Prakash Kota - CIO at AutoDesk

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Prakash, the CIO at Autodesk, and we discussed the ratio between being bold and being reckless, tips for having an MVP mindset to keep things simple, and ways to break down walls between teams to build a culture of collaboration. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:35) Hello?

(Prakash at 00:00:36) Hey, Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:37) Did you make it through the sound check?

(Prakash at 00:00:41) Yes. It took 13 minutes, but we made it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:43) It sounds good, though. I promise you.

(Prakash at 00:00:46) Good. Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:47) You've got some awesome screens back there. Are those dashboards?

(Prakash at 00:00:51) Yeah. Those are my dashboards, my cockpit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:53) Nice. We can't see them for security reasons. They're blurred.

(Prakash at 00:00:58) Intentionally.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:59) Where are you located?

(Prakash at 00:01:02) 1 Market, San Francisco.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:03) Oh, wow. I know that area.

(Prakash at 00:01:05) The Ferry Building.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:07) Yeah. I was out there a few months ago speaking at Williams Sonoma. They're out there.

(Prakash at 00:01:12) Oh, cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:14) So it's pretty early. It's probably, like, right around 9:00 over there.

(Prakash at 00:01:18) 8:15.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:19) 8:15?

(Prakash at 00:01:21) This is my second meeting, so this is not early for me. I'm an early person.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:24) Me too. I get up around 5:00, 5:30 and go for a run, and I start working probably around 7:30.

(Prakash at 00:01:31) Cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:32) Yeah. Do you do that? Do you go for, like, a run in the morning?

(Prakash at 00:01:35) I go to the gym at 4:30, 5:00, and I take the 6:30 train—usually 6:15 or 6:30—and I commute into the city. And then I'm in my office by 7:00, 7:30.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:48) Nice. What benefit—like, did you always do that, or is that something, you know?

(Prakash at 00:01:53) I usually always do that. I sleep for four to five hours. That's the sleep I need, probably. I wish I could sleep more, but I'm fresh after four, five hours of sleep. And so I'm an early morning person. So I like to be out there in the city, and it's a refreshing environment. Early morning in the city, 7:00—there are joggers, there are tourists, there are people rushing to get into the office to get work done. That energy is what I look for when I come in the morning.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:27) Yeah. You can thrive off of that energy.

(Prakash at 00:02:30) Exactly. Exactly. And before the meetings start, you can get stuff done.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:37) I know. That's the best part.

(Prakash at 00:02:39) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:40) So that's good. So you start early in the morning. What does your day typically look like?

(Prakash at 00:02:46) Meetings after meetings after meetings, usually. Because I have a global team. I have teams in 30 countries that report up to me, and we are a global company as well. So there is stuff happening everywhere. And usually, it is a series of meetings with our customers, with our internal stakeholders, with my own team. And then, usually, I wrap up the day between 5:00 and 6:00 and head back home.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:20) Nice. Do you have a wife, kids, family?

(Prakash at 00:03:23) Yeah. Yeah. One wife. One wife. One daughter. She's 10 years old.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:31) Oh, wow. That's amazing. I've got some little ones, but they're—we had two of them, and they're under two years old. So one's about two, a daughter who's about two, and then a boy who's about five months.

(Prakash at 00:03:40) Oh, wow. Yeah. That must be a handful in itself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:44) I wish I could say I only need four to five hours of sleep.

(Prakash at 00:03:47) But you only get four to five hours of sleep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:50) I only get—I put them to bed, and then I go to bed.

(Prakash at 00:03:56) Exactly. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:58) Oh, man. This is fantastic. Yeah. I'm glad—whenever somebody says, um, don't worry, this will go fast, or they say, you know, enjoy it, this is gonna go fast. I look at the "go fast" part. I'm like, I want this stage to be over.

(Prakash at 00:04:12) But it's a fun stage. You should enjoy the time, too, because later you'll feel like, you know what? That age was fun. It went too fast. That's something you'll think. Right now, we always think about that. My daughter—she's 10 years old. And sometimes we feel like, wow, those were the days when all the cute moments, when they start walking, when they start crawling, they start talking, the first words. All those are very important moments too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:35) And I like how our brain remembers those.

(Prakash at 00:04:39) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:39) Yeah. Because you go from sweet crawling moment to just banshee crying screams.

