Nick Caldwell - Chief Product Officer at Looker

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Nick Caldwell, the Chief Product Officer at Looker, and we discuss the great work he is doing with Dev Color, ways to communicate complex ideas effectively, and why the most important thing a leader can do is create new leaders. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:34) There he is. Where are you calling in from?

(Nick Caldwell at 00:00:37) The San Francisco office. So, you know, we have a lot of offices around the world, but our main HQ is in Santa Cruz, and then I work out of San Francisco several days a week. And we share this building with a couple other companies, and, you know, I guess depending on who's on the wifi at any given moment, we can run into some trouble.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:59) Well, you could just say our company is growing so fast, right?

(Nick Caldwell at 00:01:05) Exactly, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:06) So, alright, so today you're in San Francisco?

(Nick Caldwell at 00:01:10) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:12) And like, what part? Because I spent a lot of time there.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:01:14) Oh, we're over in the Mission District right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:17) Oh, nice.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:01:17) Yeah, 23rd and Harrison, if you know where that is. This is the old—I think this used to be the Lyft building is what I'm told, like, before they moved to fancier digs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:29) It's got good karma then.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:01:32) Yeah, exactly. You know, we're doing pretty well as a company. So I don't know if you saw the news, but we recently announced that Google is intending to acquire us. So it's pretty exciting times for Looker.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:46) Yeah, we've actually talked to a couple companies that Google has acquired or was in the process of acquiring. We had a recurring topic on the show for a while about—people were asking, the audience was asking about what's it like to go through an acquisition? Because it's a very invasive process, right?

(Nick Caldwell at 00:02:04) Yeah. I mean, so far, you know, honestly, we haven't closed yet, but so far we're really excited about it. I think the upfront work of going through all the documentation and talking about how the technology works and so forth—I think in one part, yeah, I mean it was invasive, but another part, we had a lot of fun just kind of really honing what our strategy was and putting together the content. In some ways, we found it kind of rallying for the team and had a lot of fun doing it. You know, waiting is not fun, so we hope it closes soon.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:39) Yeah. So there's Sift Science out there in San Francisco, and Fred is actually the CTO over there. And he built what is now Google Payments, like, back in the day. But they went through a Google acquisition, and so he's actually, like, right down the street from you. He's a pretty cool guy.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:02:57) Oh, wow, okay, cool. Send an intro if you can.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:02:59) Yeah, yeah. I've only been in the Bay Area for two and a half years, so I'm still trying to build out my network here and get connected to all the right folks. I was in Seattle for fifteen years, so, you know, all my old crew is up there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:13) Oh, nice. That's like the stomping grounds, right?

(Nick Caldwell at 00:03:16) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:17) Well, dude, I got you hooked up. After the show, I'll send you some stuff. I got Yassir from Williams Sonoma, CTO there, right downtown, right near you. You got Fred from Sift Science, all great people. All I've been out and personally hung out with before, so like, not just strangers, right?

(Nick Caldwell at 00:03:31) Oh, nice, man. Appreciate it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:32) Yeah. I'll send you a couple other contacts, a lot of great people right in your area.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:03:35) Sweet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:36) Love it. Yeah, boom. And that's it. This is just a matchmaking service.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:03:41) Really elaborate way to network.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:43) Yes. Okay, so like, what is Looker?

(Nick Caldwell at 00:03:48) Oh, okay. Let's get into the meat of it. Yeah, so Looker is a platform, a data platform. What we do is we connect all of the data within your business, put it all in one place, and provide an API on top of it. So the simplest way that I like to explain Looker to people who aren't familiar with it is that it's an API for your business data. And then on top of that API, we provide all sorts of services—data delivery, business intelligence applications, et cetera. What we're increasingly seeing is that people use our API to build all sorts of custom tailored solutions that we couldn't otherwise predict. So workflow integrations—there's a company, I don't know if I can list their names on the podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:35) We can edit stuff out or you just—

