Rob Zuber - CTO at CircleCI

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. When hiring people, you don't ever want to shop hungry. When you shop hungry, you end up getting junk food. Now, this was a Leaderbit challenge completed by a leader this week, and that reminded them to step back and analyze what people they need on their team based on their current team strengths and needs. After completing this challenge with a fresh set of eyes, they were able to identify their newest team member with clarity and confidence.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:26) When you teach your people to do what great leaders do, you'll end up with teams stacked with humble, outcome-driven leaders. Level up your leaders with Leaderbits, an action-based leadership development program where you take action on the advice from the greatest leaders in the world. Visit leaderbits.io and click Discover to get a demo today. Now get excited, because today we are talking to Rob Zuber, the CTO at CircleCI, and we discuss how to leverage peer groups as you experience different stages of growth, solving the challenges of a distributed organization, and how to amplify your culture by aligning praise with company values.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:07) All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Rob Zuber at 00:01:24) Rob. Hello, Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:26) Oh, I'm already in love with you. You got a guitar on the wall.

(Rob Zuber at 00:01:29) Yeah. This is—we joke. Oh, you could see a little bit of cable down there, but nothing else. Everyone in CircleCI, I think, has oriented their camera in a way that they feel best represents who they want to be.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:38) Mm-hmm.

(Rob Zuber at 00:01:39) Yeah. You know what I mean? The good side.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:44) Yeah.

(Rob Zuber at 00:01:46) Yeah. If you could see my desk right now, you'd be appalled if you could see the rest. There are actually other guitars, but other than that, it's a hot mess in this room.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:55) Oh.

(Rob Zuber at 00:01:56) And so it's very specifically—this is the part that I want people to see. This is the cleanest part.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:00) Right.

(Rob Zuber at 00:02:02) It looks nice and clean and beautiful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:03) And it's a constant reminder of something I should be doing, but I'm never doing. Right? Instead, I'm sitting here talking to other people. That's not about you. I'm just saying my day is 8 a.m. to midnight every day, and then, you know, at least I remember that I have a guitar if I see it in my own little image right here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:24) I was just struggling with this recently, actually. So do you have kids?

(Rob Zuber at 00:02:29) I do. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:30) How old?

(Rob Zuber at 00:02:32) Ten and twelve.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:33) Okay. Boys, girls?

(Rob Zuber at 00:02:35) Two boys.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:36) Two boys? So I have a three-month-old boy and a two-year-old girl.

(Rob Zuber at 00:02:42) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:43) And she loves music. So we got a lot of music in the family, and I haven't been playing much either, you know, just running a business and everything. And then I was laying in bed about two or three nights ago, and I said, the justification for me spending an hour every two or three days playing guitar is that my kids will see me doing this, and then they'll pick up on it and learn and be able to talk about it. And before, I was doing it for me because it was something that I enjoyed. So I'd put it off because I was like, I need to work harder. I need to focus more on the business and scaling and growing.

(Rob Zuber at 00:03:20) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:21) But now I have an excuse. I have a reason. I need to do this so that they see me doing this.

(Rob Zuber at 00:03:28) Yep. Yep. That makes a lot of sense. My kids actually both play piano.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:32) Oh, amazing.

(Rob Zuber at 00:03:33) And they're quite good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:35) Nice.

(Rob Zuber at 00:03:36) But it is fun to play together. I think they enjoy that. The part where it's just practice for the sake of learning an instrument doesn't excite them. But when we do things like, hey, one of you grab the—we have a cajón. I don't know if you know what that is, but it's like—

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:51) Oh, I know what a cajón is. Yeah. Yeah.

(Rob Zuber at 00:03:52) Because it's the cheapest percussion you can get in your house, and other than the claves, which we also have. But, you know, why don't you do that? Why don't you play some chords on the piano, and I'll play some guitar or whatever. That's the thing that gets them excited. It's just like we're hanging out together and we're doing anything. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:11) Nice.

(Rob Zuber at 00:04:13) Which is awesome and easy to forget. My kids actually left—yes, no—Tuesday, Tuesday for eight weeks of summer. So I'm—I'm from—yeah. I know. Right? They went to Toronto. I'm from Toronto originally, and my parents are there. And so they go to overnight camp. And so now I can play some guitar for myself, the stuff that they don't want to hear.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:35) All right. So what are you going to bust out? You going to bust out some John Mayer, B.B. King, or—what style do you like to play?

(Rob Zuber at 00:04:41) Definitely more blues-oriented. I was having a funny conversation, though, with someone who works for me the other day about really fast downstrokes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:51) Okay.

(Rob Zuber at 00:04:51) Specifically in reference to James Hetfield. And so I have a ton of musical influences, but I've never been really fast. Right? I've never been the shredding kind of—either that or just playing two-handed tapping up and down the fretboards is not really my thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:10) But it's so popular on YouTube, Rob.

(Rob Zuber at 00:05:12) It is. Yeah. Exactly. And I know there are eight-year-olds who can do it way better than I ever will, so I'm just going to leave that whole territory and be like, yeah. I want the soulful note. Right? B.B. King, you referenced—that guy who could play three notes, and you're like, oh my God. That's the best thing I've ever heard. So I'll strive for that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:30) Yeah. It's the space between the notes that's beautiful.

(Rob Zuber at 00:05:33) Exactly. Yeah. It is the space. Right? It's stopping to take a breath and expressing a small thing and then letting that sink in with people and certainly something I try to think about in public speaking. I wouldn't say that I've learned to be a better public speaker because of guitar playing, but they're related. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:50) I would listen to that conference talk.

(Rob Zuber at 00:05:53) About how guitar playing makes you a better public speaker? All right. I'll submit it. I don't know who's going to take it, but I'll give it a shot.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:00) People will take it. That's original. They'll like it.

(Rob Zuber at 00:06:03) Fair enough. It's worth a try. It's worth a try. Cool. I like it. Great to meet you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:09) We're best friends now, Rob.

(Rob Zuber at 00:06:10) Excited to talk about something completely random, but still, I will say, actually, going back to the point of, you know, working in a very distributed team, in one sense, it feels a little invasive. In the other sense, it's really nice to have a connection with people. As soon as you sort of first meet them, they start working with you. The number of guitars, honestly, in CircleCI in people's rooms is bonkers. And if it's not a guitar, it's a bass or a drum kit or whatever. And so there's—or all. Actually, there are many people who have everything in use.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:43) I have everything. Yeah.

(Rob Zuber at 00:06:45) Yeah. Awesome. Like, how do you have time to do all that? I don't know, but that's amazing. It's so cool to me that people do all these different things. And it gives a connection point. Right? Right away, you're like, oh, oh, tell me about that book that you've read that's behind you in your bookshelf or, you know, tell me about your guitar. What—you know, it's just—it's cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:02) I like it. I definitely don't have time. I just like the way it looks.

(Rob Zuber at 00:07:08) It's something for your kids to do. Right? To have exposure to all those things and learn. And I was having—we'll try a little software development in here somewhere, but I was having—

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:20) Okay. Yeah. Yeah. We'll get back.