(Prakash at 00:04:47) That's so true. That's so true.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:48) Oh, this is great. Yeah. I like to talk about family. I like to talk about the past a little bit just to get some idea of who you are and what drives you. Now, were you born in San Francisco?

(Prakash at 00:04:58) No. I was born in India.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:00) Okay.

(Prakash at 00:05:00) I grew up in India in a town—or a city called Chennai. Okay. Southern part of India. I did my bachelor's in engineering there, and then I came here for my master's in chip designing at Oklahoma State. I graduated there, and then I got into consulting. And after a couple of consulting gigs, I moved into Autodesk as a three-week consultant and stayed there quite some time. Three weeks became three months, nine months. And after that, I took a full-time opportunity, and then I've stayed there for the last 13, 14 years. Played 11 different roles and grew up the chain. I was an individual contributor when I joined. And right now, I manage a team of close to 750 members worldwide. And it's been a great ride. And the company as such has been going through a huge transformation, and I'm lucky to be part of the whole journey so far.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:56) So if you were giving advice or insight to someone who's back where you were as an individual contributor—where you were several years ago as an individual contributor—looking back, how did you do that? How did you go all the way up through the organization? How did you constantly become more valuable?

(Prakash at 00:06:17) I think the big thing is being bold. There is a slight difference between being reckless and bold on the scale. And the other side is conservativeness. Right? People are usually very conservative, comfortable, and they try to be in those shoes. And it's always very important if you have aspirations to grow, to move on the scale towards bold—and not too reckless—but where you are putting in the effort and taking some bold decisions and risks and delivering results. And results is what drives you, gets you the currency, and gets the confidence and trust. And while you do that, you also build relationships, which are very, very important for you to grow in any organization. Because at the end of the day, when you're growing, you're taking on more responsibilities, and you are being more accountable for getting stuff done. And so that's the one thing that I would say: be open-minded. Make sure that you're getting whatever you are specifically supposed to be doing—are getting those things done. But at the same time, you are also challenging yourself to an area where you are not comfortable with and taking on those opportunities as they come. And delivering results will naturally help you scale and do well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:37) Build relationships, deliver results.

(Prakash at 00:07:41) Absolutely. And learn continuously. We are in such a unique time period, is what I feel, where there's so much change happening in a good way. Technology is enabling, and the rate at which technology is changing and disrupting is incredible. So all of us should be super fortunate and take advantage of it. You know, so much change is happening. As long as you have the mindset of adapting and shifting as technology evolves, as new capabilities come out, as we solve new business problems, I think there's so much to really get stuff done and so much to learn and so much to grow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:21) I agree. And I talk with leaders at your level and different levels all day. I'm curious, what are your insights for peers? Like, let's say you're talking to some peers that are at the top of some large organization like yours, and you're discussing how you stay on top of these trends. Speak to that.

(Prakash at 00:08:39) Yeah. A good thing is within the Silicon Valley, especially, we have quite a good CIO network. And so we meet regularly, and we also ping each other when—because all of us are trying to solve business problems very similar and leveraging common technologies that are out there. So we reach out to the groups to see, "Hey, who has used this vendor? I'm hearing about this vendor and the capabilities that they're bringing. Have you tried these things?" So we are always in touch, and so that's what I tell vendors: you don't need to ask for a reference. Whether it's good or bad, you'll surely get it because we all talk. So that word of mouth—then you also share, "Hey, here is the problem that we are running into." We get advice. We share our thoughts. We share our experiences with others. So we get a lot of stuff done through that network as well. So that's how you keep in touch and see what's going on, and you always compare: are we leading, are we bleeding, are we catching up, or what stage are we in? And that's always helpful as well internally when you're trying to influence folks. And when you are doing that, that external benchmarking is also sometimes very important.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:56) So I want to take it back a little bit again. What was the most interesting part of technology? Like, what really caught your eye? I know you did some chip design and you got your master's. You did all of that. But when was that first hook where you're like, "This is technology, and I love it"?

