Sri Viswanath - CTO at Atlassian

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. I'm curious to know how many of you have a leadership pipeline. We know that great leaders grow companies because we talk to them here on the show every day. But what are you doing to create great leaders within yours? If you're a CTO, it is 100% your responsibility to grow and improve your people beyond just their coding abilities.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:20) We've built a tool that improves your people in their craft and in leadership. Visit leaderbits.io to learn more. Today, we are talking to Sri, the CTO at Atlassian, and we discuss Atlassian's open company, no nonsense culture, how to unleash massive potential within your team, and why you can only be successful if the people you lead are successful. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:50) This is the Modern CTO Podcast. Hello, my friend.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:01:04) Hey, Joe.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:05) Hey, buddy. How are you?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:01:06) I am doing great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:08) Dude, look at the office. I like it. It's a good color.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:01:12) Yeah. No, it's great. We are in Mountain View. I'm based in Mountain View. We are in a number of locations, but right now, I'm in Mountain View.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:19) Right now, you're in Mountain View.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:01:21) Correct.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:21) You know, I was just out there about three weeks ago looking at this robotics company. They're called Knightscope, and they have these roaming robots that are security patrol.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:01:33) Yeah. I've seen those in Stanford. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:36) Yeah. Like, the Stanford Westgate or something. I saw a bunch of those logos everywhere. Yeah. What did you think? Did you walk up with—

(Sri Viswanath at 00:01:44) It's curious. You should see kids all staring at it, and that thing is actually a real cop. You are not supposed to tease it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:52) They were telling me—so I got to meet with the CTO and their engineers and tour their facility—saying people would kiss it and leave lipstick marks and all sorts of nonsense.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:02:03) It's fascinating.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:05) So at Atlassian, you guys own the market. You're huge.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:02:10) Yeah. We don't think we are huge, but we are growing great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:15) What's the culture like there?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:02:17) It's great. It's the best company I've worked, and I've worked in lots of companies with lots of positive things. Atlassian has this unique combination of everything good. Right? We have two amazing tech cofounders. We have a great culture. People love working here. We have this flywheel model that just keeps working. We are somewhat long-term focused. We are not doing the hacks for the short term. Great place to be.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:46) That's one of our—here at our company, one of our core values, things that we value—is we think in terms of decades. Right?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:02:54) That's great. Yeah. Yeah. We definitely are—we take on big projects that are game changing, and we actually complete those, and it helps us. I can tell you the story of what we have been. I've been here for three and a half years, and we have gone through a big cloud native journey.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:10) Tell me about it. What was it like when you came in, and where are you at today?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:03:13) Yeah. Yeah. So in the last three, three and a half years that I've been here, we have gone through this massive transformation. As a company, we have always been an on-prem company for several years. Even before I came in, we had launched a cloud product. But the cloud product was in a different architecture, a single-tenanted architecture. We ran our own data centers. So after I came in, we accelerated our move to AWS, and we made it multi-tenanted, and we went cloud native. And in the process, we also created a platform because on the cloud side, we have a number of products. We have Jira, Confluence, Trello, Jira Service Desk, and now Opsgenie and AgileCraft. So we have a number of products in the company. So we have built this platform that is shared across all these different products. So in the last three and a half years, we have gone cloud native. We have made it work. We are scaling. We have grown much bigger. In fact, today, more than 90% of all new customers are all coming on cloud.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:10) Nice.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:04:10) So that's a big shift in terms of how we are operating, not just in terms of technology, but also in terms of DNA, which is actually a much bigger change because technology, you can foresee. I've actually been in cloud companies for the last ten years at least, and you can see what needs to be done. The DNA change is actually harder, and we have successfully navigated that change, which is great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:38) How? Like, how did you do that?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:04:40) Yeah. The thing that changes in the cloud native space is the DevOps model. Right? So you want people to build it and you run it, and we have moved to microservices. As we move to microservices, we have created smaller teams. And the good part is also we are actually distributed in a number of locations, which helps. As we move to this new model, it actually works better than being in a monolith. Because as you break down the services into smaller services with clear API and clear interface, you can put that anywhere. Right? So we have this philosophy of products and platform services. Products are pinned to your location, so you have the designer, product manager, and engineering lead in the same location. But the platform services team, which have clear REST interfaces, can be in any location. So as we have created microservices, that has actually helped us to scale to a much bigger—both in terms of number of services we have in production, but also in terms of how many people we have in engineering.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:43) So give me an idea, a perspective. How many people in engineering and IT, that area?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:05:49) Yeah. As a company, I guess, we are roughly about 3,500 people, and I would say more than half or roughly half is in engineering.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:58) Wow.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:05:58) So that's the rough scale.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:00) Nice.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:06:01) And we are distributed in a number of locations. We are in Sydney, which is where we started. That's where our cofounders are. We are in San Francisco, Mountain View, which is where I'm based, and in Austin and New York. We also have a number of remote employees. We acquired a company in Turkey, so we have a Turkey office. We opened an India center in Bangalore. So we're actually pretty distributed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:28) And that's good. Right? Because you're building products for teams that are largely distributed.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:06:32) Yeah. I say this. We are the most dog-fooded company. We have every one of our products because that's how we live. We live and breathe our products every single day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:42) How could you not? Right?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:06:43) No. Our instances are so big. We use Confluence for all of our intranet. We use Jira for all our workflows. We use Trello for all the lightweight project management. We use all our products.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:56) That's exciting. I was actually talking to Jeremy King, who is the CTO of Walmart. He actually lives out by you, in that area.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:07:05) Yeah. Have you met him before?

