Yasir Anwar CTO of Williams Sonoma Inc

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. I am so excited to let you know that we now have a free trial of Leaderbits. If you want to learn from the greatest technology leaders on this planet, visit leaderbits.io. So I want to recommend a book to you this week. It's called Blueprints for a SaaS Sales Organization by Jacco.

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(Joel Beasley at 00:01:10) The book is Blueprints for a SaaS Sales Organization. Now I get really excited because today, we are talking to Yasir Anwar, the CTO of Williams-Sonoma. And we discuss their exciting developments with AR and VR, creating an outcome-based culture, and making sure your investments align with your passion to achieve success. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:40) This is the Modern CTO podcast. What's going on today? Tell me about it.

(Yasir Anwar at 00:01:53) It's a beautiful sunny day. I can see the ocean right from here. The bay. San Francisco, pretty good day. And getting ready for the weekend.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:02) Nice. Any big plans?

(Yasir Anwar at 00:02:04) Well, yeah. Dinner tonight and then, hopefully, a good long sleep during the afternoon on Saturday. That's a big disruptor for me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:14) Is that when you catch up on your sleep?

(Yasir Anwar at 00:02:16) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:17) So I checked out the Williams-Sonoma AR stuff. That's awesome. That's exciting. Tell me about that.

(Yasir Anwar at 00:02:25) So it's our recent acquisition of a company called Outward Inc., which is based out of San Jose. And it is very unique in a way that it allows us to do unprecedented scale three-D visualization assets. That means virtual assets are created in a three-D format, which is the foundation for any AR or VR implementation. You need those three-D assets. So that is a very exciting time for us that we have a platform in-house now to which we can virtualize our assets across the different categories and stuff at scale.

(Yasir Anwar at 00:03:04) And the AR/VR to me is like the tip of the iceberg. So these are the applications of those assets. So we can have multiple implementations of these three-D objects and assets and deliver various experiences for our designers and customers. For instance, today, if you look at it, in the next couple of months, we would be launching first-of-its-kind customer-facing room planner tool. So customers would be able to define dimensions of their own rooms and shapes and sizes, and our three-D way would be able to, in an AR application, design the rooms with our furniture, with our sinks, tables, sofas, everything in their application. And we would have a similar tool available for our designers also inside the store.

(Yasir Anwar at 00:03:52) So that's going to be a big unlock for us because as we understand, designing rooms and decorating rooms is a very engaging, emotional, and sometimes a difficult process to get the things right with the colors, combinations, and dimensions. Right? And three-D space gives you that thing that you could place things and see how everything looks into the ratio of the size and the space. So our job at Williams-Sonoma is to kind of make that difficult process not only easy, frictionless, but also fun. And that's where we are heading with the AR/VR aspects.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:31) That's so smart. I would love to see more companies being innovative like you guys are. The fact that, I mean, there's a lot of opportunity out there and to see you go, you know, acquire another company and leverage the technology really shows how forward thinking you are, which I love because that's my style. Right? So, like, what made you—did you come up with this idea to acquire this company? Did you just want to use it? And then the second part of the question is, is Williams-Sonoma more than just kitchens?

(Yasir Anwar at 00:05:01) Yeah. So I think to your first question, I think it wasn't my idea because it was pre-me. I joined Williams-Sonoma like four months ago. I think we were engaged with this company for a period of time. We were working with them as their customer, and I think our CEO and some of the other leaders, they figured out that given such an important space for us in the future, instead of being their customer, let's acquire and own that platform. So I think that's where it came in. So acquisition takes a while. Now I think 2018 is the year where we're going to build some foundational experiences leveraging that technology. And in 2019, you will see things build on top of where we will try to create more edge in terms of customer experiences online and in stores.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:47) So was it a pretty smooth transition? Like, do they still operate independently or they all come under the brand?