(Nick Caldwell at 00:04:37) Okay, cool. Well, there's a company that we work with called Dayton Freight, and they use Looker's API to automate figuring out which of their truck drivers are going to be available every morning. There's companies that use us to automate the bidding process for their digital marketing spend. So the cool thing about Looker is, you know, once you've got all your data connected into the platform, like, of course you can use it for business intelligence and analytics, but we're trying to reach much, much further into the operations of your business. Because we think that if our mission is to empower people with data, we can't stop at dashboards. We have to go further. And we're leaning into a broad trend in the data and analytics market because we're not the only people who recognize this. But the broad trend is that people are being empowered with data through things like SaaS applications or data delivery, and Looker is a platform for building those types of purpose-built solutions that go beyond empowering the analyst into empowering your entire organization with data.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:43) That's exciting, man.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:05:45) That is really exciting. I mean, you know, I've been in the BI space for a long time, and I think that in my previous life, I would have told you that, you know, dashboards are everything. Dashboards are still important, but I think over the last couple years—I stepped away from Microsoft and went to become VP of Engineering at Reddit for a time, and it just gave me a new perspective. One, I think you reach people by helping them accomplish tasks that they want to do. I think I used to have the mindset that you would reach people with data by training them to be analysts, and my mindset has shifted there. The other thing is, modern data stores, you know, things like Google BigQuery or Snowflake, they've become so powerful that they've fundamentally changed how people do data engineering. And Looker is really riding the wave of that transformation. It's been just a phenomenal ride. I've been at Looker for eleven months now, so I'm still kind of new. But it's just been a really fun ride of following those trends and being able to really direct how the future of the BI market is going to proceed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:00) I haven't thought about this. I've been—my background, I've been writing code for seventeen years. I'm in my early thirties. But, you know, ten years ago, ten, fifteen years ago, it was actually really hard to get companies to get data out and put it into another source. You just brought up a good point. With the rise of these new technologies, companies have gotten really comfortable with just pushing data somewhere. And so that's awesome.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:07:24) Yeah, it's still sort of an emergent trend, but if you—the way I like to describe it to folks is think about the number of SaaS applications that you've used just today, right? I've probably used fifteen just today. This Zoom call was set up in a SaaS application. I used G Suite. I used Opsgenie this morning. I used Datadog and Sumo to check on an incident that we're having. All of these applications, if you think about them, they're really just pretty user interfaces on top of rows of data. So in the previous generation, you might look at this and say, oh, we're going to build a business intelligence dashboard. In the modern generation, no. It's like, I'm going to build an application that uses data, shapes it, and builds a user experience, a tailored user experience around it, and gives it to specific people within your organization to accomplish specific goals. And I think the future of BI has to lean into that. If we want to reach more people, well, just follow the trends that are already happening. We're already seeing this massive proliferation of SaaS applications. I used around fifteen of them this morning. Looker as a business, we use about 140 SaaS applications to run our business. The average enterprise uses more than a thousand. So this is a trend that, you know, one, it is empowering people with data. It is—if you're looking for the answer to how data is impacting people's lives, I think things like SaaS applications and line of business apps and custom solutions are what's driving it. Second, it means that the way that data engineers and analysts think about their jobs really has to change, because now you've got a thousand different data silos laying around. And if you're going to use the previous generation techniques, like ETLing data into one place, trying to model it, connect it with complex Airflow jobs—this doesn't scale in the face of how quickly SaaS applications are growing. So fundamentally, you need a new approach to wrangle your data. And fortunately, the other big thing that we're seeing is modern data stores are rising to the occasion. So you can dump just massive amounts of data into something like a BigQuery or a Snowflake. You can query it, like, all of it at once, for very, very low cost. Increasingly, you're seeing analytics built directly into these data stores. And what this means is that whole classes of what you would do in the previous generation of ETL and data management, whole classes of that work start to become much, much simpler if you assume that the databases are going to be more powerful. Now this hasn't, I would say, fully happened yet. We're definitely talking about trends. But wow, if you compare BigQuery today to, you know, maybe Hadoop clusters three years ago, you can see that the trend is there and these modern databases are getting more powerful, cheaper, easier to use. So I think Looker is just leaning into those trends, and it results in simpler data ops and the ability to spend more of your time working on applications or if you still want to use dashboards and so forth to reach your end users. The point is that it lets you spend more time actually delivering value to the end user.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:56) I love it. And that's what we're all here to do, right?

(Nick Caldwell at 00:10:58) Exactly, exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:59) But let's take it back. I want to talk more about you as a human, right? Because that's what I get most interested in. Because I saw the Looker website, and I got a good idea. I was like, okay, I think I know what they do. I've confirmed it. I feel good. I love what you guys are doing. I think it's fantastic to have you on the show. But I'm always interested in who's the human behind that, right? Because you had a career at Microsoft. You were at Reddit for a while, right, building the city up, right? Did you ever run into Chris over there, Chris Slowe?

(Nick Caldwell at 00:11:30) Chris Slowe? Yeah, yeah. Really good buddy of mine. Was he on the show too?

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:34) Yeah. Yeah, he was telling me about the fire team and stuff and some different things that they do inside of Reddit. It was pretty cool.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:11:39) Oh, yeah. That was a really fun job. Chris is one of the best human beings I've met in my time in the Bay Area.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:45) Oh, yeah, great human. But we're going to turn that love back on you right now. So I'm curious—I read a Medium post. I did look up some background. But I want to kind of hear it from you about where did you start with getting involved with technology? Were you obsessed with the microwave in the kitchen? You wanted to press all the buttons? Like, where did it start for you?