(Rob Zuber at 00:07:21) At dinner last night with some people who were over about trying to get kids into software development, and, you know, people always ask me about that. "My kid's seven, and should they learn Python or C++?" I'm like, I don't know. Go outside and take something apart in your garage. Just become interested in random things and find what sparks, you know, creativity and excitement, and then someday you'll build on that. Right? I'm a big fan of baking with my kids, but we—Christmas time, we'll make a gingerbread house, and they're like, "We want to buy this gingerbread house kit." I'm like, no. We don't. We want to go home, and we're going to make templates, then we're going to use geometry to figure out the dimensions, and then we're going to bake. We're going to look up a recipe, and we're going to bake stuff. And then there's resilience, which is a big thing in engineering, right, because we put the roof on, but it cracks in the middle, and how do we deal with that? We get a little more icing and M&M's and kind of hold it together. And then you realize I can make things. Right? And I have, you know, the ability to do things and create things that I want, and someday, when I'm like, oh, maybe I would want to do that in software? Cool. Be excited about that, and you'll learn Python. That's not the hard part. The syntax, that's not it. It's realizing that I can make things and I can break things and I can fix things and just being excited about that. That to me is what matters. Plus, you're seven. Who doesn't want a gingerbread house? Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:50) Right? I want a gingerbread house, and I'm 30.

(Rob Zuber at 00:08:53) Exactly. And who cares about Christmas? Even if you don't celebrate it or even if it's June or July, we just make one. They're delicious.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:01) Who doesn't love cinnamon?

(Rob Zuber at 00:09:02) I mean, come on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:03) Well, maybe after it's been on display for a year, maybe don't eat it, but yeah.

(Rob Zuber at 00:09:08) Well, okay.

(Rob Zuber at 00:09:13) Anyway.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:14) But there's your next talk. You could do rebuilding legacy systems in relation to fixing gingerbread houses. Do you—do you tear the whole house down, or do you just isolate the roof and fix that? Do you rebuild the whole roof, or do you just put some tasty glue on the crack? These are big questions.

(Rob Zuber at 00:09:32) You know what? They're very relevant to real houses also. I mean, it's not that much of a metaphor. There's a house down the block from me that has been on, um, you know, those stacked four-by-fours or whatever. I guess they're maybe—or whatever. Just the whole house, the whole bottom is missing. It's been sitting there for a year up on these things, which just scares me. I'm glad I'm not their next-door neighbor. I mean, I live about a mile from a fault line. This is not a good place to have your whole house floating in the air on top of piles of wood. But every time I look at it, I think, given the amount that they've taken away, why didn't they just build a new house? What is that little part that they're keeping? Why do they have that? You know, at what point do you just tear the whole thing down and start over, which is also metaphorically applicable to so much software.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:23) Right. You should ask them, and they should profile them and, like, what type of software person they would be.

(Rob Zuber at 00:10:28) Exactly. Exactly. But I don't even know—I hope they don't live there because it's really—it's scary. I mean, it's very scary. Anyway—

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:37) You guys, next time you're going through, just send a picture and tweet it, and I'll follow you because I'm interested to see this house on blocks.

(Rob Zuber at 00:10:44) Okay. I will take a photo and post it. Sounds good. All right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:47) We're going to take it back since we're talking about kids and all that good stuff. Was music the first time you fell in love with technology, or did something else get you interested? Like, what was your first use of technology?

(Rob Zuber at 00:11:01) That's a great question. So depends on technology, I guess. And so, I—you know, speaking of taking things apart, the guitar that's over on this side, I took apart in high school and repainted, and then tried to rewire it and basically ruined it. And I only recently had a luthier here in Oakland fix it all for me so I could play it again. And that was really cool to play the guitar that I played in high school, you know, my high school bands and stuff like that. So I always had an affinity for—I mean, this is probably why I think about it in this way. I didn't start with software per se. I mean, times were also different. This is—we're talking late eighties, early nineties kind of thing. But I loved doing things with my hands, everything from doing, you know, construction with my dad in his house, to—and then I ended up getting my first job working in a plumbing and electrical department of a hardware store. And so, you know, just much more sort of macro, hands-on types of things. And then I studied engineering, engineering physics, which is not super hands-on. It's very, like, you can't see it. It's quantum and math and all this kind of stuff. But when I left school, I started working in a factory effectively. It was we're manufacturing circuit boards for—

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:23) Oh, cool.

(Rob Zuber at 00:12:23) Large organizations, many that you've heard of, but quickly learned—my job was basically process improvement. And so analytics on top of the process, and we were, you know, doing a bunch of stuff with spreadsheets, and it was very manual. And I started doing some work to automate that, and I realized I enjoyed building the software more than I enjoyed thinking about the process and fixing the problems and all that. And so as far as getting into—I had done some numerical methods in college and stuff like that, but it was all small. That was when I realized I really enjoyed software within the overall technology space. Actually building software. I liked what you could achieve with it. And that was late nineties, and friends of mine in Toronto start—we're starting a company. Some friends that I had gone to college with, and they pinged me because they were trying to find people. It was just a very different time. It wasn't like there were software engineers on every corner. Kind of feels like everybody's a software engineer now, which is awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:32) I know.

(Rob Zuber at 00:13:33) But, you know, you—it was we were mostly comprised of people coming from other disciplines, which was interesting in its own right. I think we brought some different perspectives. So, anyway, I joined them, and there were some amazing software engineers there who I really learned from and entered me and grew me. I started out doing QA and then sort of—we called it systems engineering today. That would be SRE. And that was my real transition into sort of software as an industry and as a career, and have been doing it ever since.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:04) So whenever people say words I don't understand, I ask them. Okay. What was—you said SRE?

(Rob Zuber at 00:14:10) Oh, SRE, Site Reliability Engineering. This is a — I think Google coined the term really around taking people who were doing — well, trying to solve the problem of large-scale operations by taking the discipline of software engineering and applying it to the problem. So bringing much more automation. I mean, their group, as they describe it — I'm probably not the best person to describe this, but their group as they describe it is about 50% people coming from an operational systems background and learning more about software engineering practices, and then 50% people coming from more of a software engineering background and really diving down into the details of the systems and using that combination of disciplines to create a much more structured perspective of how you can do — I'm trying, I'm going to hesitate in calling it operations because it was really moving away from the classic.

(Rob Zuber at 00:15:07) Like, we just sit here and watch the lights, and if something goes wrong, you know, we try to follow a runbook and then go call someone else, and really into, like, the infrastructure as its own delivery of a system. And this is where I — I don't know if it's totally accurate to say this, but a lot of the principles like infrastructure as code and sort of really turning all of that definition into something that you manage using the same principles that we've developed and honed in software engineering.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:35) I like it. It sounds good, right?

