Anand Thaker - CTO & Co-Founder at Pulse Q&A

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) If you want your team stacked with humble, outcome-driven, technically capable people, then you'll want to set up a CLEAR review. CLEAR stands for Complimentary Leadership Evaluation and Review, and we created it for teams and technology leaders just like you. So here's what you'll leave the CLEAR review with: a clear step-by-step plan tailored to your exact situation, tactical insights on how you can apply these skills immediately, and a review of your leaders' abilities so you can see how your team stacks up to 500 other teams that are just like yours. And we'll answer all of your questions about how to create better leaders faster.

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:41) Remember, great leaders grow companies. Visit leaderbits.io/clear to set up your CLEAR review today. Today we are talking to Anand, the CTO and co-founder at Pulse Q&A. And we discuss the keys to a great relationship with your co-founder, benefits of passionate problem solvers, and how you can leverage the compounding nature of time to propel your career forward. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:13) This is the Modern CTO podcast. Hey, buddy.

(Anand at 00:01:25) How's it going?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:27) Fantastic. How are you, my friend?

(Anand at 00:01:28) I am good. How are you doing?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:31) Pretty good. My little girl got the chicken pox today.

(Anand at 00:01:35) Oh, I see. I see. So, well, I've never had chicken pox, and I've never been vaccinated for it either.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:43) Stay away from small children.

(Anand at 00:01:45) I know. I know. Actually, I'm at home today. I got back from the hospital recently. I randomly got a staph infection.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:56) What?

(Anand at 00:01:57) Yeah. In my elbow. And it's been a week now, but my elbow still doesn't really bend and hurts very much. If I'm in an Uber, it hurts. I can't really get into a car, and I definitely can't rest my elbow on anything.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:13) That's crazy. Do you know how it happened?

(Anand at 00:02:16) No. It's the most random thing. They said that you must have had a cut or something on your elbow when this bacteria got in through it. But this is what they call a superbug. I don't know if you've heard of those.

(Anand at 00:02:30) But these are staph bacteria that are resistant—I think they're called MRSA—and they're resistant to antibiotics. So it was really tough to get them out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:43) Dude, that's crazy.

(Anand at 00:02:44) Yeah. It's so random, but yeah, glad to be back. And I should be going into work starting next week.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:52) Well, that's good.

(Anand at 00:02:53) Yeah. Good to have—

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:54) Good to have you back with the team. Right?

(Anand at 00:02:57) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because in a startup, this is a long, long time to stay away.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:01) Right. Well, how long have you been away?

(Anand at 00:03:04) I've been away for two weeks now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:05) Two weeks. Yeah.

(Anand at 00:03:06) But I've been working from home for a few days, and we'll be starting up soon.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:12) Well, luckily there's Slack. Right?

(Anand at 00:03:15) Luckily there's Slack, and it doesn't make up for the presence, which is really important. But yeah, all these tools really help. Zoom helps. So it's fine. And we have two engineers overseas, so I—it doesn't matter anyways with those guys.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:32) Yeah. I like it. We have some people remote too, and it's always an interesting dynamic mixing the in-office people culture with the remote people. But we've managed to do it through stand-up meetings on Fridays where everybody videos in if they're not in person. And that's how we've connected our culture.

(Anand at 00:03:52) That's great. So, I've noticed that you have a bunch of CTO interviews up, and I noticed some great names in there. So congratulations on your success. How long have you been doing this?

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:05) About a year. A little bit over a year, year and a half. Maybe two years. I don't know. Time goes by really fast.

(Anand at 00:04:12) Yeah. Yeah. That's great. And do you generally interview CTOs from all kinds of company sizes starting from small companies to large companies?

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:24) Yeah. Especially when we first started out, I started with some friends, some people that I knew, and then we branched out. And then slowly we started to get an audience. And then other CTOs with notable brands started to reach out and say, "Hey, you gotta come on the podcast." And we're like, "Yeah. Absolutely." And then it just grew from there. Now we have a six-month waiting list.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:47) I know. It's crazy.

(Anand at 00:04:49) Yeah. Well, I'm glad you could fit me in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:52) No. Right when I saw what you guys are doing with Pulse Q&A, I was like, this is really unique. Specifically how you were taking it away from the analysts and more about the practitioners, because that's what I'm all about here at the podcast. It's like, I don't want to read about a leadership author that has never actually led. They've just researched other people. I want the practitioners that are actually doing it on a day-to-day basis to come talk directly to the audience. I mean, that's why we have technology. It's like we can hear directly from the CTO of NASA or Microsoft. We don't have to hear from an academic person about it.

(Anand at 00:05:26) Absolutely. In talking to CTOs and CIOs, we—early on when starting out Pulse—we talked to over 100 of them. And we asked them what really bothers them. And one of the number one complaints we heard is that, first, they don't have a lot of time. They have to make more decisions than ever. And they have to read all these really long, lengthy reports. And who has time to read a 20, 30-page report only to see some simple conclusion at the end of it? So the number one thing they expressed is they would like to be able to engage with their peers in an easy way. And that's how Pulse was born. My co-founder, Mayank, and I worked with him in the past, used to work at a company called Capriza where he got a chance to work with a lot of CIOs. And at that time, he was on the vendor side. So he got to know a lot of them, and he learned about their pain points, and that fed into Pulse.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:25) So give me a quick overview. What is Pulse for people who don't know?