(Yasir Anwar at 00:05:55) They are part of the company, of course. Right? But to be able to keep the freshness and the approach they're doing in the startup, they are located in a different location in the Silicon Valley, but they're all integrated with us. So it's like, you know, decoupled yet highly integrated. And I'm given the responsibility to lead that organization, that Outward company.

(Yasir Anwar at 00:06:22) So that's also because it's so close. It's a tech organization. It's a tech product. So it made all sense. So when I joined, I took over that responsibility.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:32) That's awesome. Yeah. Because you want to leave their culture and what's making things work intact because you want the benefit of all of that. Right?

(Yasir Anwar at 00:06:40) Exactly. And you also want some osmosis. Right? So there would be some great nuggets of culture of speed and decision making, which we could bring to the larger Williams-Sonoma technology organization.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:51) Oh, it's so exciting to hear. And you've gone from big C-level technologies, like, from Walmart all the way up through, you know, Macy's and now Williams-Sonoma. Tell me about, like, was that intentional? How did you get involved with technology and the enterprise?

(Yasir Anwar at 00:07:11) I think, you know, I've always been a technologist. I started my career as a developer and spent a lot of time being a developer, tech lead, architect, you name it, different things in different areas, infrastructure as well as application. But, you know, all along, I always believed that besides being a hardcore technologist and hands-on engineer, I could unleash more for organization by scaling what I have learned and coaching and mentoring people and leading teams. That's how I got into the leadership positions. Right? And Walmart's gig was primarily to learn the scale of retail. Prior to that, I wasn't in retail, so I learned a lot there. And then Macy's was, I think, a big transformational job for me. I was there for almost six years.

(Yasir Anwar at 00:07:55) And, you know, I started in the digital space as an e-commerce VP and then grew up into different ranks and different responsibilities. It's at Macy's that I stepped into my first CTO role, and it's all a unique situation and a very good one where we had for long period of times two different technology organizations in my previous company. One was digital-focused, which is where I was working for the past few years. And then there was IT infrastructure, enterprise IT, and store IT team, which was two different organizations. So while working and growing the digital business and digital experiences in tech, it was very clearly understood that we wouldn't be fully successful. We would not be able to unleash the full power of tech for the company's benefit if we don't bring the two large organizations together. So that's where I played an important role in influencing the leaders around me, and I got full support and trust from the leadership there that we were able to unlock such a big potential that we brought these technology teams together and deliver that value for our customers at Macy's. So that's how the teams were brought together under one umbrella, under one CTO, and that happened to be me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:17) When you build out these leadership teams and come into a company, what are you looking for in the leaders? Like, what qualities really stand out for great leaders that you notice?

(Yasir Anwar at 00:09:26) Yeah. I think, I mean, there are many lenses to look into the technical talent and the leaders you're looking, but specific to leaders, I think what I look at at least like two axes, an X and Y axis. One axis is the axis of your passion. Right? Are you passionate about the job you are doing, about the charge you have in your hands? And the other thing is your expertise. And are you expert in the same space or not? Right? And that is also my advice to everyone of my teams. I coach them that, you know, you need to look at the intersection of expertise and passion, and I hope they are aligned.

(Yasir Anwar at 00:10:02) Because if they are aligned, you can deliver so much more. And then the aspects of, you know, such as fast-growing pace where you have to learn so many new tools, new ways of working, and all of that, that could become stress for you. The changes in the organization can become stress. But if your passion is aligned with it, it will be fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:21) Right.

(Yasir Anwar at 00:10:21) So I look at it—this is like, not an—this is like a people's view of looking at my teams and leadership. And I try to—when I form team, when I allot portfolios to my leaders, I look at that and try to see if somebody is not fit in that X and Y axis in the sweet spot and try to get them into a position where they would be in a sweet spot.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:42) So mobile is obviously a huge component because that's how everybody is going to be planning their rooms and working on that. Do you happen to focus on one platform build for the big two platforms, or do you guys throw Microsoft in there too?

