ultimately it boils down to making sure that we are all well aligned, well communicating, leading by example, of course. And again, just setting up so that we have healthy but strong discussions and arguments that will make us better in terms of solving a problem or solving, you know, it could be a technical problem or a business problem—having an honest discussion and really enabling that. I think that's where I aspire to go and am constantly trying to train myself to do that. And of course, I mean, there are times simply you just want to get stuff done, and I'm just pounding my table. Like, when is this going to be done? How do we get there faster? What do we need to do? And I'm more in that mode these days mainly because I feel like we're at wartime. We're not at peacetime. We're at wartime. And during wartime, the way we really need to lead is make sure that we can get ahead and have every edge that we can. And, of course, that's not just about working smart, but you have to work hard. You have to perspire every day. Come in, add value every day. And so not just leading by example, asking the right questions, but also making sure that we're aligned and just constantly at it every day. That's, I think, leadership for sure. But that's how I want us to win, though. And, ultimately, it's—well, it's not the means to an end kind of discussion, but also the winning becomes very important right now for us. And, you know, it's—I feel like we're just getting started too, so I think, which is a very good place in the market, I think.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:52) Yeah. It's that day one mentality.

(Mok Oh at 00:17:55) Yeah. Yeah. It's like, hey, let's get together, plan, ideate, sprint. Next, again, and how do we get better? Was this better than the last one we did? If yes, then do it again. Do it again. Do it again. And that's—yeah. That's where we really need to be. Ultimately, I think if you're in an, I guess, arena or the trenches, I think people who have the grit ultimately win out. I mean, smarts are a dime a dozen. I'm pretty smart. You're smart. There are tons of people who are smart.

(Mok Oh at 00:18:33) Then what? Like, how do you—what's the next step? You know, can you be creative like the lots of people who are creative? At the end of the day, I think what differentiates winners from people who are not is that they have the grit and they can go in every day and just grind it out.

(Mok Oh at 00:18:50) And ultimately, it comes down to last man or last woman standing. And it's really in the marketplace now. It's like really no different anywhere else beside, you know, from arena versus marketplaces. So I'm very much—it feels like kind of like MMA.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:09) Yeah, right?

(Mok Oh at 00:19:11) It's like you have to have the conditioning and everything else, and you have to be good at everything. But at the end of the day, all things being equal, the grit that you have will win. And I do believe that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:28) I like that book too, the grit book, where they actually studied grit. Have you read that one?

(Mok Oh at 00:19:33) I think I've read it a long time ago.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:35) Yeah. She starts the beginning of the book—it's a female author—and she's talking about how she analyzed how people made it through some military training. Like, West Point graduates. That's what it was. It was like graduates of West Point.

(Mok Oh at 00:19:52) And then she—

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:53) Went and found like people who are famous and popular for different things. Like, what was their persistence? And it was like these slow incremental improvements over time, this concept that you don't find your passion, you develop it and let it kill you. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:07) Right?

(Mok Oh at 00:20:07) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:07) And like all these very real and raw things, and so I enjoyed that book quite a bit. As I'm doing harder things that require more discipline, I had to learn about discipline because I used to think it was something that like happened when you got in trouble. Right. So my mind had to rewire—it's the ability to do something you don't want to do that'll benefit you and you know you should do it. Right. You know, to go ahead and do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:32) And so I found that discipline in one area of your life is like tugs on disciplines in others. Like, you're either slowly building your discipline up overall or you're slowly breaking it down. And so doing things like forcing myself to wake up at 5 AM and go running, right, and then forcing myself not to think about work during that run. And instead, just think about what can I do to be slightly better than yesterday? You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:59) Mhmm. I've got this like monologue that runs in my head as I'm running, you know, in my neighborhood in the morning. It's saying like, how can I get better? What's the one thing I can do? And then instantly, my mind starts trying to think about work and details and to-dos, and I have to—it's so much energy to like suppress that and just say no. Like, why am I happy? Why am I grateful? Like, what can I do to be better? And that's what I do for the first thirty minutes every day. I sort of—I own my morning. I win my morning, win the day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:24) And I listen to all that type of stuff too. Like, all this—I had previously in my life, say the first thirty years of my life, I'd rejected all of that. That's just what hype people do. It's just like something—just didn't come up on my radar. It wasn't an option.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:40) Then when I started messing with it after I tried everything else—

(Mok Oh at 00:21:45) You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:46) I was like, I'm willing to do whatever works. Like, just show me something that works. Right? Yeah. And then I found that improving your discipline and growing yourself as an individual, that works. And that pays off no matter what is happening with your life in the short term.