(Prakash at 00:10:12) Yeah. So what happens is when you're born in India, you have only two options. You either become an engineer or a doctor. And if you're lucky, you become a lawyer. So your parents already tell you what you need to become. So your brain is already fully engraved that you're becoming an engineer, you're becoming an engineer, and you start loving what you get to know. You're getting exposed to all of this technology. And I was—my parents grew me, helping me learn technology and be interested in engineering and wanting to get there, and I eventually got there. And once you get there, you also like what you're doing. And you start having the circle of friends who are like-minded, and you start sharing and learning from each other, and you fall in love with technology. When I came here, too, for my master's, I had great opportunities working with great professors as well as my fellow students, where you start learning new stuff. And when you start solving business problems, leveraging technology, and then using technology as an enabler, you really get excited. Once you start delivering results, that's where you get a lot of satisfaction. And that's how I got hooked on technology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:20) Yeah. I agree. When I—my first big venture into the business world, other than just tinkering with technology, was when I was doing some real estate software. And I would sit in the real estate office with my parents, and I would solve these little problems. And looking back, the motivator was the joy and the excitement that I would bring other people by solving their problems.

(Prakash at 00:11:40) Exactly. That's exactly what a typical developer or analyst or a coder—a programmer—will get when you really solve things and give it to the end user and see that excitement in their eyes. You get humongous satisfaction. And I'm one of those lazy developers that doesn't want to do manual things. So I'm in the business of trying to automate stuff. So wherever possible, if there are any repetitive tasks—and that was always my notion. Why is it done in a human way every single time? If it has to be done more than once on a regular basis, why can't it be programmed? And that's how my brain works. And so I'm huge into automation. And mainly, it's trying to see how can we augment human beings with much more technology, programs, bots, robots, where we can do much more interesting things where judgment is required. Whenever there's no judgment required and it is repetitive, I feel like it's not a job of a human being. It should be done by a machine. And that's what my core focus always is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:44) So have you seen the Elon Musk Neuralink?

(Prakash at 00:13:01) No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:01) Oh, so for your next train ride, the next time you're commuting, Elon Musk has been working on a high-bandwidth brain-computer interface called Neuralink.

(Prakash at 00:13:01) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:01) And you should—

(Prakash at 00:13:02) I should check it out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:03) You should watch it. There's an 18-minute—I've looked at all the videos. There's, like, an hour-long one. There's an 18-minute one if you search on YouTube.

(Prakash at 00:13:10) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:11) That's a recap of, like, two weeks ago when they released what they've been secretly working on for two years.

(Prakash at 00:13:16) Awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:16) And it'll blow your mind. You'll love it.

(Prakash at 00:13:19) I'll do it. Let me check it out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:20) Yeah. Personal thing, though. Now it'll—your inner geek will get even more excited. So what's the mission? Like, what's the flag? What's the mission at Autodesk?

(Prakash at 00:13:32) Yeah. So at Autodesk, we make tools so that our customers can make anything—literally anything. So as you probably know, we're a design software company, and we have been focusing a lot on design software. And if you take a step back, we were in the business of shipping DVDs to our customers so that they can install and do all the cool things. But now we have really—as part of a business model transformation—we have moved on, and now we give access to our software in the cloud so that our customers from anywhere can access and really make anything. And so that's what the business purpose is that excites me, because the cloud brings the scale. And if you look at the world, it's continuously changing. There are, like, 400,000 people that are getting into the middle class every day, which means their needs are changing. They need housing, and there are developed countries that are refreshing their infrastructure, who need to use our software. So there are so many exciting things happening, and that's where we are in the middle of that huge transformation. And so now we want to keep up to the promise of subscription. We became a subscription company. So there's a huge focus on how do we keep up to the promise of subscription, which means we keep the customer at the center of everything. And the key focus—one of the corporate focuses, which is also where I get hooked—is digitizing Autodesk. And when we say digitize, we mean creating frictionless experience to our users, whether it be end customers or internal employees or partners. And that's where we put a lot of focus in, and we leverage automation to hide the complexity and to create simplicity and to give that experience. But we have really moved a lot from being product-focused to more experience-focused and value-focused. Because with subscription, that's what customers are looking for. We really want to understand how our customers are using our software, what new capabilities will really help them. And how can we really make it seamless for them? And because if you look at folks in their personal lives, it has changed in the last four to five years with the whole consumerization of how things work. You don't schedule stuff if you want to go out. You're not scheduling taxis. You just call them. You don't go to movie theaters anymore. Some of us do. But mostly, you can watch it on demand whenever you want. You don't need to go to malls to do shopping. You can shop online. You don't need to go purchase things. It just gets shipped to your house.