(Yasir Anwar at 00:11:00) Yeah. No. I think we are definitely seeing what everybody else is seeing, that the customer is moving into the mobile because that's the most important device they use every day, 24 hours. So we also have mobile—our websites. As you know, we are a house of powerful brands. So all of our brand websites are on mobile. So they're tuned for mobile. They are tuned for mobile excellence. And as I have joined the journey here, that is another focus on trying to make sure that people are focusing a lot to remove as much friction as possible from our mobile experiences. And how do you connect it to our stores experiences as well?

(Yasir Anwar at 00:11:36) So to your point, the AR, VR, all these things and other features which we're going to roll out, we are definitely focusing a lot on mobile. We also are working heavily this year to be able to have a very high performance on our mobile experiences by deploying a kind of set of tactics which we call, you know, progressive web applications through which you can have very highly optimized web applications. So that is also an effort in progress right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:05) That's awesome. So getting the mobile done, you've gone and climbed up through and had huge experiences at Walmart, Macy's, and now Williams-Sonoma. What are you most excited about today? Like, what gets you jumping out of bed in the morning?

(Yasir Anwar at 00:12:22) Yeah. I think, you know, I think Williams-Sonoma itself, you know, the reason I joined this is, like I said, it's a house of powerful brands. Right? We are also international. And the brand recognition that has been built—we own our own designs. Right? And we own some of the manufacturing also. So with this whole life cycle that exists, I think there is so much with technology to unleash for this in terms of its growth, in terms of innovation, and innovating through tech. Right? I mean, I always say that, you know, these companies are doing—are tech companies, that means their business is tech, or they are doing business through tech.

(Yasir Anwar at 00:13:00) There is no other way to kind of survive in today's world. So I think I'm very excited to be able to unleash and unlock various technology enablers for Williams-Sonoma so that we become more highly digitized inside the stores as well, and our digital presence, e-commerce also goes for a very hypergrowth. So I think it that excites me a lot. Right? And I shared the Outward road map to you. That's a big one. And then there are many other initiatives we are taking inside the company to be able to help the businesses grow. And, you know, just to kind of share with you, when I joined, I was thinking what mission statement can I give to my technology teams? And one simple mission statement which we have now adopted here is to build a world of possibilities for business. Simple.

(Yasir Anwar at 00:13:47) Right? To help businesses think of newer possibilities.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:51) Right. I'm taking notes. I really enjoyed that. You've mentioned a couple times that there's a number of brands with Williams-Sonoma, but I didn't know this. Can you give me an overview?

(Yasir Anwar at 00:14:04) Sure. So I think we have, as you know, our core parent brand, Williams-Sonoma. Right? And we have Williams-Sonoma Home. And then we have Pottery Barn. I don't know if you are aware of Pottery Barn as our brand.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:18) You guys—right. Williams-Sonoma Home. That's different. So I should give you some—I tried to do some research. I did some research. I went to the mall where the—to me, Williams-Sonoma is the Williams-Sonoma logo in the mall, and I bought a mug. I'm actually traveling. I'm in San Francisco right now. But I bought this orange mug so I could have it, talk about on the show. And I went through the whole process of digitally, like, checking out and becoming a—here's what was really cool. What was really cool was that you're the only company I've ever interfaced with that while I'm checking out on the digital touchpad, I could actually type in my email address.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:54) And so it wasn't like something I had to say or speak to the individual, and the whole process was very modern. And so I think I did this—it was probably, like, three weeks ago, right when we got you booked on the calendar. I took my wife and our little daughter and we went there and bought this orange mug. And yeah, the whole process was really cool. So but to me, Williams-Sonoma has always been the kitchen store. So I think Pottery Barn's in the same mall. I'm very aware. Now I'm starting to understand more about this AR/VR thing.