(Anand at 00:06:30) Absolutely. So Pulse is a community of C-suite executives, and we're dedicated to helping them make better decisions through discussions, Q&A, and bite-sized polls. You might be familiar with Glassdoor. And Glassdoor has that one simple question, which is, "What is your salary?" And that's how they started out. And you can go and answer your salary. This question really worked because everyone wants to know everyone else's salary, but no one wants to share their own. But the key thing you want to know is not always a specific person's salary, but how much would I make in a similar role? So Glassdoor solved it by aggregating responses and preserving anonymity. So you can actually know the average salary that an engineer at Google makes without knowing what your friend specifically makes. And this worked out really well. We have bite-sized polls that we allow our members of our community to ask that work the same way. You can take any questions such as, "What is your priority for investing in machine learning next year?" And it can be a quantitative question. You send it out to the audience, and you quickly get all the answers you need from your peers, who are verified before they join the community. And you can be sure that you're hearing from the best in class.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:59) That's pretty cool.

(Anand at 00:08:00) Yeah. And we decided to start out by focusing on CIOs and IT decision makers because we realized that this is where a lot of the action is happening. There are so many products coming out. If you think back in the day, there were half a dozen to a dozen database management systems. Now there are hundreds of them. How does one keep track of everything? How do you know what's best? So if you go out there to these random message boards, they are littered with questions around, "Should I be using CouchDB or should I be using MongoDB or should I be using DynamoDB?" If you think of CRM software, there weren't that many players, but now there are literally thousands of players, or if you think of ERP software. So helping executives make sense of all these products is something we hope to do. And as a result, make better decisions rather than just going by gut feel. So we go after CIOs and IT decision makers. One, because there's a lot of cognitive dissonance there. The industry moves really fast, and the spend in this area is tremendous. I believe the figures last year were around $3 trillion on software and services spent by companies worldwide.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:23) Wow. That's a huge market. You know, I was just reading yesterday, did you see Musk putting up his satellite?

(Anand at 00:09:30) Yes. Actually, I don't think it happened.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:33) No. It got scrubbed. It got scrubbed.

(Anand at 00:09:34) It got scrubbed again. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:35) It was just the same time. Yeah.

(Anand at 00:09:36) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:36) Yeah. Because it's only two and a half hours for me, so we were gonna try to go see it.

(Anand at 00:09:40) Oh, that's fantastic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:42) Yeah. And then we kept seeing it get scrubbed and we're like, "Oh, man." But when I was reading farther into the article, he was talking about how his rocket business caps out at $3 billion a year in transport. That's as much money as they can make. But they're entering the internet space because if they capture 3% of the global internet market, that's $30 billion a year. And so they said, "We literally cannot generate enough revenue to do the things we want to do even if we're max capacity for this industry. So what we're gonna have to do is we're gonna have to use this to launch us into something else." And so then they came up with the internet thing.

(Anand at 00:10:21) No, that makes a lot of sense. I think SpaceX has a bright future in front of it. And internet is definitely an area where they could stand to make a lot of money. I think we will see them rapidly expand into this space. What I wonder about is how we're going to deal with the proliferation of all these small satellites in space, crowding everything out. It's really not that big an area if you think about it, and we have more and more objects out there. So I wonder how companies are going to deal with it, but it remains a challenge.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:55) We're gonna—you and I, we can open up a space trash company.

(Anand at 00:10:59) We should do a podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:02) We'll call it "Space Trash."

(Anand at 00:11:05) Sounds great. Right? Yeah. There's a lot of initiatives, I think, by the US government. There's a Swiss company I heard of that I think has a robotics arm that goes and grabs—there's a company that anchors into space debris and then throws it down. So we'll see. I'm sure there will be innovative solutions in this area as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:29) Right. You know AOL? So Steve Case is the co-founder of AOL, and they did this revolution tour where they went around to these—not the major cities like New York or San Francisco—but they went around to second-tier cities like Tampa and Orlando. And they did essentially a pitch competition. And one of the companies that pitched, and I think they won, but one of the companies that pitched was they go into space and they literally will adjust the orbits of different space debris.

(Anand at 00:12:02) Oh, it's interesting. To help them fall back to Earth?

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:06) Well, no. So this is a little bit different than our original discussion. But so what they do is—they have to put propellant in the satellites to push them to higher-level orbit. So they drop them off at one level of orbit, then they propel up. But that's a really costly procedure. So what this company was doing was putting a tow truck essentially into space so all the companies could reduce payload costs by just putting them into one orbit, and then they take them—it's like last-mile delivery, but for space.

(Anand at 00:12:38) That makes sense. I think I know what you're talking about. I think they often call them graveyard orbits, especially for geosynchronous satellites that are way out there. You can't have them fall back to Earth, so they just push them out. That makes sense. That's really cool. Yeah. I think space in general becomes a very interesting industry with—you have all kinds of—until now, it was just exploration. And that's why it was the domain of governments. But it's been expanding into construction and manufacturing. And you have mining and transportation even, internet too. So all these new areas are opening up. I heard of a company that wants to open a luxury hotel in space, where they'll have four people and two staff in the hotel, and you get to stay there for a week or so.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:28) That's pretty neat.