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:05) Have you met him before?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:07:06) I haven't met him before, but I know him. Yeah. I met him once. Yeah. I do know him.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:12) So he's a fan of Jira?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:07:14) Yeah. No. We have—that's our business model. Right? So our business model is to build fans and champions. And because we don't have a direct sales team like other traditional companies, we have a very small go-to-market team. That's actually pretty strategic in terms of how we operate. And the way Jira and Confluence is sold is not actually by having commission-based salespeople, but having an awesome product that can sell itself. Right? Word-of-mouth flywheel model. And we want to create champions who can go champion the product and save the company, and that's how we have been growing for the last seventeen years plus.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:51) It's pretty exciting too. We started a small company here out of the podcast, and so we have about 13 people now. And so that's pretty cool. In the past year, we've grown from me and Jake to 13 people. But, yeah, that's one of the things that we just started to experience. We have customers that tell people to buy our product. And we're like, what is this? And then one of them flew in from Colorado and was like, hey. Can we have lunch? I want to give you my experience with the product. And I was like, yeah. For sure. So I went and had lunch with these two customers, and they didn't have anything bad to say. And I was like, guys, you gotta give me—you gotta give me something. Right?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:08:38) Congratulations. You are big now. 13 people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:39) Right? We're not close to the vision, but it's exciting that we're in business. Right? We're not struggling to stay alive, and that's pretty cool.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:08:50) Yeah. Yeah. That's great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:51) So you have a team? How many people report to you? About five, seven people?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:08:56) Direct reports? Yes. Something like that. I run all of engineering. So I have leads from the platform team, and I have leads from the product teams reporting. That's about four or five people. I have the CISO reporting to me, and I also run program management, and I run partnerships for Atlassian. So those are my direct reports.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:17) You know, question just popped into my head, because a lot of people have been saying CSO reporting to them in the past year. It's been more of a thing. How does the security area distribute themselves within the teams in the organization? It's like you get one CSO and you get a bunch of junior CSOs. Like, how does that work?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:09:36) Yeah. No. That's a great question. So the way we have organized, and it's actually working really well, is we have a centralized CISO security team that does all the framework and tooling and all the scanning of our infrastructure, both internal and external. And they liaise with all the other product teams because it's not just in the centralized team that the work needs to happen. The work actually needs to happen all the way from designing the software to operating the software, which is done by the product team. So they work closely with each of the product teams, and they make sure that they have—and we also have this operational maturity model that is a self-disclosure from each of the team. We call it Service Quest, and it's been working great. So every team, whether it's a microservice or whether it's a product team, they disclose what their maturity model is, and one of the pillars is a security pillar. And we review that every quarter, and there is a goal for each of the teams to improve those. And the security team works with all these different teams to make sure that they keep pushing the boundaries and upping their bar.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:40) And you're saying something that I don't understand, so I love to ask whenever this happens. You're saying they just—they disclose the maturity model.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:10:48) Yeah. So we have a maturity model. We call it Service Quest. And there is a scoring of 20 points per pillar, and there are five pillars. And security is one of the pillars. So each team discloses—they answer a bunch of questions and it gives them a score saying, I am 10 out of 20. And the security team works with them to say, how do I move you from 10 to 15? And they list down a bunch of projects and the teams execute. They may be how to design the software, maybe how to build the software, how to run it in production, what types of bugs that you need to fix and the SLAs that you need to have. So there's a whole bunch of things that goes into it. But that's a self-disclosure. We have gone for a more bottoms-up approach rather than a top-down. We have a gate and you can't ship anything unless you do these five things. We have avoided that so that we can move fast and we can move, but we still can have the controls in place that can help us be a mature enterprise company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:45) Is this something you created, or is it something that's just slipped past my radar developing software?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:11:49) No. This is an internal thing. We haven't open sourced or opened it yet, but at some point, we may.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:54) But what about the concept?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:11:56) The operational maturity model has been around quite for quite some time. A number of companies do it well. In fact, when we were designing this, we talked to a bunch of companies including Twilio and several others. But we took those inputs, and we basically modeled it based on how we work. Atlassian is a bottoms-up company. Innovation is the lifeblood of Atlassian, and we want to empower engineers to go innovate. Right? So we want them to build awesome products. So we avoid having anything top-down and mandates that can just put constraints on people. We want them to imbibe what needs to happen and more bottoms-up. So every structure that we create, every process that we create, embodies that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:41) Nice. It gives that freedom, and it keeps you relevant as you scale too.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:12:45) Yep. Right. Yeah. And we are in a number of locations, and we have a number of products. So we have all these different complexities, and we want to make sure that it's owned by the teams that actually operate those.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:57) And that's how you attract the best talent too. That's also a great talent acquisition strategy.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:13:03) Yeah. We have been doing great. So I actually started the office a few years ago, and we have grown to about 500 people. I'm excited we are opening up a new office right next door in the same campus in the next couple of months. So we are growing. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:19) So I'm curious. You said you had about, you know, seven people reporting to you. How much time do you spend developing them professionally, working with them, growing them?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:13:28) Yeah. It's very important to me. So people—definitely Atlassian in general is a people-focused company, so people growth is important. So if I divide my job up, I spend some time on the technology piece, making sure we have a vision for technology. We want to make sure that we are moving in the right direction, and I'm part of the executive team trying to tie into the business of the company and figuring out how to leverage and have the leverage that we have from engineering. So that's one portion of my job. The other portion is making sure that we execute on the projects, and rest of it and the bulk of it is actually on hiring people, growing people, mentoring people, and making sure that we can have that set up. So that's definitely a big portion of my role.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:13) I love it. I'm always looking for trends between the different leaders and the cultures of their company, and it's like the great leaders do that.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:14:21) Yep. Yeah. No. It's important for us. The only way I can be successful is if my leaders are successful. Right? So I try to unblock them. I try to give them guidance. We have an amazing—we call it CLT. It's the CTO Leadership Team. Great partnership. Play as a team is one of our company values, and it's definitely seen in my CLT. I'm proud of my team.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:49) That's awesome. I like it. I like you already, man. I can't wait. Next time I'm in Mountain View, I'm gonna send you an email and be like—