(Nick Caldwell at 00:12:14) Yeah. I mean, it started really early on. My dad brought home a—he was a lawyer, and one day he replaced his typewriter with a Tandy 1000. I don't know if you remember these things, but one of the very first personal computers. And I used to sit on his lap and try and type into the command line. It had MS-DOS 2.0, and it had 640 kilobytes of RAM. And it also had a ton of games on it. Like, you can imagine, Flight Simulator 1, I remember playing that on his lap. So at a very early age, my dad kind of introduced me to these machines, and then later on when I was ten, he bought me a book called Learn C++ in 12 Easy Lessons, which was a lie. But no, I mean, I got that book and I just dove into it. I did the first Hello World program, and, yeah, you've probably done the same thing. You're a coder, right? The first time you write that Hello World program, you either know you wasted your whole afternoon or you just fall in love with it because it's like, wow, I made the computer do something. I fell into it immediately. I got into the BBS scene, started coding my own BBS stores, if you remember that sort of stuff. Started to do game programming and really just became, frankly, a computer nerd. I think that, honestly, it led to so many great things for me. I grew up in PG County, Maryland, which is—I think at the time it was 96% black neighborhood. And, you know, learning how to code gave me opportunities to better my life, and I really leaned into it hard. I used my skill in coding to get into—if you grew up on the East Coast, they have specialized science and technology high schools. So I used my skill there to leave my neighborhood and go to one of the better high schools in the state. And then, it's like every time I just learned more about tech, my life got better and better. So I got a NASA internship based on my ability to code that led to me being accepted at MIT and so on and so forth. But yeah, my interest in tech comes from a combination of being exposed to it really, really early by my father in combination with I am just an extremely driven human being, and I'm highly motivated by tech because I love it. And it allows me to change so much in the world. It allows me to accomplish more than I ever thought I could. My first project at Microsoft was—my first big project was the Microsoft spell checker. And I remember when it finally shipped, thinking that more than a billion people were going to use the spell checker that I had written. It was one of the best feelings I've ever had. So anyway, I know it was a long-winded answer to your question, but that's how it all got started.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:26) Oh, but it sounds good. I like listening to you talk, so it works.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:15:31) Thanks, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:33) So I read that article and it was on /dev/color. Can you tell me a little bit about what that is?

(Nick Caldwell at 00:15:38) Oh yeah, this is something I'm very passionate about as well. So when I had a fifteen-year career at Microsoft, Microsoft obviously headquartered in Seattle, and there's many good things about the state, but one downside to Seattle is it's not a very diverse state. So, you know, being an underrepresented minority in tech, particularly someone who moved up into the executive roles, it can be very, very isolating. I think at my time at Microsoft, I met literally zero other Black tech executives. Like literally zero. And then in general, there were not a lot of people like me that I could get exposed to. Now when I moved down to the Bay Area, some people tell me that the Bay Area is still not as diverse as it should be, but relative to Seattle for me, this was very eye-opening. The first two weeks I was in San Francisco, someone invited me to an organization called /dev/color. /dev/color is, within the Bay Area, the largest network of Black people in technology. The goal is to help each other advance their careers.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:16:49) So I show up to this thing, and for the first time in my life, there's 300 other Black technologists in a room. And it just blew me away. And really for the first time in my career, gave me hope that there were people like me. And it also just immediately inspired me to try and give back. You know, I've always said that leaders make new leaders, and this has given me a channel to mentor others, and so much has come from it. Like I've seen people I've mentored go on to become executives in other companies and so forth. And they also, sorry, I just got so excited about it and spent so much time with it that they asked me to join the board. So I've been on the board of directors for about a year and a half now. And that's what /dev/color is. I think it's the best network for people of color in technology to try and support each other's career goals.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:45) No, I love it. We're all looking for community and groups and like-minded people. Even when you get to the, when you said you were very driven, instantly I'm like, yeah, I'm gonna outwork you. Because every morning when I'm running, I listen to this Will Smith motivational thing where he's talking about how he's either gonna die on the treadmill or outwork someone else. Have you ever heard that before?