(Anand at 00:13:30) That's pretty neat.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:31) I mean, I don't know if I'd do it. I'm looking forward to when the hotel experience is equal to that on Earth, I will go.

(Anand at 00:13:41) I would happily do it if I could afford it. It will be millions of dollars, but I would happily do it. It's one of my—

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:50) That is true. Well, we could build a trampoline. Not sure. We'll get you there, man. Alright. So we know that's a—this is a future poll that will probably happen on Pulse Q&A. Right? How much will space disrupt your industry?

(Anand at 00:14:06) As soon as we finish the podcast, I'm putting it up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:09) Right. I'll tell you one company I saw. They built these little satellites. They put them up into space because it's only $10,000 a pound. If you want to put something into space that's 10 pounds, it's like $100,000. Right? Put yourself in space. And that's actually really interesting. There's something that is more obtainable than the hotel. Right? But you put it into space and then it was tracking the ships in the sea because they have these giant numbers on the side of them to identify the ships. And what they were doing was they were correlating the numbers on the ships to the ports that they were going to on the shipping logs. And then they could determine when a shipment would be late. Well, it turns out in the stock market, this is very useful if you've got raw materials that'll be delayed by a quarter because it'll adjust your earnings. And so they were using this arbitrage of knowing when the shipping would be delayed by using the satellites from space prior to the companies themselves actually knowing their shipment was delayed.

(Anand at 00:15:13) That's fascinating. Reminds me of the hedge funds that look at the occupancy rate of parking lots. But taken to the next level. Yeah. That's fascinating.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:23) Like Ray Dalio with his measuring the water to know the crops back in the eighties, measuring the water tables and predicting the yields. He's like, "Alright. The farmers knew it yielded this when it rained this." And so he would know what the production cycle is going to be way before it ever hit the market. That's actually interesting.

(Anand at 00:15:43) That and I've heard of companies looking to how deep oil storage tanks have been filled up to look into what the demand for oil will be in the future.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:57) We live in the most interesting time ever, don't we?

(Anand at 00:16:00) I know. And very hard to predict what's gonna come up next.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:03) Superbugs in space.

(Anand at 00:16:05) Yeah. The ingenuity of people can't be predicted.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:09) I hope there's not superbugs in space.

(Anand at 00:16:11) I think there are. Right? We've been hearing—

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:13) Oh, no.

(Anand at 00:16:14) We've been hearing about that too. Actually, they can grow in space, and there have been some found on the International Space Station.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:21) Really? So it's

(Anand at 00:16:21) an active area of research. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:24) Oh, man. Oh, you know what? I think they bring a lot of drugs up in the space because you can't see a doctor.

(Anand at 00:16:32) I bet they do. I bet you would need everything up there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:35) This is one of the most fun and strange podcast I've had. I really like you. All right, so wait. So you've got to tell me, what are you learning from Pulse? Right? You've got all these people. You're having these conversations, these polls. What are some macro takeaways?

(Anand at 00:16:49) So one thing we've learned is when we started this out, we didn't know what CIOs and CTOs would actually discuss on there. We just decided to let the audience take it somewhere. And initially we found that people didn't actually just come up and start engaging because why would you? There are so many sites out there. Why would you just come to Pulse, an unknown site, and engage?

(Anand at 00:17:15) So initially we went out there, talked to a lot of CIOs and CTOs. We've had some very interesting personalities who've helped us out in the past. The CIO of Palantir, the ex-CIO of Facebook, ex-CIO of Netflix, Head of IT at Uber. So we've had some great people give us advice, and I'm struck by how helpful and generous with their time they are. And they agreed to help us seed some content early on. And that's how we kick-started. We found out that Quora kick-started the same way. So that's how we got started. And then once we had some seeded content, we were able to slowly get the community going.

(Anand at 00:18:01) And what we noticed was that discussions fell into roughly three categories. I can put them into one is the buckets of products and services. What product should I use in this category? What's the best product for me to use given my business use case for CRM and so on? Something about machine learning, for example.

(Anand at 00:18:25) The second we see is around strategy. Many of these CIOs come from a technical background, but they don't have a lot of knowledge about how to work with the company strategy to achieve company goals. So they ask a lot of questions around this area. And the third thing we've observed is there's a lot of leadership questions because they suddenly see an increased team size, and they want to know how to effectively communicate with their team, how to manage their team, and how to make sure their team morale is high and feels rewarded. So these are just some of the things we can observe.

(Anand at 00:19:02) At the same time, what we notice is that CIOs engage on our site for different reasons. There are the very well-established CIOs. They don't need anything. The CIO of Palantir has already made it. You know? They don't need anything from anyone else, but they go out there and they engage on the platform just to help out others. Mike Kail, for example, who was a CIO at Netflix, he goes out there and he just writes content to engage with others and help each other out. And that's his only motivation. He has no reason otherwise to go out there. He just wants to give back to the community and his peers.