(Prakash at 00:15:59) So the whole consumerization that has happened in personal lives—people when they come to work, they have the similar expectation. And that's my biggest goal working with my team. How do I create that consumer kind of experience when employees come to work at Autodesk? How do we remove friction, and how do we not lock them down so that their creativity comes out and they are best in whatever they need to do, not needing to worry, "How do I get access?"

(Prakash at 00:16:24) "How do I—will I be restricted from doing these things?" I really want them to have a cafe kind of experience, like a consumer experience, but at the same time, maintain enterprise security. So keeping security in mind, but at the same time, giving that seamless experience so that they can be productive and effective. So that's what we are really focused on on a day-to-day basis when we come to work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:46) No, I love it. It sounds beautiful. I'm like on your team now. So we get some questions from the audience from time to time, and they say, "Hey, if you come across some awesome leaders, some great leaders, will you ask these?" And I say, "Okay, cool." So is that okay? Can I ask some of those?

(Prakash at 00:17:05) Sure. Sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:06) Okay. So this one's about—we call this question the MVP mindset. And the hardest thing to do professionally is to keep things simple. Right? And so how do you keep things simple?

(Prakash at 00:17:18) Yeah. So we have this whole concept in my team where we follow Amazon's working backwards. So whenever we have any project or initiative or an idea and a team comes down, we have this one-pager, what we call it. So you need to come up with a one-pager document, assuming that we are going live. On the day of live, how will the press release be? What will we talk about on the capabilities? There, you'll not talk anything about technology. You'll only talk about business value. What will be the minimum business value that users will be excited about to consume it? So you need to write a one-pager talking about all the good things and the value that it brings when you launch it is what we look for.

(Prakash at 00:18:02) And then we look at, is this what customers are looking for, whether it's internal or external? And then we prioritize. And so whenever there is a scope creep that continues to happen in an engineering worldscape, we go back to the document to see, was it in the minimum viable requirement? Was it in the press release? Is this—do we want to add it or is it a future phase? So that's how we prioritize things and keep it simple. And our goal is, how can we be as quick as possible? Like, I remember four to six years back, the whole IT landscape, we used to have releases once in three to four months. So we used to call these major releases that go. Now we have releases all the time.

(Prakash at 00:18:43) We don't take systems down at all because we do releases keeping our systems alive so that customers can continue to interact. We have business flexible releases that are scheduled every two weeks, but we have a lot of on-demand releases. That's what we are moving into. It's like, at the end of the day, how many releases are we doing per day so that business can continuously get value? So we are always looking and focusing on how do we really keep to the core of what we are trying to solve and connect it to our corporate values and departmental goals so that we don't go off and create products that nobody uses.

(Prakash at 00:19:17) Or you have two people consuming it. So we don't want to create that, and that happens in an engineering side. People get excited for cool technology. And so we keep going back and asking, what is your total addressable market? How is that adoption going to be? Is it going to replace a different tool? Or are we going to add new capabilities? Or what is the consumer base look like? We ask these questions before we prioritize and approve and have teams work on different things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:44) Oh, I love it. We're a very small company over here, but we took the same concept of the outcome-driven approach, you know, from Amazon and did narratives on all of our features. And it was actually interesting because we introduced it into a team that hadn't done that before. And so watching the shift happen and watching people become better at creating those narratives has been very interesting.

(Prakash at 00:20:07) Exactly. And you get into a lot of questions while doing that. "Oh, I didn't think about this." And others ask questions and really get super crisp on what you need to deliver, and that becomes super impactful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:18) And then you get the engineers advocating for the customers. They're like, "I wanna win, so now I have to find a way to prove that this is useful to the customers."

(Prakash at 00:20:26) That's exactly—that's a totally different way of how engineers operate rather than talking about technology. You're talking about customer value and business problem, which is like music to my ears when I start seeing engineers talk in that language.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:40) Oh, I love it. Rather than you and I arguing about which is technically faster. Right?

(Prakash at 00:20:46) That's exactly right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:48) Right? Instead of arguing what's technically faster, we're now arguing on behalf of how we bring more value to the customer. It's beautiful. Yeah. So let's talk about—let's say you get to work with some of the best people in the world, but we're all still human. So let's say that you're working with some people and you notice that there's some disconnect. Like, within one of your high-performing team members, they start to disconnect a little bit. Like, how do you approach that?