(Nick Caldwell at 00:18:09) I haven't heard that. I'm gonna look it up, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:10) Yeah, you have to.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:18:11) Send it to me after this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:12) I will. Yeah. He's like, no one's gonna outwork me. He's got this great, Will Smith has this great speech about work ethic and how no one will outwork him. He goes, two of us get on the treadmill, either I'm winning or I'm dead. Because I got to the top. Yeah.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:18:26) You know, it's interesting that you brought that up. I don't want to get too far off track.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:29) No, let's get off topic. Yeah.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:18:31) Yeah. I mean, that's one thing that I think in my time in the Bay Area I've started to change my mindset on. So for the first fifteen years of my career, I think I probably worked no less than eleven, twelve hours a day for every single day of it. And it meant that I had to make a lot of trade-offs, you know, like work-life balance. You can't spend as much time with your family and so forth and so on.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:18:56) Recently, I actually enjoy seeing, and tell me if you've observed this as well, but I definitely see a big trend recently toward self-care, mental health, and making sure that people take care of themselves in order to get their best work done. I think that's gonna be the next big trend in management expertise, and I think it's really a healthy way to think about managing your tech career. That in the old days, I think it was very much a sprint, like hustle, hustle, hustle as hard as you can. And I think that is now pivoting toward, hey, this is a marathon. You gotta take care of yourself if you want to get to the end. So this is something I'm still learning about as well, but I do think it's a positive trend.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:39) Well no, I agree. And let's talk about it a little bit, because what I've learned is, so I was driven and then I took it to the extreme, right? And then you kind of have to back it off because you start getting sick or you push yourself too hard, right? And you realize, okay, you meet that limit, that edge. And at first it's fun because you can push it and push it and push it. But then you realize that there's a limit to how much you can push it. And then you step back and you're looking at life and quality, and then you start reading research about sleep and about nutrition. And now, because we're driven people, what's going to happen is we're going to adopt the processes and the situations that allow us to achieve the most, regardless of public opinion.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:20:24) Yeah. Yeah. I thought where you were gonna go with that is, like, we're also, because we're driven, gonna try and optimize the mental health and taking care of yourself aspect of it as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:36) Oh yeah, that's part of it. That's, yeah, I mean that's, if we're going to be driven and we're going to create the most change that we want to achieve that for ourselves and fulfill our potential, self-care is an absolute requirement. Sleep and nutrition, these types of things are absolute requirements. And I'm in love with the fact that this idea of not sleeping is becoming stupid, because it doesn't work. It's like science. We are all science people. It doesn't work.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:21:05) Exactly. You know, I think you're 100% correct. And what I'm looking forward to is trying to take these ideas, and I think they're really percolating. Whenever I'm on Twitter or social media, I can definitely tell that the trend is emerging. I haven't seen it translate directly into formal management approaches and formal management philosophies. I would love there to be a modern version of the Agile Manifesto that took this into account. I don't know what it would look like, but someone should go write it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:39) I love it. No, that's unique. And they're always on a delay though, right? Like they're always, that part of the world is always on a several-year delay. Let's talk a little bit about leadership, right? And we're talking about drive. We're talking about leadership. As a kid, I had, like, I got hit by a car. I was in a wheelchair. I had all these setbacks where I had to learn how to walk again. And looking back I'm like, oh, that's where I probably get a lot of my drive, having to do these difficult things. And I was reading some of your story, and you had some difficult things that you were dealing with, you know, when you were growing up. And do you think that attributed at all to your drive or your discipline?