(Anand at 00:19:42) There are other CIOs who like to write on there because they want to be on the same platform as their heroes, the CIOs they aspire to be. So we see all kinds of different CIOs engaging for different reasons. And then we see directors—we generally have our audience as decision makers, so we go down as low as directors, but not below. And directors actually engage with products much more than CIOs, who can be sometimes somewhat divorced from the technical details. So we see more substantive discussions coming in from director and VP-level folks.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:21) That's super interesting, right? Because you've had—you have this big network. You've got all these polls. You've got all this data, and then it groups into these three areas: product services, strategy, leadership. And you get the people who want to give back, who've already made it, and then you get the people who are in the process of making a name for themselves, who want to be near the people who have made it because that's what we want to do, right? You want to be close to the most successful people, figure out what they're doing, how they handled and made certain decisions so that you can emulate that behavior and get similar results.

(Anand at 00:20:51) Absolutely. And the other thing I would say that we've learned is that, like I said earlier, the CIOs just don't want to read these large reports. And the biggest company serving them until now has been a company called Gartner. I don't know if you've heard of it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:08) Oh, yeah. Yeah.

(Anand at 00:21:08) They're a very old company. I think they were founded in the seventies. They make $3 billion in revenue every year. So they're not small, but they publish a quadrant. They call it the Magic Quadrant. And the way it works is that they cater to buyers and sellers or vendors. They cater to both sides, and this introduces a conflict of interest because on one hand, CIOs use this to reference—they reference the Magic Quadrant to find out what products they should be purchasing for their business. But the vendors can pay Gartner some money and get better placement on the Magic Quadrant. And this is a little bit like if you could pay Google to bump you up in the search results.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:04) Oh, yeah. And—no, I'm just kidding. In organic search results, I know you mean. I'm sorry.

(Anand at 00:22:09) Organic search results. But you know what I mean? And we've had a lot of leaders express frustration with this. They're aware that this is a problem, but they don't know what to do about it. On top of it, you have to start out by paying $50,000 minimum annually to get a starting account with Gartner, and it only goes up from there. If you want a custom research report, they're going to give you a 30-page report, again, published by an analyst. As you said earlier, you're not hearing from the source, and you're not hearing what the future will be. You want to skate to where the puck will be. Instead, you hear something outdated from an analyst, and they are not actually real operators. So you're not getting the best-in-class info.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:53) And they're using secondhand information. Like, they didn't go through this. They either poll people who did or they talk to the salespeople of the companies who are pushing whatever, check the boxes on their matrix. But they have no idea what it was actually like to go in through an implementation process. I mean, they say they talk to the past customers and all of that, but, you know, they're only giving you the best customers, right?

(Anand at 00:23:16) Absolutely. And what they end up doing is they call up other CIOs, get some info from them, put it into a document or a long report, and then share it. So why are CIOs actually paying for this if they're the ones actually coming up with the info? It doesn't make a lot of sense that you'd pay so much money, shell out so much money for a membership there. So one thing we've learned with Pulse is while CIOs and CTOs lack time, they are willing to engage if information is delivered to them without the fluff. Just get right to the content, get right to the insights and conclusion, and just see the direct data and be able to filter the data. So we allow our users to go and filter the data they see by geography because Europe behaves differently. Tech leaders in Asia are different from tech leaders in North America. You see variations based on company sizes too. A startup may be more likely to use GitHub, but larger companies, for example, are more likely to use Perforce for source control.

(Anand at 00:24:27) So you'll see variations because of company size. That's another area where we allow filtering. And you see that oil and gas companies, for example, prefer different products from tech companies or from manufacturing companies. So we allow filtering in that domain as well. And by filtering, decision makers can hone down to the exact detail they need and compare apples to apples.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:56) That's massively useful. One of the biggest frustrations I had when I was looking for leadership management, management leader-type stuff was you go into a forum or you go into one of these paid sites, and there's only a username. There's no context of how many engineers this person has, what revenue they have, what industry they have. And the leadership advice that a CTO running a 10,000-person company is going to be different than one that's running a 12-person company, right? They're going to be focused on different things. And there was no context. Yes. That's what you guys have done. You've provided self-selecting context. I could filter however I want to, right?

(Anand at 00:25:42) You can filter however you want to, and you can see the data in a way that it's relevant to you so that it actually makes sense.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:53) Perfect. That's what you want. And then can you have conversations around the poll or no? Is it just you just get to put in your information?

(Anand at 00:26:01) No. Great question, actually. When we started out, we only had pure data. We just started out with charts. And then we realized that raw data is great, but it still takes some thinking to tease out small details in there. So we added these insights. So these quick, bite-sized insights that we automatically calculate based on the data that we see, and we just put those up there. The insights are also relevant to the person looking at them. So if you're in manufacturing, you will see insights that are relevant to you based on manufacturing as an industry. If something stands out about others who were in manufacturing who responded to this, we highlight that for you.