(Mok Oh at 00:22:01) That's fantastic. Yeah. It does take a lot of discipline to do that, and it hurts. But I think you grow every day just by challenging yourself to do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:13) I have a hypothetical for you. Yep. So let's say you're an individual contributor. You just got out of code school. You've been writing code for a year and a half on your first team as an individual contributor.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:27) Now you're going to have a conversation with this person, and they're going to ask you, how do they take that next step? How do they—they're hungry. They want to progress, but they just need a little—they need someone else to tell them.

(Mok Oh at 00:22:40) I see. So let me ask you a clarifying question. Does a person want to continue as an IC or get more involved with working with other people?

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:52) They're unsure.

(Mok Oh at 00:22:54) Okay. Then my advice would be go and expand your horizons.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:59) Okay.

(Mok Oh at 00:23:00) I think knowing and having a subject matter expertise really helps, and winning over trust from your coworkers, of course, helps a lot too. I tell my engineering team at that, I guess, people at that level, like really try to expand, go beyond just engineering. So at the end of the day, you own that code. You own that piece of code. And so you have to first go upstream and talk to the product managers, and you have to really understand why you're doing this and how does this help ultimately the key result for the company that we want to achieve.

(Mok Oh at 00:23:46) And you have to have that understanding, then it'll motivate you better. So be the product manager. Ask why, and ask how this is going to impact the company, not just your piece of code. And also, one of the other things I ask them to do is swim downstream in a sense that it's not you write the code and you throw it over the wall for QA to catch all your bugs. No. You own the bug. You own—you are responsible for how this impacts a business. And if it's a buggy code, then it's not for QA to catch it. It's for you to own it and be responsible and accountable for how that does. So I think I would just at least start from there understanding why and how do I make my code more robust.

(Mok Oh at 00:24:36) I think there's a more cross-functional excellence that's going to be necessary where in a lot of times, in many organizations, engineering organizations are fairly insulated in a sense that there's stuff they do and then the output's code. But then, ultimately, going beyond will help you and everyone else actually grow. And then having that cross-functional excellence actually will make you very invaluable in any company. I would also even ask and say that don't necessarily just put yourself into one box where you're an iOS or Android or web or back end. Don't be just that developer, but go expand further into other places too.

(Mok Oh at 00:25:22) So for example, a lot of our, I guess, web front end engineers really delve—dive deeper into APIs so they can be a bit more rounded full stack engineers and be able to move faster in certain themes of projects that we're doing. So, ultimately, I guess, at that level, the important piece here is just expanding out and going beyond your IC bubble, but like pop that, go out, and experience other people's—why they're doing things and how you can make yourself better there too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:05) That's great advice. I like it. Let's talk a little bit about the company you're at today. 100 million downloads. Right? Over 100 million.

(Mok Oh at 00:26:13) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:13) Japan and US. Correct? That's where it's primarily at?

(Mok Oh at 00:26:18) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:18) So where did the coding start? Did the coding start in Japan, or did the coding start in the US?

(Mok Oh at 00:26:23) Oh, in Japan. It was a company that's founded in 2013 by Shin. Okay. And it was all in Japan first. And US started about five years ago as well. Soon after about a year after Japan, US started there. But it was more initially an effort to make sure it was an offensive strategy in a sense that if we are successful in Japan, we have to be successful elsewhere because at the end of the day, companies that are successful in other marketplaces will come into Japan anyway. So that was the initial strategy. And yeah. I mean, now we run US as a totally separate, wholly owned sub of Mercari HD.

(Mok Oh at 00:27:18) And, of course, there's Japan Mercari as well. And then, of course, there's Merpay, which started in Japan at this point already. We'd launched in February, actually. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:28) So I've got some questions about Japanese code. First of all, do you speak Japanese?

(Mok Oh at 00:27:33) No. I don't. No, I don't.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:34) Secondly, have you seen the code—the Japanese code base?

(Mok Oh at 00:27:38) I have. Yes. Because it was actually a hard fork. Much—well, much of the back end is a hard fork from a couple years ago.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:48) What is it? Is it English? Is it Japanese? What's the language?

(Mok Oh at 00:27:53) Yeah. So language is PHP. Oh. But a lot of the common words are Japanese.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:57) So the function names themselves were English?

(Mok Oh at 00:28:01) Yes. Of course. Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:02) Oh, very cool. Yes. That's exciting. Right?