(Rob Zuber at 00:15:39) I can't take any credit for it. I just see it happen and try to, you know, learn from it and use it in our organization.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:45) I like how our culture is shifting that way too. It's more of, like, open discussion points rather than I am the central expert, and I really like how the human engineering culture and technology culture has shifted to let's be useful and helpful, have discussions, figure it out, push the best ideas forward. That's very different from the early to late nineties where it was like, who's the hero that's a jerk? And yeah. So I'm proud of us as, like, a group of people.

(Rob Zuber at 00:16:16) In many dimensions, we have long ways to go in so many different dimensions. Yeah. There's so many things that we've learned, and I think the things that we've learned about how to build software better and how to more incrementally improve — we're also learning to take and apply to other things like our cultures and our models of working and stuff like that, and sort of becoming more growth mindset-oriented as a community, as a discipline. I'm not really sure what to call it, but basically, software engineering now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:50) So you go to the factory, you start writing some software, you realize you can bring some value, and then you pop into CircleCI, or was there, like, a bunch of different stuff in between?

(Rob Zuber at 00:17:01) There's a lot of time in there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:04) Yeah.

(Rob Zuber at 00:17:04) So yeah. So I went to this startup in Toronto. It was called DocSpace, the DocSpace Company. I mean, it had a few different names. We were acquired in 2000 by a company called Critical Path, which was a hosted email platform amongst other things.

(Rob Zuber at 00:17:21) That's when I moved down to the Bay Area. 2000, 2001 happened. That was an interesting time, but I stayed with that company for quite a while. A lot of things changed. I ended up doing, you know, a broad spectrum of different things from some sort of technical product management to — I eventually ended up in a group called the Office of the CTO and then working on mobile strategy.

(Rob Zuber at 00:17:43) Just a bunch of different areas that really allowed me to get a broad perspective on the industry and non-software. I mean, I wasn't just sitting at a terminal cranking out code, but really getting exposure to a lot of different things that I think ultimately set me up better to be in the role that I'm in now, like, you know, spending time with customers, spending time thinking about product, and not just being very technical. Not that you can't do that. Lots of people are great CTOs and have come from purely software development. Then there's a lot in the middle there that's just honestly, I have no idea what I'm doing right now.

(Rob Zuber at 00:18:20) Maybe I'll try to build a small application. Maybe I'll go do some consulting, like, just kind of one of the great things about living in the Bay Area. If you're in software, you can try a lot of different things. And, ultimately, I think if you have always sort of held up your part of the bargain — I'm trying to find a great way to express it, but if you have always done good work and, you know, when you've committed to delivering something to people, delivered it for them, then you can take some bigger risks. Because later when something doesn't work out, you'll always have an opportunity to go back and say, hey, is there something I can help you out with now?

(Rob Zuber at 00:18:56) And building that network was really kind of my safety net to try some bigger and kind of scarier things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:04) So your general responsibilities as CTO of CircleCI, you spend time with customers, spend time with product, grow your team, do some other things, experiments. Is that like a good overview?

(Rob Zuber at 00:19:16) Yeah. So I have responsibility at this point for all of engineering. Actually, let me be clear. I have a platform engineering group, which is responsible for infrastructure, so that includes security and SRE, and then I have a product engineering group, which is building the core functionality that we deliver to our customers. And I also have responsibility for documentation. We have other engineers in the organization under a customer engineering org, which is responsible for partners, solutions, support, those sorts of things.

(Rob Zuber at 00:19:52) So we have a very — because we sell a very technical product, our customer-facing organization, or organizations, are very deep in technical skills. So there's lots of people that I would absolutely refer to as engineers who are not in my organization.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:09) That's amazing. Yeah. That's cool. I like it. I always — some people asked me recently, and they said, how do these companies get so big with all these engineering teams?

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:17) Like, we have a product team. They might have, you know, 30 people. They're like, how do they get to, like, 300? And the way you responded was, like, you have partner, customer integration, like, all these different things will help paint a picture. Because I couldn't answer that question super well when I was asked it.

(Rob Zuber at 00:20:30) So I was —

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:31) Like, I don't know. I'll go out in the world and talk to smart people, and then I'll come back.

(Rob Zuber at 00:20:35) Yeah. I would say, even within the scope of what's my org — like, we build the core, effectively, right? And at a certain layer, you're in a place where as someone who's working with customers or the community, you can build extensions and stuff on top of our platform. For even my part, growing and scaling organizations is a real challenge for everybody. I would say the two conversations that I keep participating in outside of CircleCI — so another great thing about being in the Bay Area, I know a lot of CTOs, a lot of VPs of engineering who have similar challenges, and it's nice to have that peer group.

(Rob Zuber at 00:21:08) I'd say often, there's only one CTO in my company. I don't have another person that I can go be like, what do you think about this thing? There are companies with more than one, but we're more — and so it's nice to have that exposure.

(Rob Zuber at 00:21:29) But the key conversations that I'm generally in right now are, one, building distributed and remote teams. That's a challenge that a lot of people are trying to sort out given just the kind of pressure and density of companies and opportunity in the Bay Area. It makes it hard to build a team here. And the other is sort of maintaining culture through rapid scaling, right?

(Rob Zuber at 00:21:56) Like, you set out with a vision of what kind of company you want to be when you're really small. But as you're, you know, doubling and tripling your team in the course of six months or 12 months, can you really effectively maintain — and then combine those two problems, right? I'm hiring people all over the world and trying to make sure they're bought into not just our vision and mission, but the approach that we take in building software and working with each other. Those — I'm not about to spit out the answer to all those.

(Rob Zuber at 00:22:23) Those are the most interesting —

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:25) We're going.

(Rob Zuber at 00:22:26) Problems as we do this. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:28) I fully expect, like, a written answer that's also a plan of action for people to implement. No. But so I was researching you, and —

(Rob Zuber at 00:22:40) Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:40) First of all, I'm a customer. I'm a very happy customer. I've —

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:41) been a customer for a long time, really enjoy it. It works and we don't worry about it, and it's just like we chose CircleCI and it's like there's — you don't change your products if they just work. So I'm a fan. But I was reading about how, you know, you've increased the team, like, fourfold. Like, it's growing rapidly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:01) And I was also looking, like, at other executives in your company, you know, people that have their hands on culture. Like, I found this guy, David Mann. I don't know if you're, like, friends with him or not, but he was, like, head of HR. And so I was, like, I saw that you guys got, like, best places to work in San Francisco. And through hypergrowth, you got that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:21) And so I'm wondering, you know, not necessarily what your secret is, like, what the answers are, but, like, how do you approach it? What are your thoughts on scaling? And, you know, what's your one secret?

(Rob Zuber at 00:23:37) I think you're going to be super disappointed because the reality is I don't know that anyone has this figured out. I think one of the interesting things about these — and someone will try to convince you that I'm wrong about this, and what I'd be — I would love to meet them. Not that many people go through these cycles multiple times, right? Like, a lot of people who start companies and end up having successful companies do a bunch of small things.