(Prakash at 00:21:11) Yeah. So, I mean, is it an individual or a team?

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:16) Let's say, well, let's talk about whatever you think. Which one do you have more experience with?

(Prakash at 00:21:21) Because at the end of the day, we run into—as we have global big teams, we run into different kinds of issues. At the end of the day, it is very important when you take a look at an individual and somebody who's high-performing and suddenly having a disconnect. It's very important to understand with the individual, him or her, to find out if there's anything going on in their lives, personal lives. What is causing that disconnect? Because especially if they are such an engaged employee, how could that disconnect all of a sudden? And having that one-on-one conversation and being there to listen first from their perspective rather than being judgmental is very important as a leader is what I feel. Because sometimes you don't know all the elements what goes on in one's life. And so there may be a situation where we need to support that individual of whatever situation they are in so that when they come across or come out of that situation, they're again getting back and being engaged. So when we are being supportive, it always helps. I remember one of my employees, he was super engaged, high-performing, and suddenly started to have some disconnect.

(Prakash at 00:22:27) And then we started noticing, "Hey, what's happening?" But he was not sharing. So then we had a conversation, like, started, "Hey, is everything okay? What's going on?" We figured out that his wife was diagnosed with cancer, and he was trying to help her at home as well as here. We said, "You know what? Family comes first. Go, please go do whatever you need to do to take care." And once they went through all the process and she recovered very fine, and then he came back, he was super and 200% energized, delivering so much value to Autodesk. And we really—we are thankful for the team, the entire team being there to support because sometimes people don't open up. And that's where you'll need to find out what's going on in their situation and help them out. And if it is a case where an employee is disconnected or not engaged or having some conflict, having that one-to-one direct conversation with the person that they're having conflict with and tackling that conflict head-on is very important so that you can solve it rather than trying to munch it behind your head.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:27) We are doing good today, man. You're on fire. Like, I love this. Okay. So open up my mind a little bit about how this happens with teams and what do you do with teams.

(Prakash at 00:23:38) So with teams, I think teams also, depending upon how they are set up, it is very important to have a culture of collaborating between teams. Having joint—in some cases, if there is joint ownership that is required, even though you can really create a specific goal and deliverables, it is also important for them to work together. And that's something that we really highly encourage. We really want to have a collaborative culture within the teams. So it's very important for us to set them up.

(Prakash at 00:24:08) And if we do notice, we also want to celebrate joint wins. So really recognizing that culture of, "You know what, we need to collaborate with each other," because there is typically a tendency, "You know what? You start building walls between teams and saying, 'Okay, I'm delivering this. You're delivering this.'" It's totally okay to make progress and to quickly get stuff done, but it is also very important to collaborate and have that culture because each team is different and their setup and how they operate. So that is one of those muscles that we are continuing to push for because we want more cross-collaboration between geos, between teams so that we can have much more diverse outcomes out of that. Because when you have diverse thought process going in, cognitive diversity and other things, you get really the best outcomes for the customer. So we really push for that cross-collaboration too.

(Prakash at 00:25:02) And when any teams get disconnected or disengaged, we are—same way, we follow agile methodology. We have standups. We have sprint reviews and planning, and people are super candid during these retrospectives too. And we really have these conversations. "Hey, what's going on? Why are you disconnected? What's going on between the team members? Why are we having these conflicts?" So we tackle them during those conversations, which are very safe to have because people also know that we are not going to penalize folks because of their outspoken nature. And that's something, over time, that's a great culture that Autodesk has, where people are really upfront in having straight conversations, straight talks.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:42) People are open, upfront, transparent.

(Prakash at 00:25:44) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:46) I love it. Yeah. Because when you get things out there, what you do is you allow the collective processing power of all the great people you work with to work on that.

(Prakash at 00:25:55) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:56) Do you think that fits into digital? Like, I know digital transformation's been, like, a huge topic lately. Right?

(Prakash at 00:26:00) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:01) But, you know, how do you look at it? What does that mean at Autodesk?