(Mok Oh at 00:28:05) Yeah. No. It is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:06) It's exciting to know. Most people don't.

(Mok Oh at 00:28:12) I think initially, there was—it was before my time, but initially there was a harder, I guess, learning curve especially because our code, of course, has been built up for a longer period of time. And also a lot of the comments were in Japanese. And, you know, when that happens and you don't read or understand Japanese at all, then it is not easy to at least come up to speed. Right. But we've been really trying to change that.

(Mok Oh at 00:28:44) And so for US, we have engineers in Japan as well, and we also have engineers in Boston. And because we are a sort of a US-focused marketplace, there's a conscious effort to make sure that we're definitely speaking English as well as coding and commenting in English as well and documentation, everything in English at this point.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:07) So I have some friends who've lived in Japan, been in Japan. So I've had some conversations about Japan. And one of the things that they said is this concept of cleanliness is like well tied to Japan. Mhmm. They are extremely clean. They don't have a whole lot of trash cans publicly. They take their trash with them. And so my question as an engineer is how clean was their code? Right? Like, was it clean code?

(Mok Oh at 00:29:34) So we right now on the back end—so let me at least let me separate out where we are today, which was really sort of our own code base from about a couple years ago as I mentioned. So the front end code is all basically been revamped a while back because simply localizing what we have in Japan does not necessarily map to how people use the apps in different marketplaces. So the front end UX and UI is important that's not just not only localized, but also have a localized experience for different sort of marketplaces. So that's been separated out from iOS, Android, and web. More on the back end side, we could have a layer that is more of like an abstraction layer for all the APIs.

(Mok Oh at 00:30:36) And from there, it's actually now going into different microservices. So we had one PHP code in the back end that was fairly big, and now we're slowly separating them out into smaller pieces such that it's a lot more architecturally manageable, and also we can go faster in terms of building out different services. So going into that, I guess your question, the code brought us this far. And a lot of people—I mean, there's, of course, discussions about is PHP the future or not. But, ultimately, my stance is we need to embrace PHP because as much as we love microservices and Golang that we're using for that, we also need to embrace PHP because it brought us this far.

(Mok Oh at 00:31:28) Lots of companies still use it. It's constantly getting better, and it's just another language that creates a different service. So it could be part of our microservices. It could be part of not, and as we're sort of migrating and making our back end better and better, ultimately, I tell my engineers, are you a good engineer or a great engineer? Because at the end of the day, you will be an awesome Golang or PHP, be it BASIC, C—regardless of the language of this.

(Mok Oh at 00:32:02) In order to be great, you have to understand what the—not just the requirements are, but why we're doing these things. And all the rest of the stuff that we initially talked about, they're just tools. There's tools to an end where you want to get to. So, again, like there are lots of people who are attracted towards the shiny new object. For me, it's like this is the shiny new object because it brought us this far.

(Mok Oh at 00:32:31) It made us a unicorn. We're making billions. So how do we make this better? And how do we continue to sharpen and shine it around it? And if we need to add other pieces to it, great. Doesn't matter what that is. And as long as it's architecturally sound and we can scale it up, awesome. So the code wise, like it's been amazing. Actually, it's surprising how well it's been done, and then it's surprising how forward looking we are too because it's not just about setting it and leaving it. It's not broken. Just let it be. It's not the attitude. It's constantly saying, how do we get better? How do we improve?

(Mok Oh at 00:33:09) And right now, I had to argue to a point where how do we balance it correctly so that it's not the newest and the latest, but also like making sure that it's robust and, you know, we can continue coding and that we can continue improving it as well. So it was actually very surprisingly well done when I joined, I would say.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:39) Excellent. I want to bring you some value, so I've got a couple questions real quick. Uh-huh. How many engineers do you have at your physical location where you are today?

(Mok Oh at 00:33:48) About, I would say, 50 or so.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:53) Okay. Like engineers, QA, like IT people, about 50?

(Mok Oh at 00:33:58) Oh, yeah. No. Current locations, so we have offices in Palo Alto, Boston, and Portland, and also in Tokyo.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:08) But your office today with all the engineering people. Yeah. Cool. The rest are like sales and support and stuff?

(Mok Oh at 00:34:16) Yes. Portland's mainly QA and customer service. Mhmm. And we opened our Boston offices mainly for data engineering and machine learning.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:30) Oh, that's the Boston office? Yes. How many people do you have there?

(Mok Oh at 00:34:35) We just started. Less than 10.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:37) Okay. I'll tell you what. I'm going somewhere with this, my friend. I'm not collecting Salesforce data. No, I'm just kidding.