(Rob Zuber at 00:24:06) I, when I talk, I talk a lot about sort of my credentials and here are all the tiny little companies that I was CTO of, and that doesn't necessarily set me up to go through this scale. And so I would say peer groups are huge, right? Finding people who have been through that cycle — they might be just ahead of you, but they figured some things out and they failed at a bunch of things. Both of those are really valuable to you, right? To know you're about to try this thing — trust me, this is how it went where I did it, and this is what we ended up doing instead. So, like, getting that kind of information from others, and then hopefully passing that down to the people who are who are following close behind you.

(Rob Zuber at 00:24:33) So that's more about just the more meta how to think and how to solve these problems as you run into them. I think the things where we've learned and see where we're maybe behind or wish we had done things earlier — being really clear about not just clear about values, but, like, writing them down, and sharing them, and reinforcing them.

(Rob Zuber at 00:25:14) I think signaling is super important, or both modeling and signaling — I'll just call this out in different ways. So, one, if you have some stated values, you should probably be living them yourself. And two, when you give recognition, make sure that the recognition that you're giving is aligned with the values that you're claiming, because the recognition will be so much more powerful than the document that you wrote, right? You can get all the posters in the world with, like, pictures of nice sunsets and put them on the wall talking about what your corporate values are.

(Rob Zuber at 00:25:47) But if you then call people out as fantastic for doing things that are counter to those values or don't align with those values, that's what people are going to interpret and pay attention to. And I would say those are a couple big ones. And then finally, in the distributed model, not just writing down your values, but writing down everything. And we're a little interesting because we have a pretty decent density in our San Francisco office and then distribution.

(Rob Zuber at 00:26:21) And so it is easy to fall into the trap — I think companies that are completely distributed have their own challenges for sure, but everybody recognizes immediately the challenge of being a remote or distributed employee of that company, as opposed to if you have kind of a core and then some people satellite it to that. It's easier to fall into the trap of, oh, yeah, we had this conversation. Everybody was there. So everyone knows this. But really, some people were there and a lot of people weren't.

(Rob Zuber at 00:26:52) I mean, we are pretty distributed. And in particular, as we get into multiple time zones, we have a bunch of folks in Europe, a bunch of folks in Japan. There are huge amounts of time where they can't get access to the subject matter experts on things. And so if stuff isn't clearly written down in a way that they can find it, it's just — everybody grinds to a halt, which is terrible. So those are a few key points that we've learned recently.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:19) How do you do the recognition thing? Like, like, how do you do it? Like, obviously, it's in your culture that giving this recognition is, you know, more powerful than the document you write. But how do you ensure — you guys have over, like, 500 people. Over, like, 200 people?

(Rob Zuber at 00:27:35) Yeah. We're, like, 240, 250, something like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:39) Yeah. Got it. So you're you're around that size. And so, like, how do you — how do you encourage this to happen through your rapid growth?

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:47) Like, how do you do it?

(Rob Zuber at 00:27:48) So we have a spectrum. And to be clear, I'm calling this — everything I'm telling you is because, like, hard-won or hard-learned lessons, right? And there was a point at which — so, sorry, let me go back a little bit. We've consistently, in our all-hands calls, taken time to call out specific people and say, you know, this person did this thing, and that's awesome, and we're really excited about them, and, you know, round of applause or whatever.

(Rob Zuber at 00:28:15) Like, first of all, that's not hard. Anybody not doing that, like, please do that, right? Like, take time and do it at a high level, right? I think it's important to recognize that people all through the company are seeing what people are doing. So as — and that's been an interesting thing to work with as you grow. You know, when you're 30 people, which I think is about the point we started doing this, generally, you're like, yeah. I saw every one of these people do these different things, and I can just talk about it. You get to a scale where there's people in the company you've basically never met.

(Rob Zuber at 00:28:49) And so really going out and recruiting for that information or, you know, getting people to nominate, those sorts of things. But along the way, it was pointed out at some point, like, we're stating these values, and we're giving recognition to people. I mean, it's not like they're doing things that we all think are terrible or illegal or anything like that, but we're reinforcing behaviors in some senses that are not the things that we're trying to, you know, drive to, right? I mean, a classic example of that in a growing company is sort of hero culture.

(Rob Zuber at 00:29:25) Right? When you start out, you need — you have a tiny little company, three, four people. Everyone kind of needs to be a hero. Everyone needs to be great at everything and willing to go and do kind of anything, and they're all putting in extra hours and all that kind of stuff. And you try to shift at some point, and I don't know that anyone can put their finger on what that point is, to something that's sustainable.

(Rob Zuber at 00:29:45) Right? We need sort of high-leverage efficiency, the ability for people to have big impact with small efforts. Like, those are actually the things that you're driving for. Of course, you want people to be focused and excited and driven, but at some point, you start to feel more like a larger organization and less like a few people in a garage, like, trying to change the world, right?

(Rob Zuber at 00:30:08) And so in order to make that kind of change, you really need to be focused on the behaviors and values that you're rewarding. And so now, over the course of that time, when we ask who would you want to give recognition to, who should be raised up and pointed out, the first question is which of these values are they embodying? Right? Like, what is it about what they're doing that shows that they are clearly demonstrating and are a great representation of what we believe as a company we want to be?

(Rob Zuber at 00:30:47) And I phrase it like that not because it's totally aspirational, but rather because every day, you want to be thinking, like, is this in line with the values of this company, or is it not? And as you get bigger and bigger, again, really living those yourself and expressing and reinforcing those through those kinds of actions, I think, is really important.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:09) I like it. And I'm learning that too as a parent. Like, they will do what you do, not what you say. Lessons learned every day.

(Rob Zuber at 00:31:19) I have so many—I don't know what the audience rating is on your podcast, so I won't give you examples. But, certainly, language that I choose to use, that I tell my children not to use, for example, that doesn't work. Right? They just listen to you, and they're like, that's how we talk.

(Rob Zuber at 00:31:40) And so, I mean, I'll just say expressive language. Not offensive language. Well, offensive if you don't think kids should use words like that. Creative. Yeah.

(Rob Zuber at 00:31:49) Exactly. But the few times I hear it, I'm like, where did you—oh, of course, I know where you heard that word. Great. Yep. So, yeah, very small example.

(Rob Zuber at 00:32:02) But, yeah, many things. I mean, in terms of just attitude, how you treat people—modeling that so your kids will do it, in the same way, I think, is really important.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:10) So I've got some questions here from the audience. That's cool.

(Rob Zuber at 00:32:15) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:15) So one of the things—because I think you're uniquely positioned to share on this topic. You've gone through—you have a founder mentality and ownership mentality. You've been a part of these growing companies, and there's a lot of change that happens as these companies grow. And so one of the questions that we get a lot is, how do you overcome the resistance to change?

(Rob Zuber at 00:32:39) So that's a really interesting question. For context, I am not a founder of CircleCI.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:47) No, it's fine. You founded other companies. You've founded four other companies.

(Rob Zuber at 00:32:51) Absolutely. Yeah. But I just want to make sure that the audience, whoever's listening, is clear. I started a company with two other folks. It morphed into a different company with one of those and one other person, and then we were acquired into CircleCI.