(Sri Viswanath at 00:14:55) No. You should definitely come over.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:57) Yeah. It's—by the way, the weather out there is really nice too.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:15:01) Absolutely. Yeah, we are in the best locations you can imagine. Sydney, Mountain View, San Francisco, Austin is one too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:10) Oh yeah. I was thinking about coming out there. I think Salesforce—they have Dreamforce, but they are creating a Dreamforce for developers. They've done it a couple years in a row, so they have all the Salesforce partner developers and everything there. So they invited me out to that, and so I might be out there for that.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:15:32) Cool. I'll also invite you for our Developer Day and our AtlasCamp. We have a large developer community.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:39) I mean, it's your customers.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:15:41) Yeah, our customers too, but we also expose our APIs for third-party developers who build apps on top of Jira, Confluence, and other products. And that's a pretty big, thriving ecosystem. And that ecosystem, in fact, has generated more than $500 million in GMV in the last several years since we launched it. So it's a pretty massive investment for us and a big part of our strategy.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:16:07) Yeah, and we do specific camps similar to what you mentioned. It would be great if you can attend one of those.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:14) Yeah, and we'll give a shout out. I'll look at when they're—after the call or after we record the episode—I'll make sure to look at the dates and give a shout out in the intro for the dates and tell people to check it out.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:16:25) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:25) Yeah, because we're always trying to help. By the way, this is a perfect segue into, what do you need more of right now? What type of people do you need more of right now if they're listening to this and they're interested in maybe a career at Atlassian?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:16:38) Yeah, Atlassian is an awesome company. We have moved to a cloud-native—I think we are hiring heavily on cloud. We are hiring both front-end and back-end and full-stack engineers. We have invested in mobile side. We are in a number of locations. We are also hiring remote people. So if you are tech-savvy and can solve problems, absolutely, you should talk to us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:01) So I'm going to give you a hypothetical. All right, let's say you've got your direct reports and then the layer under them, and let's say you're all hanging out, spending time together, solving some problems. What behaviors would stand out to you that would say that person's a high potential, that person is someone I would want to invest time into? What do you look for?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:17:23) Yeah, so the thing that we do, even as part of the interview process, we call it the values interview. So we look for people who embody the values of Atlassian, which I talked about: "play as a team" as a value, "open company, no bullshit," having transparency and being able to take feedback and to work more transparently. And we have talked about this on our website and other places. We work open. Open is the mantra for how we operate, and we want people coming in to be able to do that. And that's definitely—so we look, definitely for software engineers, for example, we do a technical interview just like everybody else. We want to hire the best IQ people, but we also want to have people who can embody our values and play as a team. Right? Because, as you know, our Nasdaq symbol is TEAM, and our mission is to unleash potential of teams, of every team. So the team play and the teamwork is critical for us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:19) That is awesome. I did not know that. But you've got one of the coolest symbols that exist.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:18:26) TEAM, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:27) That's cool. Did you get to ring the bell? Were you there when they went public?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:18:31) No. I started—I signed up before the IPO. I started right after. So I didn't ring the bell, but I saw people ring the bell. Atlassian did something unique on the day. Atlassian invited old-timers to go with them to ring the bell with our founders, and that was great to have people who have been there for ten years. And on the same day, we—I should say now—did a hackathon. We run this every quarter, so that it was more important on that day that the hackathon was successful than the event that happened, because that happens. This culture and part of being—innovation as the lifeblood of Atlassian—needed to be showcased on that day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:10) So when you have these hackathons, has anything ever come out of it and gone into production?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:19:17) Yeah, absolutely. It serves multiple purposes. One is it helps people to think different and to come out of their shell and say, "Oh wow, I could think about this." And we do it slightly different. We actually do the hackathon for the whole company, not just for engineers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:33) Oh, that's awesome.