(Mok Oh at 00:34:46) What are you typing?

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:47) No. Right. Well, I was at a conference like a couple weeks ago, and they literally said that part of their—like, this company's strategy is they would call people up, do interviews, and start like asking them questions and log their data and sell their data. So that was in the back of my mind because I heard some company talking about that, and so that's why it came out. But the reason why is because we have a lot of great engineers listen to the show. We have a lot of great people that listen to the show. The only reason why we have our audience is they want to know how they can do better, what's the edge, you know, how they can grow. And yeah, they like to find their tribe. And so we like to talk about the cool things that you're working on, you know, like the technology, and then how many people you have and where you're located. And that way people, if they're interested, they can reach out to you.

(Mok Oh at 00:35:31) Great. Great. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we're hiring, of course. I think I was fortunate enough to join a company that had very, very strong product management, engineering, QA, and, of course, a lot of other, I guess, teams as well. And our excellence was really on the mobile side in the back end, and a lot of it was like very, very well done. We're constantly trying to grow, of course, iOS and Android folks and as well as back end engineers, microservices, and SRE. Actually, like, I'm hiring every—the whole shebang.

(Mok Oh at 00:36:14) But I do believe our next step function of growth comes from data and machine learning. Really, it's more about how do we automate and scale and move faster. And much of these things that we're trying to do ends up being—I think it's not really legacy. It's still the way people do it, but there's some UX and UI and product and marketing design that come out, and user experiences we put into our app and services.

(Mok Oh at 00:36:50) We test it out, get feedback, and iterate through that. I think there's another way of design that's coming these days, really about how do we even abstract that further into the next layer. And I think a lot of companies are already doing it, but ultimately, you want everything that you see on your phone as well as your desktop to be personalized. And what that means is things that you click on—for us anyway, things that you're looking at to try to sell—would understand what kind of interest you have, of course, and then making sure all those components or modules are constantly updated. And it's not just a static page of things that you see all the time, but even how and when they show up should be varied depending on your activities and your input to the system.

(Mok Oh at 00:37:53) We're doing the same thing. I call it modules to models. So every module that we have on any kind of device or surface or even different channels like email should be some version of a model. Meaning, it should be something that is not a static thing that a human being puts in, but it's something that should be machine generated and constantly iterating and learning. So from emails, from transactional emails to even just your homepage that you land on, all of those modules that we see should be something that is really based on your preferences that needs to come out. And in order to do that, there are two components that we have been historically lacking, which is more about data engineering and machine learning.

(Mok Oh at 00:38:45) And that's why we're really trying to invest further into those two fields. Data because, ultimately, we need stuff that comes in, and we've got to clean that up and then serve it up to the data science or BI or ML engineers. And ML in the sense that we work closely with the product managers and understand what kinds of pieces of questions and iterations and tests that we need to do, and then put it back into the system so that it can iterate more automatically. Ultimately, what this means is that a lot of the coding that we're doing, hopefully, will get easier and updating of the apps becomes more automatic. And I think that also calls for different types of product managers as well as QA engineering. Because it's not about tapping and testing if that functionality worked or not, but you have to go another layer up.

(Mok Oh at 00:39:45) Meaning, like, if I did this and I saw these results, if I saw this module that's supposed to tell me what I want to buy next, how do I know if that's working correctly or not? It's completely hard.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:00) Edge case, right?

(Mok Oh at 00:40:01) Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So, like, how do you know if A is better than B? So then the QA needs to have a different thinking for that.

(Mok Oh at 00:40:10) And, of course, product managers who are more traditionally about UI and UX and making sure that the tests, A/B tests are done correctly, how do we make sure that all these, you know, not just pixels, but also functionality is being worked out well? Then you've got to start adding on, like, how do we scale it and how do we create the right model for it? And also means that understanding how classifiers work with some fundamentals of data science and machine learning is also a necessary toolset they need to have. So by growing that brains and muscles, I think we're trying to expand out so that it becomes prevalent in all of our services very soon.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:55) And then can you just tell me a little bit about the company's actual end user product, the problem that you solve?

(Mok Oh at 00:41:03) Yep. So the app is called Mercari, M-E-R-C-A-R-I for those just in case you don't know how to spell that. It's a selling app. And basically—well, let me just step back. So if you think about a lot of, I guess, commerce, e-commerce applications or services, eBay, for example, it's really geared towards buyers.