(Nick Caldwell at 00:22:17) Yeah, for sure. I mean, I'm glad you asked. You know, I still kind of struggle with explaining this to people who haven't necessarily come up from a less privileged background. But when I was in PG County, Maryland, there was a moment in my life where I remember, and I kind of hinted at this earlier, if I had gone to Largo High School, which was across the street and it was the less affluent, less opportunity high school, my life would be radically different than it is right now. And the drive really comes from having wanted to make sure that I lived up to my full potential. It's like I knew I was a smart guy, but being smart doesn't automatically give you opportunities. Opportunities are not equitably distributed in life.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:23:04) So the drive comes from, I wanted to get to a place where I could have access to as much opportunity as possible so that I could live up to my full potential. And that carried me through high school, college, and into the workplace where, I mean, I was just, probably to an unhealthy degree to be honest, just really, really pouring as much of my energy and effort into work and projects as possible because of that. And it does come from an early age. I just wanted so badly to get myself into a position to succeed. So I think there's other things that come from that as well. I think later on in my career, I probably didn't take on as much risk as I should have. If you come from a background where you're clawing for every opportunity, sometimes you don't kind of pop up and see the forest from the trees that, once you've achieved a certain station in life, it's very unlikely you're gonna fall all the way back to where you started. And I think I stayed maybe at Microsoft, for example, I was there for fifteen years. And in retrospect, I probably would have left sooner and taken on more risk if I had felt more comfortable that I didn't need to claw for every single opportunity anymore, that I had achieved a place in life where, you know, I had the skills, I had the network, I had the track record that opportunities were always gonna be there. But it took me a while to get into that mentality.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:46) It's an interesting dynamic, right? Because the mentality got you to that spot, and then it's like you don't want to ease off too much.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:24:54) That's the thing. Yeah. It's always that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:56) I always said I will never regret, when I'm on my deathbed, having worked too hard, having tried too many times, within the self-care realm obviously and all of that. But you, when I leave for the office I always, like, what's one last thing I can do? You know, like what's one thing I can do? Let's talk about leadership a little bit. I want, your video on YouTube. Yeah, it's how to step up and lead. Talk to me a little bit about that.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:25:26) Yeah. So I've always been fascinated by the idea, you know, we're engineers, right? So I've always been fascinated by the idea that you could programmatically figure out ways to take people and turn them into leaders. And, you know, that talk is really kind of my best effort at all of the different tools and operational techniques that I've deployed over the years to try and systematically give people leadership opportunities, encourage them to take those opportunities, and then give them the kind of safety net to succeed or fail.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:26:05) So that talk is called "Ignite the Fire," and the purpose of it really is something that I'm passionate about. Like, can we figure out a way within any organization at any scale to systematize creating new leaders? When I was at Reddit, you know, this is really what kind of triggered me thinking about this heavily, because I remember I had a conversation with Steve, the CEO, and he was like, Nick, you know, we're scaling so quickly. And I remember when the company was only like 20 people, you could count on every single one of them to step up with any new challenge that would emerge. You know, anyone on the floor would step up and try and take it on. But as the company passed like a hundred people, 200 people, etcetera, you don't see that as much. And you can expect that to be the case. As a company expands, you have roles and responsibilities, you have different swim lanes that people are supposed to own. It's less and less likely that your CTO is gonna be personally handling sales calls, for example.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:27:08) So as a company gets bigger, it's necessary that you do kind of carve out swim lanes and ownership gets distributed in a different way. But the downside of that is I think you do lose this feeling that anyone on the floor could step up if they wanted to. And the talk is really about ways to encourage that. So trying to make sure that you always present people opportunities to step up, like have a systematic way in which you collect and present those opportunities to people within your organization. Two, try and, as you present those opportunities, think of ways to align them with things that people might be passionate about. I think you see leaders emerge when there's a business need combined with something that an individual might be passionate about. You start to get into this, what I call blue flame, the intersection of business need with something someone is passionate about. You intersect those two things and great things happen. And then the final thing is to make sure that they feel safety in taking those risks. Like the number one inhibitor for people stepping into a leadership role is fear of failure, and study after study has shown that. But if you're in a leadership role, you can actually help reduce that fear by sponsoring projects or making people feel that, hey look, an executive is backing me, and that means that, you know, good or bad, I'm gonna get to take a fair swing at whatever this problem might be.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:28:47) So I think it's a really relevant talk. I think, you know, if you haven't seen it, go check it out. Because ultimately, a leader's job is to make new leaders, and that shouldn't be an abstract idea. I think it can be really done programmatically and embedded into the fabric of how we run our organizations.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:01) Oh, I love it. I'll back you up a little bit with something here. So I give this talk around the world. I've done it like 40 times this year, and it's about creating better leaders faster. So I took all the knowledge that I've learned from like 500 interviews of how these people do it, and then I boil it down to, you know, three or four things that are the most common patterns and habits of leaders. And the opening story is about my conversation with Douglas Terrier, who's the CTO of NASA. And on his very first day at NASA, his leader sat him down and he said, Douglas, I'm not going to judge you based on your past technical accomplishments or any specific project KPIs or metrics. The only thing I'm going to judge you on is how well you grow and mentor your team, how many leaders you produce. Boom, there it is. There it is. But that's how they do it at NASA. That's how they do it at NASA.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:29:49) I love that. I really do think, particularly if you're gonna be a great manager, I think that has to be your number one goal, like developing other people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:59) Yeah. And that's how you create, that's how you compoundingly, that's a word, yes, state a new word here today. That's how you compoundingly create new leaders.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:30:10) I like it, man. I followed what you were saying.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:12) Yeah. Okay. So what is on your mind right now as a leader? Like what's going on in your world? What are you working on? What are you working on with your team?