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:19:34) And that's different from every other company. Right? So we actually have marketing people and HR people coming together and saying, "Oh, it would be awesome if you automate this," and they work with engineers. Or even without engineers, we have process changes and cool little things. In fact, if you come to our Mountain View office, you'll see that our staircase is painted differently, and there are brushes hanging around. That's all part of ShipIt. So we have products—Jira Service Desk, which is the fastest-growing product in the company, was initially done as part of ShipIt. But we also have the cool little things, which I think creates the character for Atlassian, happens a lot during these ShipIts. And we run it—we run it on the day we went IPO. We do it also as part of our user conference. We actually have an area in the conference where engineers are hacking while the conference is happening. And the last presentation is actually the presentation from them pitching it to the audience, our users, and they vote for the winner. So it's actually pretty amazing to see that in the summit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:41) That's really cool. I love the culture and the energy over there. It's very attractive.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:20:47) Yeah. Yeah, no, it's been great. I've loved every single day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:51) So we know where you are today—CTO, Atlassian. But I'm curious to know, where did you start? How did you fall in love with technology? Video games? Where was it? Where did it happen for you?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:21:04) Yeah, I grew up in India. And my first computer was a Spectrum ZX. I hooked it up to the TV, and we had a little tape player that had to load up the thing. I didn't have any manuals. It was all BASIC programming. So I actually learned programming by just trial and error. I used to write the program—it didn't work. I used to ask questions to my uncle who was a programmer, and then I would learn a little bit, a little bit more. So that's how I got hooked on to it. And then, of course, I did the undergrad and grad, and as I learned more, then I realized it's more than just writing the algorithm itself. A lot more things go into building a real product, but that's been a journey all along.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:48) So then you go to college, you study computer science and some other things, and then where do you go right after college?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:21:56) Yeah, I finished my master's in computer science, and then I joined Sun Microsystems. And Sun was an amazing company. This was back in '98, '99. It was great. That's probably the best company I could have joined, the darling of the industry during that time, cutting edge. I worked with the smartest people I could imagine. I had great mentors, which is a critical part. I guess that's one of the things I advise interns and people joining—have some mentors that you can lean on, and I had amazing ones during the period I was there. I grew a lot at Sun. And by the time—I was there for nine and a half years. I did lots of different projects. I ended up running the app server J2EE group towards the end, and it was a great experience in terms of being a good engineer, becoming an architect, leading people, trying to be a good people manager. And in the process, I also decided, "Oh, I think to be a good manager, I should do my MBA," which I don't think those two are related, but I think it actually helped me. It didn't help me to be a good manager. I think it helped me to be a good person, have a broad perspective, and get to know more than just engineering. But anyway, so I also did my management degree at Stanford. And by the time I left Sun, I was a completely different person, much better leader, much better person, a more well-rounded person.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:21) Let's talk about that. So first of all, I don't know if Bob Warrell was over there at Sun Microsystems at the time you were, but he was there for ten, fifteen years at Sun. I think at his highest, he was the CTO, but now he's over at Juniper Networks, which is pretty cool. He was a cool leader. But let's talk a little bit about that first time that you went from individual contributor to leading a team. Everyone has a story. Everyone has a takeaway, some big lesson that they learned. A lot of people listening, they're transitioning from individual contributor to team lead. So what tips or insight do you have about that?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:23:58) Yeah, so I didn't know what it meant to be a great manager, a good manager. So I knew I had to do these five tasks. I knew I had to do one-on-ones, I had to tell them what to do. I knew bits and pieces, but it was definitely having a few things, I guess, that helped me become a much better manager. One is having a mentor. Two is clearly investing in communications and making sure I can do the right set of things in training. The learning aspect has been a theme in my career. So making sure that I learned on the job. There were lots of times when I had to let go of somebody. It's like, "Oh shit, I can never do this." But then after you do it and you do it the right way, then you figure out, "Oh, there is a right way of doing things and the wrong way of doing things." When you do the right way, then you figure out, "Okay, I know it's always bad, and even today, it's actually not great. But you can do it the right way, so you can actually get to the other side much better, and it also helps the other person on the other side to get to the situation." So learning those little things, small things on the job, helps to be a much better leader.