(Mok Oh at 00:41:30) So you make buying so easy. And if you look at Amazon, like, you know, you can do a one-click buy, one-click checkout. We've optimized everything so that you can search, discover, browse, and find stuff that you want or didn't think you wanted, but you need now, and be able to check out very, very quickly and pay and get it as fast as you can and have that delightful experience. So everything historically has been geared towards buying for the consumers. What we're trying to do is flip that around actually, which becomes a not just very interesting business problem, but also a technical problem.

(Mok Oh at 00:42:08) So how do you make buying as easy as possible has been a historical question we asked, but the question now is, how do you make selling easier than buying? And that's not just for the merchants or power sellers, but for everybody. So for every consumer—especially in the US, we have so much stuff in our house, and it's a hoarding culture. And I think, philosophically, I'm not so sure it's healthy. It's not healthy for me.

(Mok Oh at 00:42:41) So I constantly try to minimize and try to keep things to—you know, what Marie Kondo does is, does this spark joy? And I think that's a wonderful test to see if something that you own—I mean, whatever that you have, it either has to be useful, it has to be valuable to you in some way or another, and everything else, maybe it needs a different home. And so we're really trying to enable that. In order to make that happen as frictionlessly as possible, we need people to be able to have an experience where selling is easier than buying.

(Mok Oh at 00:43:17) So that's really our mission. Like, how do you make it so that if there's a one-click checkout, what's the equivalent for that such that people could sell their stuff at home? And then lots of not just technical, but business issues and operational issues come out. And that's where things get started to get exciting. And, of course, lots of different experts coming up with their toolsets, and we're all together trying to figure out what the right set of solutions might be for everyone else.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:45) Like, I'll tell you, you're sparking a big interest in me right now because so many times, I've thought, I should sell that. Like, it's probably worth $60 or something, but I'm like, I don't have to take the pictures and the Craigslist, and I can't do it on my phone. And then if I go on eBay, there's, like, I have to register an account. There's, like, this huge, like, overhead to me selling it. I'm like, you know what? Let's throw it away. It's not worth my time for $60 or give it—have my wife do something with it or, you know, like, we'll figure something out, but it's just the—there was a lot of sales resistance. There's resistance to me selling it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:21) And so I just don't. There's so much sales resistance, there's physical eBay stores. That's how much sales resistance there is. You guys should be like, we're trying to knock them out. It shouldn't be that difficult.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:35) I hope that's in your pitch deck.

(Mok Oh at 00:44:37) Yeah. I know. That's what we're—ultimately, it's like anything that you think can find some other home, like, how do you make it so that you can just point your phone at it and maybe not even press a button. Just open the app and point your phone at it. And there are lots of technologies and innovations that are happening that will better understand what the thing is that you might want to sell.

(Mok Oh at 00:45:00) We also make it easy and, you know, we launched the partnership with UPS where we call it Pack and Ship. You bring your stuff to UPS and just drop it off, scan it, get out, and that's it. And then if you think about it, like, lots of amazing back end, back office things needed to happen for that to happen. And then it's magical now for the users. And I love that because it's not just technical excellence, but it's operational excellence, business development excellence.

(Mok Oh at 00:45:32) And to make this happen, and we're using all sorts of tools of the trade that we have in order to win the marketplace. Some of the other things that differentiate us is that it's all logistics-based. So you don't have to, like, meet somebody in a dark alley to get money and trade this stuff. That's good.

(Mok Oh at 00:45:50) Like, yeah. You just basically ship it. Everything's shipped.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:54) That's my data. And my track—I minimize my dark alley experiences. I want them to be zero, negative one. I'm in the sunshine all the time.

(Mok Oh at 00:46:03) Yeah. Exactly. So I think there's lots of things that we've done that has a pretty high bar in terms of barrier to entry that makes us unique and wonderful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:16) Well, especially the 100 million downloads.

(Mok Oh at 00:46:19) Yeah. Yeah. Just amazing. I've only joined since last May, so I'm still less than a year. But then when I look at the history and hear about the rise of Mercari in Japan especially, it's just magical, phenomenal ride, like, to quickly go from, you know, zero to one in a very short amount of time, first unicorn to come out of Japan.

(Mok Oh at 00:46:54) US is doing phenomenally well, and I feel like we're just getting started. And we've built so many defenses—or it's an offensive-defensive strategy where it's not that easy for any company to come in and play. So it just makes it an amazing place. Of course, I mean, going back to the hiring piece that we were talking about before, the thing that I love about Mercari is our culture. I think that was the deal.