(Yasir Anwar at 00:15:28) Right. So Pottery Barn also has, like, brands like Pottery Barn, PBteen, Pottery Barn for kids, Pottery Barn for teens. We have also done something for Pottery Barn apartments. Then we have a brand called West Elm. It's another powerful brand. And then we have Rejuvenation. So we have almost eight brands we work through. And it's such a unique situation for us, even for technologists. Right? It poses a unique challenge because then you have to serve technology and solutions so that there is leverage. Right? It could be across different brands, but at the same time, you have to serve the unique needs of those brands as well. So it's a very good challenge, and to me, it increases your experience like multifold because at the same time, you're serving so many brands. Right? And it also gives you a very strong point from where we could test a particular feature, right, on one brand in a safe harbor approach and see how it goes.

(Yasir Anwar at 00:16:26) Learn from experimentation and then roll it out very quickly to other brands and vice versa. So that's very, very good from my vantage point as a technologist, a CTO. Hiring technology is a very great thing that we are able to do with this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:41) That's awesome. I did that on a smaller scale with features and application. I'll release the feature to a core small part of the experience and then roll it out farther along as we get feedback on how it does. If you were to take a pie chart of your day, how you spend your time, what would be the three biggest slices?

(Yasir Anwar at 00:17:01) Right. I think one slice is definitely I look for strategizing. So if you would look at my calendar, many of my meetings, one chunk would be about working with my leaders and strategizing on initiatives and asking if there is any blocker in there. Right? So establishing strategies and then checking on them. Are they moving forward in time? Are we on time? Are we seeing any blockers in that? That kind of dialogue. Then I also have certain things in my calendar which I put some time to my people and engaging with people at different layers. Right? Not necessarily just my directs. So I have a forum which is a director and below forum where I just try to have a very safe harbor, safe zone conversation with them where they can ask me questions, give me feedback, and I can learn from them and share some of the insights with them. So I try to go under every VP and try to have those kind of forums as well. And then, you know, definitely being part of the executive team, some of my time every week is spent in EC meetings, discussions with my fellow EC members, with the CEO, my boss Laura Alber. And then, of course, we are also accountable for preparing and sharing things with our board members. So some of the time goes there. But at a high level, you look at it as the first chunk is strategizing, ideating, innovating, and seeing where they are going. Other chunk is like operations, looking at generally how things are going. And the third part goes to the people and keep grooming the talent, talking to them, hearing insights from them, and building out talent.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:43) That's brilliant. I love it. Now when you said EC, whenever anybody on the show does acronyms, I ask them what the acronym is.

(Yasir Anwar at 00:18:50) It's the executive committee.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:52) Okay. Excellent. Yes. We have a wide range of listeners. So we have everybody from the CTO that's at home working out of the garage with their friend, maybe a co-founder by themselves, all the way up through, you know, Microsoft. And I actually met with Asana yesterday, and he's a fantastic CTO. They're in the $100 million range. They're in San Francisco too.

(Yasir Anwar at 00:19:17) Uh.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:18) But he had the exact same pie slices as you.

(Yasir Anwar at 00:19:22) I see.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:23) Yeah. Right? And you're both doing extraordinarily well.

(Yasir Anwar at 00:19:26) Great. Good to hear that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:28) I'm very—so what's the piece of advice that you would give yourself if you could talk to yourself ten years ago?

(Yasir Anwar at 00:19:36) I think, you know, to myself or the people who are in that phase today, I think the key is to make sure that, you know, please follow your passion. Right? Like I was saying earlier, follow your passion and make your investments align with your passion. Because then that gives you a very potent combination which is hard to achieve. And these years, whatever phase in your career you are, every year is very important. It could be very formative for you or it could be confusing for you depending on how you're investing your energies, whether it's learning, whether it's training, whether it's picking up a job. Try to align with your passion. And like I said earlier, in this fast world, you have to be so much on your toes to learn, to innovate, work on it, and those things can become stress and pressure if it's not aligned with your passion. So that's one important thing. Another thing I say, second piece of advice is, I say that, you know, if people are not laughing at your goals, they're not big enough. So it's very important to have audacious goals aligned with your passion, aligned with your expertise, and go for them. Try for them. And I've had various instances in my life, whether it's a student life or career, where I was laughed at literally and then non-literally as well. Right? And I took that as a challenge. I'm like, that clearly tells me that's my goal. And I went for it and many times I was able to achieve that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:02) Oh, dude. I'm getting goosebumps. You get me all pumped up. I love your leadership style. So your passion, I'm just gonna guess that it's technology and leadership.