(Nick Caldwell at 00:30:23) Well, I mean, I think the biggest thing that's on my mind right now is we have such a big opportunity ahead of us with the, hopefully this Google acquisition will close soon. But what this means is that we can really accelerate many of the product ideas that we've had in place. We can get to them much, much more quickly, and the scope of impact that we can have as a business is much, much greater. So I'm actually planning an off-site next week to talk through what's going to change with my immediate leadership team, because I think what's gonna change is we're gonna have much bigger scale. Like right now, my team is about 150 people.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:31:09) I think over the next year, that's probably going to grow to 200, 250 plus, and we're really getting into a point where, you know, if you've ever read about Dunbar's number, it's like the way that you communicate changes at different scale points, and I think we're passing through one right now. So I want to make sure that my leaders grow, that they have the ability to communicate vision, that they have the right communication tools, and we all have a strong understanding of where we want to go as a business to carry us through next year. And then correspondingly, stepping away from the people stuff, we can build some really kick ass products. I think we've executed strongly over the past year, and I want to make sure that we carry that momentum through to next year.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:31:55) And I guess the way that I'm framing that with my team is that this is no longer just, you know, meeting the expectations of the BI market. I think that we've put ourselves in a position technologically that we can really set the standard for the next couple of years. So for our core BI product, we're thinking about new ways for people to experience data exploration that go beyond traditional explorer tools that you see from other vendors. We're thinking about massive flexibility. One of our core selling points has always been multi-cloud and the ability to have flexibility of what database you talk to.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:32:38) We're going to extend that into multi-suite because we think that data needs to be brought into tools that people want to use day to day. So we're imagining bringing data and maybe NLP type experiences into Slack, into Microsoft Teams, into Google Hangouts and chat. And I guess the final thing is we're looking at verticals and solutions. So, you know, I mentioned earlier that we think that SaaS applications are really where the growth of data is coming from. Well, because Looker is a platform, it can be used to just provide end-to-end solutions for specific use cases like sales, digital marketing, event analytics, that sort of thing.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:33:24) So we want to lean into providing solutions where someone can come to Looker, maybe get their data warehouse, their ETL, their application automatically deployed within like five minutes of discovering us. Kick the tires and then maybe bring that back and blow it out to a full-on operationally integrated solution within their business. We want to take the time to value down to as low as we possibly can. So that's just the stuff off the top of my head. It's going to be a fun year.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:58) No, it sounds good. It sounds exciting. So one of the things that happens is, you know, people listen to the show, they identify with some of the leaders, they like their stories, and they end up reaching out. This is a byproduct of the show that we didn't initially mean to happen, but we found out from past guests that it happens.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:14) So what's the culture like? What type of team? Who do you want to attract? Who are you as people?

(Nick Caldwell at 00:34:21) Yeah. I mean, Looker is a very unique culture. So I think I mentioned before we are located in Santa Cruz. If you don't know anything about Santa Cruz, go Wikipedia that right now. It's essentially a laid-back beach community. It's a very interesting culture that has translated into Looker and then into Looker's remote offices around the world. But the way I would characterize it is we work really, really hard, but we also have always kept an eye toward the work-life balance aspect and also to treating each other very, very well. So what you see in our culture that I've really experienced on a different level than any other place I've ever worked is we take care of the human first, and then we work together to solve the hard technical problems. So the levels of support that we give other engineers, other people in product is phenomenal. If you walk into a Looker office, you'll see in any of our offices around the world, we have this concept called the kitchen table.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:35:25) And you'll see engineers, our product support staff, all sitting around a table together collaborating on projects, helping customers, et cetera. It is the most collaborative environment that I've ever worked in. Now, in terms of what we're looking for, you know, I hinted at this earlier. On the engineering product and design side, we are scaling like crazy. I'm sure if I had my executive counterparts here, they would tell you the same thing. So there's tons and tons of roles available at all levels if you're interested. Just reach out and say hello. We've got a lot of momentum on the business side. That's going to carry over and translate directly into staffing. So reach out if you're interested.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:10) So how would they do that? Should they just look up Nick Caldwell on LinkedIn or looker.com/careers? Or?

(Nick Caldwell at 00:36:17) I would offer, like, just reach out to me on LinkedIn. Hit me on Twitter at Nick Caldwell are all easy ways to get in touch with me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:24) That's how I found you. I actually, I was trying to remember because it wasn't in the show notes because, you know, whenever I see cool people, right, screenshot them, I Slack them to Chloe, and I say get them on the show. But sometimes cool people just come on the show and so I can't always remember. But when you just said Twitter now, you're one of the few people that I follow on Twitter, and I like your stuff. That's how I found you, by the way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:47) I appreciate it, man. Right?

(Nick Caldwell at 00:36:49) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And no, I'm trying to, I'm still, like everyone else, still trying to up my social media game, so I'm glad that worked. I just really got heavy on Twitter about a year, year and a half ago. And I think, you know, if there are any aspiring, up and coming either executives or people trying to get further in their career, it took me way too long to realize that brand has moved to Twitter in a big way. So having a presence there makes a big difference.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:22) Yeah. You don't get a ridiculous amount of engagement, but the people that go to conferences are on there because we do our talks and people hashtag. So you get a lot of speakers, a lot of people who are influential on there.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:37:35) Absolutely. And you get, honestly, you get a lot of opportunities to come at you that way as well. So, I mean, I strongly encourage people to spend time on it. Either, you know, blogging or being able to get some aspect of your personality and the way you think about the world out into the public helps a lot as you kind of get further up into your career.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:56) Yeah. We were actually talking about this the other day about how it actually helps. One of the benefits, I gave an impromptu talk about what tech leaders are looking for in the next generation of hiring. And people were asking, you know, everyone says do a blog, everyone says do this, everyone says have a brand. And I said, well, look, there's benefits to it. And one of the key benefits is the fact that, Nick, if I interview you, right, for a position, and we're talking, and I have some question, I started to get to know you in that short period of time, then I have you give me your blog or a book that you've written. I can actually enter your dialogue and your thought of processing and making decisions through consuming your content, your long form content or short term, but it allows me to get to know you without directly interacting with you, and that is a massive benefit.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:38:48) Oh, for sure. It is one of the, it's funny you mention that because I get the same sort of skepticism when I mention this to people as well because I think it's a different mode of thinking about how to, I don't want to say market yourself, but get your ideas out there. In the olden days, it'd be make a good resume. And then I think in the last generation, it was have a good LinkedIn profile. But nowadays, I think, certainly if you're operating at the executive level, being able to navigate the world of social media is a requirement. You have to be able to represent your company in the world, and that is where the conversation has largely shifted to. Social media, podcasts, and, you know, this is where the conversation is happening. So I do tell people to spend time on it, while also understanding that, an engineer, and I've suffered from this as well, engineers, in particular, won't realize the value of this until later on because maybe earlier in your career, spending more time on Python or whatever the latest JS framework will have more immediate value. But certainly in your mid and late stage career, it will come into play in a big way.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:40:01) And why not start practicing sooner?