(Rob Zuber at 00:33:05) CircleCI was about 20 people, and it was over the course of the next year that myself and one of my two partners—Jim—we basically, Jim ended up being the CEO, I ended up being the CTO. So through the growth at CircleCI, it is a little bit different because we didn't have that "this is our creation" sort of thing, but we've gone through a ton of change. And, interestingly, some of that change was driven by us as we came in and thought, okay, this company has a lot of potential, and there's lots of room to scale and be successful.

(Rob Zuber at 00:33:43) But here are some things we think are going to have to be different about how we think and work. At the same time, these are the things we really value when we're trying to hang on to those. So I would say I'm not super resistant to change. It's probably not a very helpful answer, but I think we both—I'm thinking about Jim and I kind of put together for so long, but we both recognize the difference between different stages of a company because we've worked in companies of different sizes and that sort of thing, and are willing to embrace that, create clarity about whatever it might be. Right?

(Rob Zuber at 00:34:30) We're going to create a different structure in the organization. We're going to change some reporting models, whatever. Those are the kinds of things that I think, the kinds of changes that people resist or that are challenging because there's some unknowns, there's some uncertainty. I'm probably to a fault comfortable with uncertainty, and maybe that's what allows me to be in this kind of role. And I would say, overall, my interest is always—at this time and for the next foreseeable period, which is usually pretty short in a company of our size even—what is the best thing for the company?

(Rob Zuber at 00:35:16) Like, what are our key problems, and what kinds of changes can we make to better align ourselves to support or to solve those problems? And I think when you're thinking about it from that perspective, and I think there are great founders who are like this—meaning they're still operating at large scale in a company that they started—and I think what happens with those people is similar. They're constantly thinking, what is the best thing?

(Rob Zuber at 00:35:44) Like, the success of this company, if I'm the founder, is a great success for me, whether you're thinking about it financially or in terms of just the personal pride that comes from building something successful, or perhaps people have other motivations, whatever your motivation might be. And, therefore, being tied to what is clearly the success versus "this was my vision at the beginning, and if we shift from that vision, then that's a slight against me"—I think that's kind of this founder syndrome thing that people talk about. I haven't really worked with people like that, but, going back to kids, my children actually went to a very small school that was recently started that was like that where the person who started the school sort of continued to—they don't go there anymore. I don't think anyone's going to try to figure this out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:37) This is the Elon Musk school, right?

(Rob Zuber at 00:36:39) No, it's not.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:40) One of them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:42) That'd be awesome.

(Rob Zuber at 00:36:43) But they were trying to drive the school according to their original vision as opposed to allowing others to come in who had more experience operationally at scale. I think that's actually—that's amazingly, my analogy reminded me of something, which is bringing in people who have experience at different levels of operation. And, you know, I talked about peer networks outside of my organization for me and my role, but just ensuring that as you build, you're bringing in people who really have the skills, experience, whatever, to operate at those different levels. I think when we hear about or see, again, founders who have scaled companies to ridiculous levels, way bigger than CircleCI is right now, what you'll often see is a great network of support, whether it's mentors or advisors or coaches or named VPs or executives they bring in, recognizing your—I'm a little bit off of change, but recognizing your strengths and weaknesses. And rather than saying, cool, I'm not good at these three things, I'm going to spend all of my time trying to be good at those things, bring someone in who's awesome at those things and empower them to just run with them. Right? Like, that's a way, way better outcome than trying to be great at everything.

(Rob Zuber at 00:38:05) Like, this is my company, and I'm going to own these things. I think that ability to really focus on what you bring and drive that and find great people to fill in the other parts—like, recognize that you have gaps, everybody has lots of them, and fill those with people who really are awesome at those things—is a great way to go through that change.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:29) I don't even like the question that much anymore. Like, so as you're responding, I'm like, okay, I'm thinking about your response. I'm like, okay, I'm getting it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:38) Like, I'm thinking about the question. And then I'm like, I have two thoughts. The first one is we could either apply your logic, which I very much enjoy. How do you overcome the resistance to change? Find someone who's really good at overcoming the resistance to change and bring them in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:51) Right? That would be a direct answer using your logic, which I love. But before that, I thought, I don't even like the question a whole lot because—is it—let's analyze a little bit. The question implies that you need to overcome the resistance to change. Why—what if you just—what if it's just acknowledging the resistance to change?

(Rob Zuber at 00:39:16) Yeah. That's super interesting. I mean, it does assume that everybody is resistant to change. I would say people who go through this kind of scaling effectively are probably more comfortable with change, which is not to say if you're not, you can't do it. But, and to your point, find people who are going to help you or who are going to drive it effectively.

(Rob Zuber at 00:39:41) But maybe it's a character trait that's pretty good for people who are going to start a company and then grow it to a large scale. It's just to be comfortable because change is going to happen, whether it's the early days, I'm pivoting, trying to find product-market fit, or if it's, you know, we used to be a team of engineers, and now we're a fully functioning company. We have G&A and marketing and sales, and recognizing along that path, these are not things that I'm good at or that I even know anything about, but there's people out there who have done it and done it really, really well and can come in and be great at it. I will say for me personally, one of my greatest feelings through all of this growth is every time we bring someone in, whether it's in my team or outside of my team, who takes over something that I was having to do just because someone had to do it, and watching them be so much better at it, and learning—not because I want to do it someday, but just because it's fun to watch people who are expert or amazing at things that they do, and just the really fun experience to see people be great at things, and to have your scope be reduced to the things that you really love to do versus trying to do everything.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:55) Now let's talk a little bit about one-on-ones or leading your direct report team. How do you approach that? Do you have a specific cadence? Is it set in stone? Do you do it as needed?

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:06) Like, what are your thoughts on one-on-ones?

(Rob Zuber at 00:41:09) Yeah. So first, again, I'm talking about scaling a little bit. My—when I first joined and then first started managing folks at CircleCI, my one-on-ones were all with individual engineers, basically the whole engineering team. I started right out of the gate with a weekly cadence, which meant I basically spent my entire week in one-on-ones.

(Rob Zuber at 00:41:34) At the time, that was appropriate because the team was a little unmanaged, honestly, and so just learning what everyone was doing, and there weren't great structures in place to operate. And so a lot of communication and information came from one-on-ones. I would say I would advise against being in that situation. Meaning, if the only way that communication is happening and understanding is traveling is through one-on-ones—you know, we've all played broken telephone. That ends up being a bad situation.

(Rob Zuber at 00:42:04) And, specifically, I would call out this expression, shuttle diplomacy, I think it's called—the notion of people having a debate through other people or meeting with two of your directs and them having concerns with each other. Get out of that scenario quickly and find ways for people to learn to communicate. I mean, facilitate conversations if you have to, but don't be the go-between, because that can end up being unhealthy. It's not a ton of specific examples at CircleCI, but that's something I've definitely learned in this process.