(Anand at 00:26:44) So those insights really help. And then we realized that we should have discussions around it too. And now in hindsight, it feels silly that we didn't think of it immediately, but we allow discussions around these bite-sized polls as well. One thing—another thing we learned is people don't just want to answer polls or ask questions, but they want to share content like you do with your friends. You see some interesting article, you go and share it with your peers or friends. Well, these folks want to do it as well. They want to facilitate conversations around interesting things they come across every day. So we have these discussions. We used to just have plain old Q&A, but we expanded that to be able to share videos and share URLs and all kinds of rich media and then facilitate conversations around that. And we've seen these changes have seen a huge uptick in our engagement.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:40) That's pretty cool. I was actually—so Mayank, I got to meet him when I was out in San Francisco, and I got to see your offices, and you guys had your feed up on the screen. And I knew some of the people that were responding. I was like, what? They're over here too? This is awesome. So I actually took a picture of the screen and texted it to him. I was like, hey, check it out. I see you on Pulse Q&A.

(Anand at 00:28:03) That's great. Yeah. Yeah. We have some good personalities on there. Anyone you had on the podcast?

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:09) Yeah. Their name escapes me right now, but I'll ask after and message you because Allison noticed. She's the one that actually pointed out. She goes, "Oh, look. I think his name is Michael." But she goes, "Oh, look. It's Michael." Or whoever it was. And I was like, oh, that's crazy. And then we—yeah, we instantly texted him a picture of it. But one of the things I was curious about that when we were talking about the whole Gartner and business model thing, how do you make money?

(Anand at 00:28:35) Good question. When we started out, we wanted to be clear about one thing. We wanted to avoid what Gartner does and other such companies, meaning we don't want to represent both the buyer and the seller because it creates a conflict of interest. So we decided to not let vendors influence the platform. And this is a segue into talking about monetization, but I want to make this very clear that when we get a user in, we are very careful to make sure that they are in the IT field or in the tech or connected to the technology field in some way, either in data science or in engineering, and they have to be a decision maker. We don't let in individual contributors because we want to have people in there who make decisions for their company, and we want to facilitate them to make better decisions. But we definitely, most importantly, keep the vendors out. We don't let in anyone from the product side or the marketing or sales side into the community. We may set up other communities for those folks, but we don't let them into this core IT community that we have.

(Anand at 00:29:51) But we learned very quickly that they wanted to engage with our community and learn from these folks. Just like, you know SurveyMonkey?

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:02) Yeah.

(Anand at 00:30:03) Early on in Pulse, we went to SurveyMonkey, and we took a look at how you could create a poll on there. And SurveyMonkey actually lets you pick professions and gender and age groups and so on. They have a lot of these different filters, income levels, but their core audience in SurveyMonkey tends to be more skewed towards middle-aged folks. It's skewed towards females, but they don't have a lot of professionals on there. So if you're looking for doctors, let's say, if you're looking for female doctors, you're not going to find them on there. They just don't engage with the platform. So we noticed this was a gap. If you want to actually reach out to professionals or decision makers in any company or executives, how do you do that? There's pretty much nothing available for that. So we noticed this gap.

(Anand at 00:31:00) And now we have a community of buyers who a lot of vendors want to reach. So one way we've made money is by asking questions to our community from vendors, but we make sure to mark them as sponsored questions so that the community is aware of the source of the questions. If you see a question from the community, then the author of the question will be marked as well. But all sponsored questions are appropriately marked, and this is one way we make money. Funnily, we weren't actually looking to start monetization early on, but we got a lot of inbound interest. And we had a couple of companies reach out and say that they wanted to ask questions on the platform. And so we weren't even prepared for this. So we just quoted a price, and they happily accepted. And since then, we keep—we increase the price, but we realize what we—for what we offer, we're still severely undervaluing our service. So this is one way we make money. We're also exploring other avenues.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:11) That's pretty neat, though, right? Because it still satisfies the market balance, like, the dynamics of the vendors needing to get in front of them. But at the same time, it's bringing actual value because you get to improve the questions, and you get to—right? You facilitate that. They can't just ask anything they want.

(Anand at 00:32:34) They can't just ask anything they want. And we've also been careful to make sure to only see questions that are interesting to our audience. So these questions can get boring very quickly, as I think you were hinting at, in the sense of—who are the folks who want to ask questions? Well, we have three types of folks who want to ask questions on the platform. One is the product side folks. And folks on the product side just want to refine their product road map and strategy. What feature should we build out? What's interesting to our audience? And as they learn what features are most interesting to our audience, they will prioritize those features in their product road map. Well, then we have the marketing folks who want to refine their marketing message.

(Anand at 00:33:20) What message resonates with you? But we're careful to not ask some really boring questions like, "Out of these four marketing messages, which one is most interesting to you?" That's not of interest to our audience, and the engagement will go down pretty quickly if we have those sorts of questions. So we make sure to not put those kinds of questions on the platform. And third, the third group of folks asking questions are folks on the finance side.

(Anand at 00:33:47) And they want to ask questions to understand what the buyers are thinking so that maybe they can make better decisions on what companies to invest in perhaps.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:00) Oh, see, I was going to just buy an ad and ask the question, like, "Why would you not want to buy Leaderbase?" Like, just ask that question. "Why would you not want to buy this product?" And yeah. But no, your questions seem to engage, you know, the community and offer value.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:18) So that's pretty cool. I'm actually, like, I hate to plug it a bunch, but I'm a fan of what you guys are doing. Like, the moment I saw you, I reached out to you on Intercom on the chat, and I looked at the site, and I was like, "This is exactly it." Because I felt sad for me because, like, I had wanted to build a community, like, a place to interact for the podcast and all of that. But there's so much traction with the podcast and doing everything and the speaking and all of that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:47) I never got to build, like, a community where we could connect, like, on the website. I didn't want to do something like one of the standard boxed software open source things and then maintain it. I just didn't feel like if I didn't put 100% into it, it wouldn't be interesting and hook people. It would just be something that ended up gathering cobwebs. But what you have done is you took it to a whole other level.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:11) You really put 100% of the time into the fact that it's a community. So anyone that wants to go be a part of this community, how do they do that?