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:07) Yeah. And it seems cool because as you learn those things, you realize it's a lot about culture. It's a lot about caring about people, and so it's great that you grew and you ended up at a company where that's what's happening.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:25:19) Yep. Yep. Yeah, and then I went to different kinds of companies. I went to Ning, which was Marc Andreessen's third company. Oh yeah, great experience, four years. I loved everything that we were—when I joined, we were actually growing faster than Facebook, and we were in the "create your own social network" space. And Ning had amazing talent, and we grew the team and all that. We changed the business model after a couple of years, and at the end of it, we sold the company. So that was a great experience for four years. Then I was at VMware for a short time, which is, of course, an enterprise company. And then I was at Groupon as CTO for three years, completely different space in e-commerce, and then I landed in Atlassian.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:04) Groupon. That was a—it got so big so fast. Everyone there was—there was a Groupon craze going through the United States, at least.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:26:14) Yeah, that was an amazing experience in terms of just building out platforms, machine learning that could replace human rankings. And there's definitely the technology aspect of it in cutting edge, building out machine learning, but also a human aspect of actually replacing humans. We are eliminating jobs and replacing it with algorithms. And the kinds of pushback you would get in such an environment is—you just won't imagine. Fascinating.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:48) So I'm not even going to go down that chain of conversation because I've got—I'm more interested in knowing we have the CIO coming on in a few weeks, in a couple weeks. And so I'm curious, a lot of the questions we get from people that listen or just when I'm out speaking, things like that. How does the CIO and the CTO collaborate? I know it's different at every company, but what does it look like for you at Atlassian?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:27:14) Yeah, different at different companies. We have a CIO in the company who focuses mostly on the internal systems, mostly cloud systems that we have and bringing it together, because we use best-of-breed—it needs to be brought together. She also runs our commerce engine, which is extremely important because we are a subscription model and online only. To tie it into the business aspect, she and I work super closely. The commerce engine implementation is actually an engineering project, so we work very closely with that. There's clear boundaries in how we operate in terms of—I run all the production systems and making sure that we have a great product and focusing on building products. And she focuses on the internal systems and also the commerce and the website that we have, implementation of that. There are clear overlaps. For example, our security team cuts across both internal systems and production systems, and we are working on joint products to go to zero-trust security setup and things like that, and we have strong collaboration between our teams. So we work closely together, but there's definitely clear ownership.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:27) That's exciting, man. It's—and yeah, CIO more internal facing, you more product facing.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:28:35) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:35) Cool. I see that in general a lot. I see that a lot. And so it's in the details—when everyone's like, "What should it be? What should the person be doing?" I'm like, you should look at your product and your customer and your company, and that should tell you what you should be doing.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:28:50) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:51) Oh, man. So what today, currently, is the most exciting thing for you? What's getting you out of bed? What project? Anything you can actually talk about?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:29:04) Yeah. At Atlassian, we are working on a number of really solid projects, both some in terms of—we are working on things that directly help customers. For example, we are building cloud for the next higher scale. We are increasing the scale, and we are going to more larger customers, building more security features into our products. There's a whole stream of work happening around that. We also have a big mission to unleash potential of every team, and there are lots of aspects of teamwork that we haven't solved. So we're also thinking through, how do we help IT teams, and how do we help software teams, how do we help the rest of the company? So there's definitely lots of thinking and productization of our thinking that's happening. So that part is actually pretty interesting. And there's also market trends, I guess, in terms of machine learning—it's definitely changing how products are built. So both in terms of, at Atlassian, we have started to invest heavily in machine learning aspects and making our products smarter, but also, I guess, as an industry, it's of interest for me personally in terms of how does machine learning make it to our human space, I guess.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:22) So application of this new technology, right?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:30:24) Exactly. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:25) And then—so I live in a town where it's a vacation town. It's a beach town.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:30:31) Where do you live?