(Rob Zuber at 00:42:42) And then building over time more, again, operational structure so that your one-on-ones are—at least my one-on-ones are very much about personal development, maybe getting a quick check-in on something. But if you spend thirty minutes with someone just getting status, there's so many better ways to get status that make that not a good use of time, and you can focus that time on more critical issues, coaching people, growing them, getting your own feedback. And so, I guess, the other transition is now my directs are VPs and directors, versus being individuals. I still have one-on-ones basically every week unless I'm traveling or something like that. You asked about being set in stone.

(Rob Zuber at 00:43:36) The schedule tends to shift a lot because all of us have things coming up that we have to deal with, but we all value the time that we can spend together, and use that for—I mean, the conversations are probably different in terms of what people need, but the overall goal of the one-on-one in that scenario is still the same. Right? And for me, I'm looking at a higher level of abstraction about what's going on and where the problems are and seeking out the big ones, and just making sure that the people that work for me have what they need in order to be successful in their roles. You know, kind of same principles just applied to a different level of space. I don't know what to call it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:24) No, I totally—I like that you said you spend a lot of time on personal development of the individual versus just status updates. Right? Spending that time to care about them and do the human thing is super important. But I'm curious, how do you continue the conversation meeting to meeting?

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:40) Do you just keep a Google Doc? Do you have a tool? Like, how do you do that?

(Rob Zuber at 00:44:44) That's a great question. I mostly take notes. I walk around with a paper notebook and a pen, and I always have to explain it to people when I'm on calls because I'm looking down and writing. I'm like, oh, by the way, I'm not—you know, I don't have a video game over here. I literally just have a pen because when I write something down with a pen, I actually never need to look at it again, because I'll just remember it.

(Rob Zuber at 00:45:10) But anything short of that, if I type it somewhere or whatever, I lose it. And then one thing that I would say I have been inconsistent at but tried to maintain is just having that same cadence around specific actions if there are any that come out of it. And that's changed a little bit. I would say, like, at the IC level, maybe that's going to be the case. At much higher levels, maybe there are specific things, but most of our work, and maybe—I don't know if this is unique to engineering, but most of our work, especially ICs achieving things over the course of a week or whatever, is tracked somewhere else.

(Rob Zuber at 00:45:52) Right? I mean, this is why you don't really need to be spending a lot of time on status because you have Jira or Trello or whatever—the actual work that you're doing. So it's rather the what were the points of conversation, what concerns were raised, and did we address those over the course of the week? I tend not to have—I try to get away from big projects that I have with my reports in terms of things we're working on and more "this is a thing we're going to get done by next week," because those bigger projects tend to go into the bucket of contiguous time that's being allocated to other projects.

(Rob Zuber at 00:46:27) And so it tends to be more, hey, here's the thing that you could go do. Let's check back in on that next week, because it's the ancillary time, if you will, not the core work of that person. Does that make sense?

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:43) Yeah. Are you a fan of Atlassian? Couple other products, you use them or no?

(Rob Zuber at 00:46:47) So we use Jira, and we use some Confluence in some parts of our org. I am not a fan of wikis in general, but I've realized—I've mentioned levels of abstraction earlier—I have realized that my direction to people should be, because—like everybody who grows up through different levels, I still have opinions on things that I should not express. My direction should be, here's the problem we're trying to solve. Right?

(Rob Zuber at 00:47:21) We need some consistent availability of information. We have a distributed team. People need to be able to help themselves. Let's find a way to make that available, and that is much more important than I personally don't like wikis. Therefore, you should go do this other thing.

(Rob Zuber at 00:47:36) I mean, my reasons for not liking wikis are kind of personal. I don't think they're the most important. It just doesn't matter at my level because I'm the person who's going to be writing all this stuff. Right? So me saying I don't like to use that form of, like, Confluence doesn't have great markdown support. They have their own, like, Atlassian markup because that existed probably predates markdown. Who cares what I think? Honestly, I'm just not going to do the writing. So people like to write in that, have at it.

(Rob Zuber at 00:48:06) You know, I just want there to be centrally available, searchable, findable information, and what other people choose to use as a tool is fine. Jira is a tool that everybody loves to have thoughts about, but ultimately it's well integrated into tons of things. You get a ton of stuff for free, and so it has staying power. Right? Everybody knows it. Everybody knows how to use it. It gets the job done. And honestly, if your whole life is about what tool you're using and not what software you're building, then, well, you might be focusing on the wrong thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:38) Or what value you're bringing to the customer?

(Rob Zuber at 00:48:41) Exactly. Exactly. Right. They don't care if you're using Jira or not.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:46) Now I did an interesting dual episode with Atlassian. I'm not sure if they aired yet, but Sri is their CTO, and then Archana, I hope I'm saying that right, is their CIO. And so we did a CTO, CIO back to back episode, which was pretty cool. But their culture at Atlassian is amazing. So when you were talking about defining the culture and then enacting and rewarding it, their first culture item is open company, no bullshit. That's the bullet point. And because they're about transparency, so I thought that was really cool.

(Rob Zuber at 00:49:26) Yeah. One notable thing that I've seen from them is that they have made decisions to change culture at scale and achieved it effectively. I mean, I don't have all the details, so I'm certainly not an expert to speak on this. But I've seen, you know, specific things called out about their culture, and they were like, yep, we're going to fix that. And the next thing you know, they're like, yeah, we fixed that. And that, very demonstrably clearly from the outside, which changing culture is harder than building culture in the first place. And I mean, I have lots of great friends that work there, and so I get that weird inside view just from talking to friends and stuff like that. And that's always impressive. I mean, that's a real achievement to be able to say, yeah, we're not living up to the values in this way, and here's what we're going to go do. And we're going to go do it right now, and we're going to make sure that we realign ourselves around that. That's hugely impressive to me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:27) I love your passion for not liking wikis. I don't know. I feel like I'm going to make you a shirt or something that says, like, wikis and has an X through it or a line through it, and then you can wear that to conferences.

(Rob Zuber at 00:50:43) Yeah, I will. Sure. I'll wear it for sure. Yeah. It's funny because as well as things that I'm learning to stop caring about, and so I don't know if I want to trigger a lot more conversations with people where they can say, oh, my wikis are amazing. It's not that I want to have the argument. It's that I've realized that's not a good use of my time. I mean, now I feel like I have to say something. It's literally just the ability to track changes and have useful review of changes, because I think people decide that they understand something and write it, and then, you know, original content gets lost and things like that. So there are other forms that are better. It's definitely not the markdown that stresses me out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:30) Okay. So what's the, as we start to wrap up here, I want to know, like, what's the thing that you're most excited about at CircleCI right now?