(Prakash at 00:26:05) So for us, digital—as I mentioned, digital transformation is removing the friction from users. So we are putting a lot and lot of focus on it and understanding, whether even for internal employees, we have gone through this huge exercise of what is the overall lifecycle of an employee. From the start, you are starting to interview with Autodesk, from the time you retire is how we have a complete lifecycle. So we are like, "Okay, what goes on? Where are the friction elements? Where is the process where the friction comes in? And how can we remove the friction to make it super productive?" We also talk about day zero access. On the first day when you come in, what all access—how do we need—like, we need to understand you are coming in finance, so you need to have all of these applications and tools and access. And we don't want you to raise any tickets asking, requesting for those access. We should be already giving you those access, and you just activate and start consuming them rather than figuring out. Because what happens is when you join a company, it takes weeks for you to understand what tools do they use.

(Prakash at 00:27:06) And then it takes weeks to understand, "Okay, where do I go and open these forms and tickets so that I get required access?" And we really want to take all that process away and really tell them, "Hey, your peers with the similar persona use all of these applications. And here is what you need to have access for. Activate single sign-on and use in a secure way" is what we are looking for. So for every single aspect, from access to collaboration, we are continuously looking for patterns to see what are those things that users are using the most, and how do we remove the friction.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:40) No, that's so smart. That's such a waste if they have to spend weeks onboarding when they could just, on day zero, hit the ground running.

(Prakash at 00:27:47) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:48) So you work with some amazing people in the world, some of the best engineers, software, business people in the world. And it's partly your job because you're the leader there to make sure that you always have this, you know, leadership bench or this pipeline of fresh people, you know, coming in and growing. And so what stands out to you as traits or behaviors that you see happening in the levels, you know, two or three below you that say, "Hey, I should invest some time into this person and help them grow up into this new role."

(Prakash at 00:28:19) Yeah. So recruiting, again, talent is a huge focus of my day-to-day time too on how we recruit in all the different regions where we are scaling and growing. And it's not just me—across Autodesk, leaders spend a lot of time not only mentoring, being available there and understanding. And within IT, we have a program also for campus-to-corporate onboarding is what we call. So recently, about a couple of years back, we did that in Michigan, and before that, we did in Singapore. We've done it in Bangalore, where we recruit college talent. We go to campuses and recruit talent and really onboard them to corporate. At the same time, we are also bringing in a lot of smart people. The key thing is we don't want to also tell them what needs to be done.

(Prakash at 00:29:07) We would really want to give them the business problem and see how digital native folks come in and solve the problem. You'll be amazed to think, "Oh my god, I have not even thought about that kind of way of solving," because we are so used to solving things where we are not digital native or mobile-first kind of mindset that comes to us. But when these folks come into the workforce and the way they are trying to solve things, it's amazing. And so that mix of having that college recruits as well as experienced folks combining them, you are able to get much better value and output, and people work very well across our teams. So I do spend a lot of time also understanding the high-performers, what are they focused on, are we giving them opportunities, what do they need to be so that we can keep them engaged and motivated. So they are working on some of the challenging things that'll keep them going.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:02) No, that's super, super bright because if you wanna know where the future's going, just go down to the next generation. Right? How do they think? We don't need to read a report. Just start pulling them into the company and see what they do.

(Prakash at 00:30:13) Yeah. Insert them into interesting projects, and you'll be amazed how quickly they are able to solve things and how different they think. And that's the whole diversity aspect that you need as well in your overall problem solving.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:27) Yeah. Because as you get—like, one of my favorite concepts is the rainforest. Right? Because I was reading this article on the rainforest, and they were talking about the reason why it's so resilient to change is because of how diverse it is.

(Prakash at 00:30:39) Correct. That's so true.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:41) And I was like, "Oh, that's a good excuse to, like, say we need diversity and thought in our companies because it'll make us more resilient to change."

(Prakash at 00:30:48) Absolutely. Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:50) Nice. Okay. No, this is—you are, like, on top of it. I love it. Thank you, my friend.

(Prakash at 00:30:57) Oh, thank you. Good job.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:58) Okay. So anything on your mind that you wanna push out into the world?

(Prakash at 00:31:05) No. Basically, Autodesk is a great company. We are continuously recruiting. We're in this whole growth mode. We are excited that we're a subscription cloud-based company trying to help our customers imagine, design, and make a better world.