(Anand at 00:35:21) You can just come to our site. It's www.pulse.qa, and Pulse as in checking your pulse, pulse.qa. So go out there, especially if you're an IT decision maker. We believe you'll find a lot of value on our site. So just go out there, and we have two ways to log in. You can use your email or you can use LinkedIn to connect.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:47) Yeah. And you guys approve it too, because when I joined, it was like, "Oh, we're going to approve your account." So, like, not anybody can join.

(Anand at 00:35:54) Yeah. And you've been a former CTO or you have been in the technology industry. Right? You're an engineer by training, I understand.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:01) Yeah. Yeah. So engineer by training, then built my first company and became, went from engineer to CTO, essentially, and then scaled that, grew it, sold it, and then did that several more times, but as like an app agency. So I built an app agency, and then we worked with venture capital firms to help rewrite systems that were getting funded but needed to be rewritten. And then I started writing the blogs, turned it into a book, and then that turned into a podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:26) And then now we have about, about eleven, twelve people here at the podcast because that turned into a leadership company. So what happened is, yeah, like CTO of NASA comes on, shares the advice, Microsoft, all these great people share their advice, and then we had some CTOs, and they had like 25 leaders, and they said, "Well, how do we get our leaders to do these things we hear you talking about on the commute?" So we ended up taking clips of the podcast and turning them into leadership challenges, and we built a data analytics platform. So like a CTO will buy it, deploy it out to their direct reports, and then all their direct reports are taking these challenges every week, implementing concepts like giving credit to their team or individual ownership or autonomous leadership, just like this steady flow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:08) And so it comes directly from the practitioners. Like somebody tries something new with their teams and it works really well, and then they scale it across organizations, and they come on the show and they share it. Then we put it into a format where people can replicate it and try it to see if it works with their team. So it's just this, like, best practices, weekly habit, leadership thing.

(Anand at 00:37:28) That's great. I like how aligned we are.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:30) Right? That's why I liked it so much. That is why I legitimately saw it. And then we looked at the industry, like myGartner. Right? Like, who's myGartner? myGartner is, like, the leadership industry is an $18 billion industry, and they take this, like, concept of, "Come to a workshop or a class, and we'll teach you for eight hours or sixteen hours. We'll do some trust falls. You'll learn the 80 things that leaders should do from this workbook, and then we'll quiz you on it. Then we'll give you a certificate that you're a great leader." And it's like, that is never how any leader became great. Right?

(Anand at 00:38:04) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:05) Like, have you ever had to take one of those workshops?

(Anand at 00:38:08) No, I haven't, actually.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:09) Oh, you're lucky. The trust falls are not fun.

(Anand at 00:38:14) Thank God. Yeah. I've luckily avoided that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:17) So what caused you to want to build the product, like, initially? Like, when did you first identify the gap and you're like, "You know what? I'm actually going to go for this."

(Anand at 00:38:28) I was working at Warner Brothers at the time. And I joined Warner Brothers, and that was my start in management. I joined Warner Brothers to build up their mobile engineering team. Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment owns a lot of amazing IP. Game of Thrones, I didn't even know of this, but they own HBO, so they have Game of Thrones.

(Anand at 00:38:54) They produced all the Harry Potter movies, so they have Harry Potter. They own DC Comics. So it's just the most fantastic IP you can imagine, and they had no presence on mobile. I have a background in mobile development and engineering, so I joined to build up their mobile teams. And I was working with three studios, NetherRealm, they make Mortal Kombat, based in Chicago, WB Boston, and WB SF in San Francisco. And a couple years in, I had worked with Mayank in the past at Cooliris. I don't know if you've heard of Cooliris, but it was a pretty hot startup back in the day. They were acquired by Yahoo, and I used to work there with Mayank. Mayank was the founder of Cooliris.

(Anand at 00:39:40) And I'd stayed in touch with Mayank since. He and I had a product engineer relationship, and it had worked really well. And I would say this is really important for anyone who's considering starting a company with someone is, I've been approached by folks in cafes, especially early in my career. Anyone who sees some young person coding in a cafe in the Bay Area, they're going to approach you and tell you about this brilliant idea they have. "And in return for stock, why don't you join?"

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:20) Lucky.

(Anand at 00:40:21) Yeah. So this happens a lot, and it can be tempting. I don't know why, but some people actually join companies this way. But you know nothing about the person, and you don't know if you can work together. When you actually found a company with a co-founder, it's like you're married.

(Anand at 00:40:40) You're a couple. You're going to spend a lot of time with them, probably more than you spend with your spouse and Netflix and everything else and your friends combined. So when Mayank reached out to me, these things checked. You know? I'd had a great working relationship with him, and he was a friend.