(Rob Zuber at 00:51:40) Well, the thing that I spend the most time thinking about is clearly just scaling the org and maintaining what we're doing. But from a product perspective, from an offering perspective, the thing that excites me consistently at CircleCI is just where we sit in terms of developer pipeline. As someone who is an engineer at heart, has been doing software engineering for so long, I've lived through so many of the failed ideas that we've had in terms of, you know, waterfall and year long projects and giant requirements documents. So really lived through this transition to how we think about doing software development now. And being in a position to watch and see, sounds creepy when I add on video cameras, but watching just as things move through our platform, how different companies think about building software. I talk to a lot of our customers. I see how they go about their work. Really understanding and having visibility into, you know, successful and less successful engineering organizations is very cool. As someone who just loves the craft of software development and the practice of actually delivering value. And so what I'm excited about for us is being able to actually give that value back to our customers. So understanding not just, like, you ran a build and your build failed, but here are some trends in the work that you're doing over time, step one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:15) Oh, that's cool.

(Rob Zuber at 00:53:16) And then here's how you look relative to the industry is a very interesting kind of problem that we're digging into in terms of just data that we have in aggregate.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:28) People love that, by the way. They love comparing themselves in the industry.

(Rob Zuber at 00:53:32) Absolutely. And I think there's real, as much as I love leaderboards and getting gold stars, there's real value in that. Right? I mean, if I am doing something half as well as my competitors, I'll call it my competitors, but really what you would compare it to is people who are, you know, maybe similar sized teams at a similar stage of company or whatever. Then I want to know.

(Rob Zuber at 00:53:55) Yeah. Cohorts. Exactly. And so I want to know so that I can look at key areas that I would want to improve. And if I'm better than everybody else, like, good for me, but I'm going to stop worrying about this and think about a different problem where I'm not beating everybody and go spend my time on that. Right? So I think that's really very interesting, very cool, and something that we are uniquely positioned to reason about and provide to our customers. And then separately, honestly, just resilience within the ecosystem in the sense that we can tell when dependent systems are broken because we're using those dependent systems constantly. Right? Whether it's where your source control is, where your packages are. I mean, as a software developer, when something breaks in my build, you know, now I've got a couple hours or whatever digging into that. Like, why is this package not working? Did something change? But we could probably tell you in most cases because we have this big aggregate view that says, hey, this package manager is currently down, or somebody upgraded this library and everybody's build broke. That's really useful and interesting information to have that is just, because of the scale that we operate and because of where we're sitting, we have a unique viewpoint in it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:11) Are your competitors doing that or no?

(Rob Zuber at 00:55:14) None that I know of. And more importantly, nobody has the same scale in terms of just total number of customers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:22) Nobody circles CI. You guys are the best.

(Rob Zuber at 00:55:26) Absolutely. There's that, but also, yeah, the biggest.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:31) Yeah. Oh, you're the biggest and the best. Also, sweet brand new move. I see email like, you guys always put CircleCI in emails, so I still, I have them all funneled into a folder since I've obstructed and hired more people. But I see the emails coming. It's smart that you put your brand in the email, so I'm just always seeing CircleCI.

(Rob Zuber at 00:55:52) I can't take any credit for that, but I agree.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:54) Yeah. I love it. No. That sounds really exciting. I look forward to it. If, do you have any sort of, like, if you could off the top of your head, you could say no. But if you could wave a magic wand and have the entire industry make one change based off of what you've learned that the most successful companies do, what would that be?

(Rob Zuber at 00:56:19) Oh, wow. That is huge. I have so many. I'm not even sure where to start. I will say the thing that is on my mind at the moment, which is not for everybody because it depends on what scale you are as a company, and I have all kinds of comments about people trying to do things too early. But resilience in production. Right? This notion of chaos and all these things. I'm very interested in many different disciplines about accepting that things are going to break and designing systems in a way that basically makes that assumption. And I think, especially in a universe where many, many companies are going from, you know, monoliths to microservices and simple systems to complex systems, many have failed to recognize the transition in complexity that comes as a result and built the resilience into their systems to support that. I think we would all be much happier if that was just a common practice and a common pattern.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:27) Okay. So resilience in production, is you would like that to be a common practice and a common pattern. Where can I go learn more about that? How to, where can I learn, is there a good book you can recommend, blog? Do you have a blog about it on CircleCI's blog? Or?

(Rob Zuber at 00:57:45) Not yet. But it's one of those subjects that has come to me in little bits and pieces kind of from everywhere. But there's a conference in San Francisco called Chaos Conf, which is probably pretty much, yeah. So if you read anything on Netflix blog about their chaos engineering practices, Chaos Monkey is a big thing. Right? We basically just kill systems in production and make sure that everything else stays running, that mental model that says something is definitely going to break at some point. I think it expands to more than just systems, which is what excites me about it. But those are good places to start for sure. And then once you tap into that, you're in the network, and you'll start finding trails out from there that will interest you for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:36) So go in there with the mindset of resilience in production. Find some Chaos Monkeys at Netflix, and they will lead you to where you need to go.

(Rob Zuber at 00:58:44) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:45) Perfect. Now let's give some context to this resilience in production because you mentioned at the beginning some hesitance to size. What size engineering org should I start to pay attention to this? If I'm two people right now, should I be obsessing about this or paying attention to the customer value or where should I?

(Rob Zuber at 00:59:02) You can get away with a lot when you're small. And I don't have a magic number. I don't have the Dunbar number for resilience or whatever. But the thing that is more important to me there is people try to build services out of the gate, and when you're two people probably, you don't understand your business model, and you don't understand the access patterns of your customers or what's really going to work in your system and what's not. So you don't really understand your domain either. And then you carve that up into a bunch of tiny pieces because, you know, because you read a book that says that's a good idea or whatever. The overhead and complexity of that will probably cause you to never find your business model and never find product market fit and never have to worry about resilience. So don't do that. It's basically at the point, for me, where I wish we had been paying more attention to that was at the point where we said, you know what? We have scaling issues in our sort of monolithic infrastructure. We definitely understand our business. We know who our customer is. We know how to use the product. We've checked all the boxes on this list that say we should start building microservices. But what we didn't do is set great patterns and practices for our teams to say, here's how we're going to go about doing this. We sort of said, you know, you're smart engineers, you'll figure it out. And it turns out smart product engineers, people who spend all of their time working in a model of building business logic and customer value aren't necessarily experts in distributed systems, and just assuming that they will be, probably a mistake. And so if you find yourself in that transition, right, of where you're going to be adding a lot of complexity, just recognize you're adding that complexity, and it's very difficult to come back and retrofit it later. So be sure that you're ready to invest in that overhead and complexity before you start to break your system apart in that way. That would be a key inflection point in my mind.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:06) Okay, good. Last question as we wrap up. This is the last one. Promise. You're at, this is a hypothetical. It's a fun one. So relax. It's all good. You're at a guitar shop. Okay. Building a picture. You're at a guitar shop. You're looking at the different guitars on the wall, excited. You find one you like. You're going to plug into this amp to see how it sounds. Right? You're going to get its tone. And sitting right next to you as you plug this guitar into the amp is Elon Musk. You just noticed it's just Musk just sitting there. He happens to play a lot of music. I made that up. But you start talking and he invites you into the new 2020 Tesla, the sports one, the one that's not really out yet. You guys go for a drive, you end up at his house. He's got a time machine and you get to go into that time machine and go back and just whisper something in your ear of you at your first job, like something maybe about leadership or some advice to your past self at your first job. What would that be? What would you whisper in your past self ear?