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:32) In Sarasota, Florida.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:30:34) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:34) So it's actually known because it's the number one beach in the United States. So we get a ton, and I'm a native here, so for me, it's just where I grew up.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:30:43) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:43) We get a ton of seasonal traffic. But I was doing a public speaking event for a Kiwanis Club, right? And so the average age in the room, I think, was like 75.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:30:56) Wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:57) And there was probably 60 people there. And I gave the whole leadership talk, what I'm learning talking with great leaders and things. But then they start asking me questions about AI and when it's taking over the world and stuff. And so it became one of the most interesting Q&A sessions I've ever had.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:16) They were upset about the data, right? They were upset about millennials, just the word millennials.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:31:23) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:25) And so I just explained to them, I said, "Look, there are rude people in life, and then there are not rude people, and they exist inside of every year, every new generation of humans. And just because you met a rude young person does not mean millennials suck."

(Sri Viswanath at 00:31:40) Yeah, exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:41) Right? So it was an interesting conversation, but I think, well, I'm confident that at the end, I left them with more positive about the whole AI because I fundamentally believe that good things will come of it as long as we continue to support good people that are building it. Right? I'm a fan of, I don't think that there's the possibility of no AI, like just stopping it. It's like trying to stop the universe. There's too much energy there, right? It's not possible.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:32:13) Yep, yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:14) So it's like now we have the option to either support people that are building it for positive reasons and help the advancements happen over there versus the people that might be doing it for nefarious reasons. Usually, they don't have much funding or anything anyways.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:32:26) Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now if you come to Mountain View, you'll see a whole bunch of autonomous cars running around here. It's fascinating to see those and how they perform.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:36) Wait, do they have people in them still?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:32:38) They still have people in them. They sit there almost ready to hold the steering wheel, but it's fascinating to see how the—currently, there's Waymo and several other cars running here. The cars do very differently in specific situations. They're very polite. The cars put the blinker signal and they wait for full space to move in, and humans try to nudge in. So it's fascinating to see how they drive.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:07) Have you been in one?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:33:08) I've not been in one, but I've definitely tailgated some.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:14) They have different color license plates, right? So that's the thing?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:33:17) Yeah. You'll know they have big things on the top and on the sides, and you'll know if it's an autonomous car.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:25) So I've got a couple questions from the audience if that's cool.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:33:28) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:28) Okay. Taking ownership of your personal development, right? Is it your responsibility to develop yourself, or is it your company's responsibility to develop you?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:33:40) It's absolutely your own responsibility. The company can give you the framework, but it's nobody else's, right? So if you want to achieve something, you need to be explicit in it. You need to have clarity on it. You need to figure out and seek out mentors. You need to ask the company for what you need. And of course, you need to be in a good company that helps you, supports you in your growth, but nobody else can help you grow except yourself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:06) I love it. Because I'm a huge—I love that book Extreme Ownership. I'm a big fan of individual ownership. Because once you make it your responsibility and you own it, only at that point do you have say over the outcome. As long as it's an outside force, then you lose, right?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:34:24) I agree.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:25) So unleashing the potential within, right? How do you do that? How do you learn what drives your team members and create an environment where you can motivate and push them and they can be the best versions of themselves?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:34:38) Yeah. Different people have different motivations, different ways of—there are some common frameworks, I guess, in terms of how you think about this. You need to empower them, right? They need to feel like they own the problem and they can drive it end to end. And you need to set the trust boundary in terms of you're letting them run, but if they fail, they should own up to it, right? But then it's your job as a leader to help them succeed, right? So that delineation of you are giving them full ownership, they should be able to run, but you are helping them, guiding them, and mentoring them—I think that balance is extremely important.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:19) So you're always aware of where your people are, how you need to motivate them, how you grow them, and you just do that by spending time with them and getting to know them.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:35:28) Absolutely. Yeah. No, we spend a lot of time as a team in CLT here, the CTO leadership team, but also one-on-ones and just getting to know them personally.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:37) What about avoiding burnout? I know it's kind of a big blanket statement. People will say, "Oh, it's about balance," and then it's like, "No, it's not balance because you don't want center. It's about ratio, knowing your ratios." But just for you, what are some of the tricks when you see yourself burning out or others burning out? How do you deal with that?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:35:56) Yeah. That's a great question. So I've never taken long breaks in my career, so I've always worked hard for a long time. A few things that helped me, vacations absolutely helped me. Just taking three weeks in a year at different points of time definitely helps out. I have a great family. Just weekends, spending time with the family, with kids—it's probably the best thing I can do. I still work every so often during the weekend because there's always things happening, and Sydney comes online one day earlier on Sunday afternoon. But just making sure that I spend quality time with family definitely dispenses and helps me keep going.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:40) Nice. How many kids do you have?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:36:43) I have two kids. A 15-year-old boy and an 8-year-old daughter who's turning nine soon in a couple of weeks.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:50) Oh, nice. I've got a girl, 19, and a boy that's eight weeks, nine weeks.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:36:58) Wow. Yeah. Weekends are packed, nights are packed, diapers change.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:04) There is just days. There's no weekend. There's no any—there is just I wake up, I go on my run, I eat my breakfast, and then I just deal with everything in life.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:37:16) Yeah. My wife and I have been through that phase.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:20) Oh, yeah. It's an interesting—