(Mok Oh at 00:47:29) And Maker for me is that he talked to everyone here. Everyone's just so smart, so dedicated, and it still feels like a very small startup to a point where we can get stuff done. So there'll be a meeting, we discuss, think about something, and we can deploy almost in a day. And now we're doing, personally, in the apps, we have a weekly deployment schedule. I think we can go faster if we need to.

(Mok Oh at 00:47:57) There's continuous deployment in the back end. There's not just engineering, but the overall, just the company, the culture that we're building has been just phenomenal that, you know, I don't ever want to leave.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:12) There you go. You don't have to. And then I like your history too because, like, insight, it's always 20/20, right? But you did payments, right, like PayPal, then you did stuff with Samsung and payments and mobile and eBay and that type of world. Now you're back in your mobile excellence and payment excellence and shopper connection. It's like it always seems beautiful in hindsight. But I do have a question about the app without having used it yet.

(Mok Oh at 00:48:38) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:39) My initial thought was it would be so cool if I could take my phone and point it at that wall. And it object identified different things and told me, like, how much I could get for a used estimate.

(Mok Oh at 00:48:53) Do you guys do that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:54) Do you guys do that?

(Mok Oh at 00:48:55) Coming soon.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:56) Coming soon. Yes. Because, like, you see on LinkedIn, you see on social media, like, the detection, the detection technology is pretty good and pretty accessible.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:09) You know? It's like you have the data of how much the iPhone goes for or how much this style of cup goes for.

(Mok Oh at 00:49:15) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:15) You can show me an average, and I could just point around the house. Which thing do I want to sell?

(Mok Oh at 00:49:20) Yep. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:20) What do I want to sell right now?

(Mok Oh at 00:49:21) No. That's right. So I think combining it with AR as well as—so I think object detection, that's fairly mature technology. Some of the things that are more difficult is sometimes if it's a collectible, it doesn't depreciate, but it appreciates in terms of value. And, also, it depends on who you ask.

(Mok Oh at 00:49:47) And so there are lots of little parameters that affect the function and including timing. So, in terms of pointing and understanding what you might have and what kind of value you can get, like, we already have pieces of all that. We're already putting it together. We'll see if it's going to be useful or not. And many times that people just know exactly what they want to sell and click and sell it, be able to sell it.

(Mok Oh at 00:50:18) Some of the other things that we want to do is, again, as I said, like, flip the buying thing around to selling. If you go to Amazon, there are things like, oh, you bought this, so you might want to buy this. What if you flipped it around and said, hey, you sold this. What if you have some of the other things that people typically sold as well?

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:35) I like it.

(Mok Oh at 00:50:35) So putting those, without being too freaky.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:39) Yeah. Would that be weird. Yeah.

(Mok Oh at 00:50:41) Right. So just making sure there's a gentle notifications or reminders of things that you might also have and motivating you to sell it. And especially when you add a value to it, these people bought this thing that you might have for this much. All you've got to do is, you know, take a picture. Boom.

(Mok Oh at 00:51:00) Yeah. So it's lots of very interesting technical to business challenges that we're unearthing as we speak. But, yeah, coming soon.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:09) Some of my future ideas make better commercials. Right? Like, you see the person pointing around the room, and then you pointed at the wife or the dog and something funny happens. It's, like, no or something. That's okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:22) Right? Like, you're pointing from thing to thing. It's telling you its value, and then you get something you can't sell.

(Mok Oh at 00:51:27) Yeah. Exactly. You know? Yeah. You will certainly see pieces of that being tested very, coming soon.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:34) That sounds fun. I'm really excited. Thank you so much for coming on and hanging out with me, talking about technology, sharing your views on leadership. I love them. We're similarly aligned in our views on leadership.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:46) So I'm very grateful you came on and hung out. If I'm in your area, I'll let you know and stop by and say hello.

(Mok Oh at 00:51:52) Absolutely. Absolutely. And please do. Joel, it's been a pleasure. Thanks for your time, and, you know, hopefully, we can do it again sometime.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:58) Thank you so much, Mok. You have a fantastic day.

(Mok Oh at 00:52:03) You too. Talk soon.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:05) Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to help, please take a moment right now to open up the iTunes app and leave a review of the podcast. If you take a screenshot of the review and text it or email it to a friend who needs to listen to the podcast and then CC me, [email protected]. If you CC me on the email, I'll send you a copy of the Modern CTO book or give you a shout out on the podcast, whichever you prefer. We're trying to get listed on the top 100 for iTunes, and I need your help in order to do this.