(Rob Zuber at 01:02:10) That was such an amazing scene setting. I was guessing the whole way where this was going to go. I have so many answers to so many parts along the way. But okay. So I'm going to throw something out there that's maybe interesting or not. But one of the things that I have taken away from so many of my conversations with leaders, especially, is, and we talk about it and people, junior engineers and stuff, talk about this notion of imposter syndrome. Right? Feeling like I'm going to get found out, like, nobody knows that I am like, I don't actually know what I'm doing or whatever. And what's interesting to me now is to see how consistently pervasive that is in, I don't know if that's just this industry or everybody that works at anything. And that ultimately, the real value we can all have is just being open and sharing with each other. Like, hey, this is a thing. We're trying to figure it out. We don't really know. No one's ever done this before. I think that's a big part of it. It's so many of the things that we all do, no one has ever done before.

(Rob Zuber at 01:03:21) So feeling like, hey, I don't know if I should be doing this thing because I don't have expertise, is a real problem. And I think recognizing that me or other people like me who were young and sort of just starting out in this industry and recognizing that that's something that travels with you, and that ultimately the best solution to that problem again is to just be open, share, like, hey, we're trying to do a thing, and it didn't work out very well.

(Rob Zuber at 01:03:53) That will support other people, and it will support you all along the way. And I think when I was younger, so to bring this back to your question, a little more tightly tied to your question, I always had this impression that I had to have the answers. Like, someone has hired me to do this job, and therefore, I must have the answers. And recognizing that, you know, I think as I've gotten older and hopefully wiser, I've started to realize that nobody has all the answers, and that's why that's what we're here for is to figure it out together. And you get more comfortable knowing that you know less than you thought and that there's so much left for you to learn.

(Rob Zuber at 01:04:31) And that if you build a great network of people and people around you and just be open and honest about these things, everyone will do better. That's probably the best solution to that. I wish I had known that, I guess, when I was younger. That was super rambly, so I don't know how much time I would get in my time machine visiting myself, but that's the message. I would write it down a few times to make sure I was a little tighter in the delivery.

(Rob Zuber at 01:04:54) That's the message.

(Joel Beasley at 01:04:56) The current delivery is you just whispered "you're an imposter" into your past self's ear.

(Rob Zuber at 01:05:03) Yes. If I had one second, that would be a terrible takeaway.

(Joel Beasley at 01:05:06) Anyway, that's good. But here's the thing. Alright. So the first time I heard the word imposter syndrome, I was at a conference.

(Joel Beasley at 01:05:14) And apparently everybody else knew what it was, but I didn't. And this guy speaking said, "Who has imposter syndrome?" And the whole room raised their hand, and I did not raise my hand because I did not know what it was. And I was like, I'm not an imposter, my initial thought. And then they went on, and I was trying to derive the meaning from the continuous conversation.

(Joel Beasley at 01:05:34) And so what I picked up in that moment was that it feels like you shouldn't be there or you're going, like, it feels like not right that you're in the position you're in, that you don't deserve it. And so my first thought was, oh, no. Like, I work super ridiculously hard. So when I'm in a position, like, I definitely deserve to be there. That's why I work so hard to get there.

(Joel Beasley at 01:05:54) And so then the second I started to research it, I found out that that wasn't the exact meaning of it. It was that you have this actual fear that you're going to be exposed as a fraud. And or at least that's what the Wikipedia and New York Times type stuff says when I googled for it. But I was like, I've just, maybe it's a personality trait of mine or something, but I've never experienced the imposter syndrome, just because I work super hard for where I want to go.

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:25) And then I'm always figuring out that, like, I learned really early in life that I'm wrong most of the time. And so now it's like, alright, let's take the position I'm probably going to be wrong, and I need to surround myself—like, my system's probably going to fail. How do I surround myself with really smart, bright people in order to minimize my total failure?

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:44) And so that's just the one area where I don't have the, I don't feel that way. But I think a lot of people do—

(Rob Zuber at 01:06:55) I—

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:55) Because they raised their hand.

(Rob Zuber at 01:06:56) I agree. I think that was an excellent tie-in between resilience and its application to other things and this message. And I think that the transition, right, the realization that you're talking about that's so valuable that I'm trying to express very poorly to my former self is that no one ever has all the answers, right?

(Rob Zuber at 01:07:22) And so it's developing the comfort with that, with the fact that everyone around you is searching for a better way to do something. Everyone around you is making mistakes all the time and building that support through, you know, the culture of your—well, working in a company that has a culture that supports that is something I would value for sure. Working with leaders or peers or, you know, whatever. It's just surrounding yourself with people who are very comfortable with that fact and then designing your team, your organization, whatever it might be, in that resilient way that's like, yeah, we're going to make some mistakes, but we are prepared for that.

(Rob Zuber at 01:08:03) We accept that, and we know how to recover from that. And now we're all very comfortable just trying things and learning together, and I think that's the eventual outcome and sort of mental state that I would love to see more people get to.

(Joel Beasley at 01:08:16) I like it. I did poorly in school, so I got a real good life lesson growing up all the way through school that I definitely don't have the answers. The grades told me I didn't, and so I got really comfortable with not having the answers. Yeah. Alright.

(Joel Beasley at 01:08:31) Cool. Dude, this was awesome. This is a fantastic conversation. I, we made a podcast. I super like you.

(Joel Beasley at 01:08:37) Next time I'm out in San Francisco, I'll let you know.

(Rob Zuber at 01:08:39) Sounds great.

(Joel Beasley at 01:08:40) Do you guys have offices out there? Do you have a central office, or are y'all distributed?

(Rob Zuber at 01:08:43) We do. We have an office in San Francisco. We have a few other offices, a couple in the US, one in Tokyo, and we're adding a couple internationally, but we have one here in San Francisco.

(Joel Beasley at 01:08:55) Dude, maybe you and I go visit—who's out there? Atlassian's out there. They have some cool events too, like company events.

(Rob Zuber at 01:09:01) As I said, I know some people, but it sounds like you do too, so I'm sure we could find our way—

(Joel Beasley at 01:09:05) That'd be cool.

(Rob Zuber at 01:09:06) Over and say hi. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 01:09:08) Who knows? Sometimes I say this stuff and it magically lines up. Like, I'll realize that I'm in San Francisco in a week, and then I'll just text some people and be like, oh, dude, let's do it.

(Rob Zuber at 01:09:16) Perfect. Would be great.

(Joel Beasley at 01:09:17) Rob, thank you so much. You have a fantastic afternoon, and we'll talk soon.

(Rob Zuber at 01:09:21) Alright. Thanks a lot. Yeah. It was great chatting with you.

(Joel Beasley at 01:09:22) See you, bud.

(Rob Zuber at 01:09:23) Enjoy. Yeah. Take care.