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:04) Right. And writing is so unique because when I did the first book, it was very hard, obviously. Like, because I didn't have the writing skill. How do I get thoughts out of my head and on the paper? And developing and working and getting through the first book, and then as my career increased from the book and from other items, I started having to engage with, you know, boards and investors and higher level people and basically communicate these complex ideas in very simple ways. And the act of writing it out before I have a conversation or when I want to communicate something, that is a unique skill that you can only get by actually writing. And then it's like, well, if I'm already writing, why don't I just put it on the blog?

(Nick Caldwell at 00:40:48) Yep. Yeah. No. So it's funny you mentioned that. There was an inflection point in my career.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:40:53) I was thinking about this the other day. There was an inflection point in my career. Someone asked me when it really started to take off, and it occurred to me that at some point, I don't know why this got in my head, I had decided that once every two weeks, I was going to do an internal presentation to people around me on whatever interesting technical topic that I had happened to pick up over those two weeks. And taking complex ideas and forcing them into something that is written down, easy to understand, you know, at a high level, yet engaging enough to get people excited is an incredibly valuable skill. And doing blogs forces you to do that, doing presentations forces you to do that. I think, you know, you should never underappreciate the value of these quote unquote soft skills because even if you're an architect or someone who would, you know, be spending a significant portion of their day coding, communication and the ability to get ideas across succinctly and in an impactful way matters so much, you know, the higher level you get in any profession.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:04) No. I don't know if you know, but we have, we did the podcast, and the podcast ended up creating a leadership company. Do you know about that?

(Nick Caldwell at 00:42:10) Oh, I didn't know that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:11) Okay. Yeah. So what happened was, when the podcast got popular after the CTO of Microsoft came on and things like that, people said, hey, we hear this advice that these leaders are giving. How do we get our, how do I get my 125 managers or tech leaders to take action on some of the stuff? And I was like, I don't know. Send them a link to the podcast. Right? They wanted specific steps. Like, here's some advice. Here's some steps. And then they wanted to see people do it. So I built a basic MVP in Rails. I spent like 10 days building it. Made these video leadership challenges, deployed them to the people who were asking, and they were like, I love it. And I said, well, that's great. But will you pay for it? Right? Because it's two separate things. They're like, yeah. We have leadership budget. So, okay. I sold $100,000 in annual revenue.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:54) In three months. Right? And then I was like, this is unbelievable. So I went and found a venture capital company up in the city next to me that's bigger and raised $500,000. Now we have, you know, 15 people and we're just now doing our second round to go to like 50 people. So we're really excited.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:43:09) Oh, man. That's amazing. So maybe this is a post-podcast conversation, but I'd love to hear more about that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:14) Yeah. But what, so the reason why I brought that up is because we just started learning that soft skills, like that word isn't sexy. Like, people don't like it.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:43:23) Ah, interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:24) So what people are starting to call it now that we notice is core skills.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:43:29) Ah, interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:29) Because they're not optional. Soft skills sound optional. Like, they'd be nice to have, but they're becoming in demand.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:43:37) Yeah, you know, and I think that there's a trend driving that as well. I don't know, do you guys use Slack or any?