(Sri Viswanath at 00:37:22) It gets better. All I can say, in a few years, you start loving it because once they graduate from diapers—

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:28) Yeah. I like that you say it gets better. Everyone else's advice is, "Enjoy it while it lasts." And I'm like, "No, tell me it's going to get better."

(Sri Viswanath at 00:37:38) No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:38) I'm kidding. I love it, though. It's definitely a unique experience. There's no way you could ever explain to someone what it's like, because it's so good, and it's so hard, and it's so bad at the same time.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:37:51) Yeah, exactly. Your priorities are completely inverted.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:55) I know. So throughout your career, and you've gone from Sun Microsystems, Groupon, Atlassian. Can you talk a little bit about your relationships and the importance of relationships? Because that's how you traverse the system. That's how you get to the next level.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:38:15) Yeah. I think it's extremely important. The technology space is pretty small. Overall, I guess, there's all the connections that you make, but especially here in the valley, in the technology space, everybody is one hop away in terms of it. So the connections absolutely help out both ways. I guess there are cases where I help out or if I need something, I can always reach out to some people. And also, I guess I mentioned this a couple of times, having those people along the way in terms of mentors who I can bounce ideas with and I can relate to, that has been absolutely amazing for me. Great to have along with my career. People that I've worked with before, I get to work with them again, whether it's I hired them or they hired me. That's been great to circle around and come back and work with people that I've loved to work with before.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:11) Right. Me, again, I'm growing and learning, but I've just recently, over the past two years, figured out the value of relationships. No matter how good I got at Ruby, no matter what I knew, no matter how fast I can get it to run—like, no matter how much value I brought through the technology, you have to have relationships, and they have to be genuine relationships in order to deploy to people, to help as many people as possible and get your solution out there.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:39:41) I think you hit upon the right thing. The genuineness, I think, is important, right? You don't try to artificially create relationships. You just work with them, and over time, they become best pals or people that you would love to work with, and that helps you overall in your career.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:56) Right? Same with the podcast. I mean, I think last year, I did 250 interviews, right?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:40:02) Wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:03) And probably about 10 people have just been really cool people, and it's just like, you know, what's up with that person? We just keep in touch a little bit, and it's just neat because it's just like, let's just do life together, right?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:40:19) Yep, yep. Yeah. No, it's great. What you've created, it's a great learning experience for people. There's different ways of learning. The best way is actually to do things that help you imbibe what you do. But there's also if you hear something, you can actually go try it out, which helps you to get ideas. "Oh, wow. That company does that way. They're people focused. We should be more people focused." So for you, I guess, having done that, I think it helps the overall industry. So congratulations.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:45) Thank you. I'm just interested in, let's go figure out what the experts are doing. Let's figure out what the practitioners are doing, and then let's put that information out into the community so other people can leverage it as well. Because I'm selfish to the humans on Earth, not a specific geography bounds or anything like that. I want technology to advance on a macro as fast as it can while I'm alive because I want to see everything I could see happen. I want to see Musk do better and get more ships into space and colonize whatever he wants to do. You know?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:41:19) Exactly. Yeah, yeah. We could see it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:21) It's like a fireworks show. I want to see it happen.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:41:24) We live in super interesting times.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:26) Right? Yes. So do you do any public speaking?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:41:31) I do. I present in conferences. I just did a microservices talk a couple of months ago. We had our Atlassian Summit, so I did the investor presentations. I speak as much as I can with my busy job.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:47) Yeah. Well, your job is communicating. So—

(Sri Viswanath at 00:41:51) Yeah, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:52) I was just curious if you had any upcoming talks. Maybe we could give you a shout out for that or just maybe at your next Atlassian—

(Sri Viswanath at 00:41:59) Nothing planned right now, but there's definitely many things slated down the pipe. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:03) Yeah. I look forward. Maybe you'll do, like, make the cover of Wired or be their keynote or something cool like that.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:42:11) Who knows?