(Anand at 00:40:59) And he reached out to me and he said, "Look. I've been working at Capriza." He told me all the things he had learned about CIOs and their pain points from working with them, that they're just unable to keep up with the proliferation of products out there. And they would love a platform which is an online community, and it's always on. So they don't have to wait for the next conference to learn from their peers.

(Anand at 00:41:26) They don't want to just call up peers because how many contacts are you going to have that you can call up and learn from? Maybe half a dozen at most. It just doesn't scale. So they would love a community where they can ask questions and get answers from a wide audience. And that's how Pulse was born.

(Anand at 00:41:45) He asked me if I wanted to join, and we just went out there and started drawing up ideas. We looked for funding initially, but it's not easy without a prototype. So then we built out a prototype. We started out with chatbots. And it sounds really odd, but the reason for starting out with a chatbot, specifically a Messenger bot, is one that a lot of CIOs, believe it or not, use Messenger, and they're found on Facebook.

(Anand at 00:42:17) It's not easy to get a foothold because it's a very specific audience. How do you reach out to such a targeted audience? It's not easy. If you place ads through LinkedIn, it costs a lot of money. So we started out by going to Facebook, and people self-declare themselves as CIOs.

(Anand at 00:42:39) And they generally don't lie about it because they have friends and family and peers on their Facebook as well. So we started to reach out. We showed ads to people on Facebook who are CIOs, and then we started to get them in through the Messenger bot, and we started running our experiments. This worked out well. We got some initial funding.

(Anand at 00:43:03) Then we applied to Y Combinator with the mission to help technology leaders and decision makers make better decisions. And we got accepted, so we are part of Winter 2018. Then we got some seed funding through True Ventures, and here we are a year later.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:22) Nice. I love it. Yeah. And you're excited? You're growing? Things are good?

(Anand at 00:43:28) We're excited. We've seen engagement improve. We saw inbound requests come in from vendors to reach out to our community. And since then, we started to focus a little bit more on sales too, especially with the encouragement from our investors. And we've seen those grow as well.

(Anand at 00:43:47) And they're reaching a point where we need to spend some engineering time servicing the sales side as well and the operations side, not just the product, which is a problem. But, as my uncle always says, it's a good problem to have.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:03) Yeah. You want bigger problems. I was reading, like, Grant Cardone. He's like a sales guy, you know, the 10X guy. And he's always like, "You want huge, you know, you want massive problems." And I, for some reason, all of this content that I read, that stuck with me. It's like, how could I get a bigger problem? And I'll tell you what. For, I don't know if it's, like, the best strategy in the world, but so far it's working. Like, the problems keep getting bigger, and the returns and the rewards keep getting larger as well. So.

(Anand at 00:44:32) That's great. And that's what's rewarding about this. Right? Why do we found companies and why do we run companies? Because the challenges are great. And while that sometimes keeps you up at night, that's what makes life exciting. It would be very boring otherwise. So, yeah, while we are growing a lot, it's challenging. Hiring is not easy. That's what makes it really exciting. That's why I prefer startups to really large companies.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:00) Oh, let's give you a shout out. If you're looking for different types of positions, let me know what you're looking for. We'll put it out there.

(Anand at 00:45:07) Yeah. We're always looking for engineering talent, especially good full stack engineers. It's tough to find in the Bay Area because there is just so much competition, and you're always competing with the likes of Google and Facebook. You have to match all the perks they provide, which is not easy and not really even possible for a startup. But wait till we get Series A.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:35) Right? Then you'll be in there. Right? I love it, man. You're right. I read some post the other day that, a company got, it was a CEO and it was probably about 20 people. And he said somebody just got recruited from Google, and their starting bonus is more than I paid them in a year. "Like, how do I compete with that?"

(Anand at 00:45:53) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:53) It's like, whoa. It's like, that's interesting. I'm curious to see how this unfolds over the next ten years. The schools are really growing though. Like, the schools to churn out talent are growing, and you see things like Pluralsight growing and all these other organizations.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:09) So I'm very interested to see how the talent plays out. For now, yeah, we're competing on our culture, like I'm sure you are, the culture that you have at Pulse. Right?

(Anand at 00:46:19) Absolutely. And I wanted to say two things there. One is that's why you say that you should hire people who are excited about the problem you're solving. You know, younger people who are risk takers and excited about the problem you're solving. And on the other side, I think we've gone away from vocational training over the years, with a lot of emphasis and focus on a four-year degree and then a master's degree.

(Anand at 00:46:49) And nothing wrong with those. Those are great. But there's just so much talent out there and so many people out there who have no background in computer science and just would like to be trained in something, some technology of the future, and then bring their skills into a company and contribute in some way. And I'm really glad we've seen the proliferation of all these training institutes recently. Training people in machine learning and AI and natural language processing. I'm very excited to see how this turns out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:23) Me too. My local, like, a college that's local to us, like, SCF, State College of Florida, they actually came and, like, we connected, and they came to my office. And they're like, "What are you looking for, like, talent-wise?" And they asked me to be on one of their boards to help decide, they're opening up this new facility, and they're going to have AI, ML, like, all these different types of education, in this new, like, $14 million facility or whatever. And I was like, "This is amazing."