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:44) Yeah, we use Slack.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:43:46) I was pontificating about this with someone yesterday, that the way software development works today, to me anyway, it is fundamentally different. It does feel much more like in order to ship anything nowadays, it is required that you work within a team to get something done. Whereas I think when I was starting in my career, you very much had this kind of lone hero. It was okay to lock yourself in a room with a couple boxes of pizza, and you could crank out the code by yourself. I just never see that happening nowadays in any of the teams that I've run for the last several years.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:44:19) And I think that tools like Slack and tools like, you know, GitHub for collaborating on PRs have made it so that communication and collaboration are now hand in hand with coding and development. I think the tools are changing our behaviors in terms of how we ship code.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:39) I love it though. Yeah. It was awesome. The standard got raised. Right? Because everybody's interacting with these companies and their apps, they're like multimillion dollar companies. And so the user experience you get from just a basic app, you expect that in every piece of technology.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:44:55) Oh, for sure. Yeah. Absolutely. It, I think from a development and UX perspective, the tooling is getting better and just raising the bar over and over and over again. And the ability to get into tech is also, you can start now with JavaScript libraries or my favorite example is machine learning libraries.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:45:18) Like when I was getting into tech, you literally had to code, if you want to do machine learning, a neural network, you had to code that from base principles. Like, here's the class for a perceptron and then build everything up from there. And nowadays, I'm seeing people with, you know, otherwise no skills, just interested in the space, getting up and running with TensorFlow projects in the space of like a day or two and doing, like, unimaginably complicated, would have been unheard of even five years ago, to real-time recognition over video with multiple actors and labeling across like a thousand different potential labels. Unheard of even five years ago. And now, with very, very little upfront investment, you're just seeing people get started on that sort of thing. So I love it. It's a great time to be in technology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:12) And it's always like a 13-year-old on YouTube. Right? You're like, oh my goodness. How is this possible?

(Nick Caldwell at 00:46:19) Doing amazing things. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:20) Yeah, amazing. Yeah. So as we start to wrap up, because you're in San Francisco today. I know you're in Santa Cruz. And by the way, the town that we're in right now is called Sarasota, Florida, and we've got one of the top five beaches in the United States.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:34) So we come from—oh, cool. We're a beach town, kind of chill. That's why I had to go to Tampa, up to the city, thirty minutes north to get venture capital funds. But so now you're in San Francisco today. Let's say that you're gonna walk outside, right? You're gonna get ready to go home. Do you walk home or you take the train home, or—

(Nick Caldwell at 00:46:53) I'll take a Lyft. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:54) Alright. So you go in a Lyft, and guess who your Lyft driver is?

(Nick Caldwell at 00:46:58) Guess? Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:59) Elon Musk.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:47:00) Oh, wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:01) Yeah, right? It's crazy. So he takes his private tunnel down, right? You're a Lyft driver. You're like, where am I going? What's going on? He's like, I gotta show you this new Starship Hopper we built, this brand new rocket ship. It's gonna be great. I want your opinion on it. This is gonna be fantastic. You're like, okay. You get to the Starship Hopper, and he pulls back this curtain, and there's a time machine.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:47:22) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:22) What? Okay. So you get to go into the time machine, and you're gonna go back to your previous self right when you were going to high school. Not Largo, right? You're not going back to Largo. But to the high school you went to, right? And on your first day of high school, you get to give yourself one piece of advice. What would it be?

(Nick Caldwell at 00:47:39) Oh, boy. One piece of advice. Can I do multiple? It's gonna be hard.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:44) Freestyle. You can do it every day.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:47:45) Or freestyle. Because getting it down to one is tough. I mean, I think I've learned a lot over the companies. I would say, at that exact moment in my life, I believed coding solved everything. So the first thing I would say is it turns out technology is not a solution for everything. It takes teams to build great products, and at the end of the day, people matter more than technology. So that would be the first thing I would tell myself. The second thing is I would say it's okay to be uncomfortable. Get comfortable being uncomfortable. It's safe to try new things. If you ever find yourself in a career at Microsoft, you don't have to stay there for a decade because there's so many opportunities. Your skill, your network, your reputation, you carry that with you everywhere you go, and that is actually the source of your opportunities. And I guess the final thing would be, give back sooner. Leaders make new leaders, and as soon as you can, spend time mentoring people, bringing them along, and making the pathway easier for the person behind you. So I know that wasn't one thing, but—

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:58) That was beautiful, and it was succinct. I love it.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:49:01) Oh, awesome. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:02) That was amazing. You win. You win. Best advice of the month. You gave me three, and you did it in ninety seconds, and they were all very clearly articulated, so you win.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:49:10) Sweet. I still wanna meet Elon too. I hope you have him on the show sometime. I saw him on a Joe Rogan podcast. It was hilarious.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:18) Yeah. I told him that he can come on, but he can't smoke any weed. He's gonna get in trouble again.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:49:22) You saw the same podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:23) I listened to it three times. Are you kidding me? I love Elon Musk. That guy is doing exactly—yeah. Every generation has their person. I mean, he's doing—he's forward, but in three different areas. It's pretty cool.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:49:35) Modern day Tony Stark.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:36) Yeah. Dude, Nick, this is a lot of fun hanging out. I really enjoy you. This has been great.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:49:41) Awesome, man. Great to meet you as well. A lot of fun on this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:44) Alright. Have a great day, buddy.

(Nick Caldwell at 00:49:46) Thanks, man. Yeah. Bye, guys.