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:11) If you come across—here's the thing. Here's the deal, right? Between you and me. If you come across something that you wanted, let me know, and we'll nominate you. We'll get as many people as possible to nominate you for it.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:42:22) There you go. Deal. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:23) Because you gotta stand behind people who are really cool.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:42:26) Awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:27) So let's say you get to meet—have you got to meet Elon Musk yet?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:42:31) No. I have not. Okay. And have you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:33) No. We're working on it. Alright. We have a thing going on called Elon Musk 2020. So we've got our best and brightest people on it. But let's say that you're out tailgating one of those autonomous cars, right? And Elon Musk pulls up next to you at a red light. He's like, "Hey, you want to go fly on the Falcon jet?" And you go, you hang out with him on his plane, and in his plane, he has a time machine. And you get to teleport back to yourself 10 years ago and give yourself one piece of advice. Yep. What would it be and why?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:43:08) Wow. I went back 10 years ago, and Musk is with me. Yeah. It's impressive. Yeah. The thing that, I guess, 10 years ago that I had not learned, that I would have wished I learned, was that mistakes are okay, right? I was not the person who would ever want to fail, or even if I failed, I would feel so bad that it was a failure. Over time, what I've learned is, actually, mistakes happen. Let's figure out what the best way to make it more positive is and learn from those mistakes. And it's obvious that you need to acknowledge the mistakes. You need to learn from the mistakes and move on. That was not in me 10 years ago. I would be so pissed and mad if I'd failed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:53) Yeah. Yeah. I was thinking about that the other day. I was thinking that, you know, scientists, right, they run experiments. The scientific method, they try 10 things. They take the best of what works and repeat. They don't attach—they don't see it as the failure. They just say, "Okay. That didn't work. Next thing." So it's like, how do I detach from the failure itself and think of myself more as the scientist running the experiments and less about being the experiment that failed?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:44:19) That's the thing that surprises me. I consider myself as a scientist, not in terms of profession, but more in terms of how I think.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:25) Yeah.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:44:26) But that didn't apply to my failures. Now it's like, "Oh, that's an experiment that failed. So that's a good thing. I learned something." But that was not there 10 years ago.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:36) Isn't it fascinating? Yes. And then I'm even more fascinated when we talk in 10 years. You're like, "You won't believe it. We all learned the experiment." Oh, man. That's fantastic. So what does the rest of your day look like? You get off of this podcast interview, and then where do you go?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:44:54) Oh, today we have the quarterly business review. So, okay. My afternoon for the next seven hours is all reviewing every project across all our business. It's a packed day today. Every day is different, but today is the quarterly business review.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:09) That's pretty interesting. That's exciting.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:45:11) That's exciting. I get to read everything that every team has written and get a much broader, bigger perspective and give them some input.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:19) Yeah. Jumping between the micro and the macro.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:45:22) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:22) So is there anything else that we didn't cover that you'd like the audience to know about, that you'd like to put out there?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:45:29) No, I think we covered for Atlassian. I guess we talked about innovation, which is key for us. It's the cloud native journey that we have been on, culture. So we've touched upon all the key points for Atlassian, and we covered a whole other ton too. So thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:44) Nice. One last question. I'm just curious, which one, and I know you're gonna say all of them, but which core principle is on top of your mind, like your favorite lately?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:45:55) Core, for Atlassian?

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:56) Yeah. Like, which one's on your mind lately? Which one?

(Sri Viswanath at 00:46:00) We have five values, and the one that I think is most instrumental for us, for our success, is the "open company, no bullshit." It actually, I don't go by a single day when in a meeting or in some place people are like, "Oh, we should write a private page," until somebody calls it out and says, "Open company, no bullshit. Let's tell this to the whole company." Right? So that actually is instrumental, and I wasn't that open when I joined, and I think I've become a much more transparent, open leader after I've joined Atlassian in the last three and a half years. So that's saying something.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:34) Well, it gives you an edge against competitors because it allows for speed.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:46:38) Yep. Yep. No, everybody can get the info. It's all in one place, and people are transparent. That clearly helps us to move in the right direction and move fast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:47) By the way, when I was talking to Jeremy King of Walmart, he was talking about being open and upfront and transparent in the context, and then he said your tool is how he allows for that.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:46:59) Cool. Now I'll send you the clip or something because, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:00) He would.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:47:02) Okay. Yeah. I'd love to hear that because, yeah, we design—it's not just a company value. We actually take that and make it part of our products. For example, in Confluence, when you create a page, it's open by default for the company. Like, you'll have to go two extra steps to be able to prevent it from other people seeing it. Unlike Google Docs or other products that are out there, we have tried to make it so that it's actually open for the company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:27) Awesome. I love it. I look forward—I'm gonna look up the dates that you have those events, and I'm gonna let you know if any of them match up with our travel.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:47:32) Good. Awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:34) Well, you have a fantastic afternoon. Enjoy getting the macro of your entire organization, and that wraps it up.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:47:41) Awesome. Thank you so much.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:42) Have a fantastic day, my friend.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:47:44) You too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:45) See you.

(Sri Viswanath at 00:47:46) Bye bye.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:52) 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.