(Prakash at 00:31:20) So if there are opportunities out there where you can come in and add value, we want more and more smart people to join us. So it's a great, and we have a great culture. I've been with the company for fourteen years. That speaks for itself, especially being in Silicon Valley, because of the culture and the nature of the people. It's so fun to work with.

(Prakash at 00:31:40) So if there are open positions there that is of interest, I would highly recommend people to look into it and join Autodesk.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:47) Yeah. So they could find out more about that on autodesk.com as I'm sure there's a career section.

(Prakash at 00:31:51) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:52) Yeah. We'll post it in the show notes that people can look for. Now we talked a little bit about the culture. Right? We can just gauge some of the open and upfront transparency, your day zero concept, how you write narratives.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:04) Any other important culture points that you would want to highlight?

(Prakash at 00:32:07) Yeah. So the key thing, right, from a culture standpoint, we have three aspects. We call it—we have nine culture values that are very ingrained in what we do, and they're divided into three sections. We call it think, feel, and do. There is an aspect of think that goes in thinking part where we want employees to be smart, innovative, and adaptable. And we also want them to have the feel element of it. It's just not, okay, you'll be engineers and just focus on the thinking. We really want our employees to be impactful and also inclusive and humble in the way we do things because all of us are smart in whatever we do. And at the same time, while you think and you have this feel nature, at the end of the day, you have to get stuff done. If you just are thinking and feeling but not able to do, then it doesn't have an impact to our customers. So there is an aspect of being courageous and accountable and being pragmatic.

(Prakash at 00:33:02) These are the three buckets that we fall into. We put our culture values into and ask our employees to make sure that they're balancing between the whole thinking and feeling and doing in whatever they do. So we want them to—these nine culture values is something that we want them to be ingrained in their DNA in whatever they do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:23) No. That—first of all, this is amazing because I have yet to come across a company that organizes their culture items by that categorization that you have, and that is just absolutely brilliant. It's so logical.

(Prakash at 00:33:35) Yeah. Yeah. No. It's fun. And people are getting into it, and the culture is something—it's leader driven, top down, comes down from our CEO and all of the C-staff members. It's not like every division is having its own culture. As a company, we all agree to these are the values that we are going to, and we spend a lot of time on this. It's not one of those all-hands meetings that we talk about it. This is continuous things that we push for because that's how we are going to grow as a company and do great things for our customers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:06) Yeah. How do you make it something that's livable versus just something that's corporate? Yeah.

(Prakash at 00:34:10) Our biggest goal is how can it become part of our DNA in the way we operate? Because culture is something that how you unknowingly start operating, not when somebody is looking at you. If a manager or a leader is present in the meeting, it's not how you behave then. When they are not there in the meeting, how you behave is what the true culture is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:29) Yeah. The culture is what happens when the leader leaves.

(Prakash at 00:34:32) Exactly. That's so true.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:34) Oh, man. This has been fantastic. There's actually—you said DNA, so I want another, for your commute, another nerd thing to look up. Yeah. Is, do you know that we're actually storing data inside of DNA now?

(Prakash at 00:34:48) Yes. I heard that. Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:51) Yes. They—I watched—there's this whole company called Catalog DNA. Uh-huh. I was talking with their CEO over the weekend on LinkedIn because I stumbled upon them, and I said, woah. This is awesome. Let's talk to this guy. Yeah. They can actually take data. Right now, they're using it for long-term storage, right, instead of tapes and other things like that. But it's amazing because if you look at a—like, when we get a wooly mammoth, right, that DNA, that genetic code is still intact. So it's very stable for long-term storage. So it'll just be an interesting thing for you to—you know, sometimes you need those sparks to sort of clear your brain.

(Prakash at 00:35:28) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:29) So I've got a lot of them. If you ever need any sparks, just say, hey, Joel. Just send me a text or something. Say, hey. What are you looking at this weekend? I'll be like, oh, Elon Musk time machine.

(Prakash at 00:35:40) I will do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:42) Awesome. Well, thank you so much—

(Prakash at 00:35:44) Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:44) For coming out and hanging out. Yeah. And then next time I'm in San Francisco, I'll send you an email.

(Prakash at 00:35:48) Yes. Please do. Yes. We should do that. Alright. Thank you, Joel. Take care. Have a great day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:51) Talk soon.

(Prakash at 00:35:52) See you. Bye. Bye.