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:48) Like, I'm so happy this is happening in this town that I'm living in because that is exactly, that is exactly what we need.

(Anand at 00:47:57) Yeah. The more people we train, the better, because I think everyone, sooner or later, will have to deal with technology. We will see, like Andreessen Horowitz says, right, "Technology is eating up the world. Software will eat up the world." You see that happening. Every single company, finance company, even oil and gas companies, there is a tremendous amount of innovation going on, and they're all going to be technology first if they aren't already. I'm sure Goldman Sachs hires so many engineers. It might be the largest amount of talent they have in-house, probably more than folks that are on the finance side specifically. And you will see that across every company sooner or later.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:45) And I love it because this is the industry that, like, I fell in love with as a small child, and it wasn't sexy at the time. And now, like, I was the weird one. They would be like, "Go outside," and I'm like, "I want to play on the computer." Right? "I want to write some code."

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:01) And now it's like the opposite. Like, everybody's doing it now.

(Anand at 00:49:05) Yeah. You have to. There is no choice. You absolutely have to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:09) Oh, I love it. So what is, what is the thing that, like, as we start to wrap up, I want to know, like, what are you most excited about other than the fact that you're getting better and you'll be back at work?

(Anand at 00:49:22) From a company point of view?

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:23) Or something? Company point of view. Like, what's, what are you really pumped up about that you can share publicly?

(Anand at 00:49:29) Sure. What we've learned is that our audience likes to engage in different ways. We've noticed that some of our audience likes to engage at different times. What we're doing is building out the system and refining the system that engages them where they want to be and when they want to be engaged. By where, I mean the different modes of communication that they use.

(Anand at 00:49:58) If they want to be on a chatbot, we want to engage them there. If they prefer the browser, then we have a Chrome plugin for them. If they would prefer to engage by email, then we want to engage them there. But we want to fit ourselves into their workflow, and this is the best way to improve engagement with our users. Aside from that, we want to understand what topics they're interested in and continually refine our feed so that they see things that are most relevant to them, and so they don't have to waste too much time.

(Anand at 00:50:34) Quora has done an amazing job of this. I don't know if you use Quora, but if you haven't subscribed to their newsletter, please don't, because you will have to read it. If you start receiving it, you will have to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:47) It's addictive?

(Anand at 00:50:49) It's so addictive. They will share some four articles with you, and you have to click on them. You have no choice because they are just perfectly exactly what you're looking for. So we want to get there. That's what we aspire to be, and it'll take time.

(Anand at 00:51:06) Those kinds of things happen in slow increments. A lot of people talk about AI as changing the world, and people think of these new products coming out that'll change the world. But I think the power of AI is in these small little increments where you continually refine the product. You don't see how Google search used to be one year ago versus today. It's improved a lot, but you don't see those improvements, just like you don't see how you age over time.

(Anand at 00:51:34) But you look back at a photo of yourself from two years ago and like, wow, I look much younger there. It's the same thing. So these incremental improvements will get us there. So I'm really excited about focusing on those aspects of our product, understanding when our users want to engage. If a user is in India and prefers to engage in the evenings, if one of our users is in Europe and prefers to engage on Sunday mornings, we want to understand that, build up a profile, and make life as easy as possible for our community.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:09) I love it. And I love that you've picked up on the compounding nature of time. Right? You can only do things. So I'm 31 now, and so I'd say right around 29, 30, I realized that I can't do something with intensity.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:26) The only thing I can do is put a small habit in place and then watch it. Right? I can't just go do something that I want to do. I have to just say, alright, if I actually want to pursue this, right, if I want to become a better leader or I want to grow a company, right, I can't just go do it with a big volume of intensity.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:44) I have to just develop a schedule and a routine that allows me to just put one little piece on it over and over. And then you look back at the books, right, and then this is what people have been saying forever. All the successful people have always been saying this. The bodybuilders say it. The people that have money and they practice good finance tips say it. This has been something that's said forever, but it's just now becoming real to me, and it's very useful. I'm glad I found it out at 29 versus 50.

(Anand at 00:53:11) No, absolutely. I think a lot of people look back and regret that they didn't put certain habits into place. And we all have some regrets, but I think you're absolutely right. You put some right incentives. Self-incentivization is very important. You put some right incentives and habits into place, and you will see the compounding effects of those play out over time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:33) Oh, I love it. Anand, this has been a fantastic conversation, my friend.

(Anand at 00:53:39) Thank you. Likewise. I've really enjoyed it. Thank you for having me on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:42) The next time I'm in San Francisco, I'm going to let you know because I got to meet your co-founder, but I didn't get to meet you, dude. You weren't there, right?

(Anand at 00:53:49) I wasn't there, and I don't remember where I was at the time. But yeah, it's unfortunate I didn't get to meet you because he spoke very highly of you, and we should definitely grab a beer next time you're in town.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:59) Dude, we'll feel better. And when I'm out in San Francisco, I'll let you know, and we'll talk soon.

(Anand at 00:54:03) Well, thank you so much, Joel. Thank you so much. Talk soon. Hopefully, see you soon. Bye.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:08) Bye.

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