(Yasir Anwar at 00:21:12) Yeah. My passion is at the intersect of three things: technology, leadership—that means unleashing it from the people—and customer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:22) Come on now. You're getting—no. Yeah. I have the technology, leadership, and I say market, but that's the same thing. That's the customer.

(Yasir Anwar at 00:21:30) Exactly. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:31) Oh, we are good friends.

(Yasir Anwar at 00:21:34) You know, because a lot of time people say that, you know, oh, this particular company removed the other company. Like, Uber removed cabs and taxis and stuff. Right? Kind of had an impact there. I mean, I don't see it that way, and it's not about technology. It's about the customer. The cab in that business became, in my mind still, it wasn't available where the customer needed it. Right? So if you look at it, technology is gonna continuously evolve. And if you're a technologist, you shouldn't feel worried about it. You learn. You're a good learner, quick study. You will catch up with newer and newer trends. It is this hyper-focus on customer. If a company can learn hyper-focus on customer, you will be successful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:13) A business exists to bring value to a market, and we're a series of repeatable processes that bring value to the market. The market responds in the form of capital in order for us to scale our processes. So it's not anything other than just bringing other people value. That's the only way. When I see people that have, when I'm driving by the airport and I see the people getting in their private jet or I see a nice car, I'm so excited at what value did they bring to the world. They must have done something so great and that's so useful to so many people that that happened for them.

(Yasir Anwar at 00:22:49) True. 100% with you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:50) Yeah. That's how I'm living my life is, you know, going around talking to these great CTOs and figuring out the different—I mean, 135 CTOs in the past eight months is how many CTOs.

(Yasir Anwar at 00:23:04) That's amazing. I'm sure you have some big goals. Right? Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:07) With that number.

(Yasir Anwar at 00:23:08) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:09) I was doing three a day, and then I lost my voice, so we had to back it down. But, yeah, the goal for me was I was learning about—I'm a big nerd—I was learning about this little organic substance called mycelium, and it's actually this organism that is in the soil, and then it goes and it brokers information and nutrients between the roots of the tree and the bottom of the soil. So if it needs, like, nitrogen, it'll go exchange nitrogen back and forth. And this act of going back and forth, you know, is very useful and it's a requirement in the ecosystem, and that communication is something that I found that I enjoy after being very intro—you know, being writing code for seventeen years. And then so I said, alright. Well, this is what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna go talk to everybody so that I understand that nobody has gone and talked to all the CTOs.

(Yasir Anwar at 00:24:04) And I said, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:05) There has to be some information here that's useful when you pull everyone together. And per the example with you and Asana, the CTO of Asana, there are certain CTOs that divide their pie chart. I ask almost everybody that. And there's a number of—there's about three or four stages that you go through, and you have to transition your pie chart as you go through the different stages. And when someone comes to me and they only have $5 million in revenue and I ask them about their pie chart, they have that problem. They have a $5 million in revenue pie chart. And then so I tell them, you know, if you're still shipping product at $5 million and you're writing—you're hitting send on the, you know, git push or, you know, releasing the code yourself manually at $5 million cash flow positive, that's a problem. You need a product architect. You're spending too much time, and you need to go be focusing on acquiring better talent. The first person, a product architect.

(Yasir Anwar at 00:25:02) Absolutely. I'm 100% with you because, you know, it's so important to have the right talent, right mindset like I was talking about in your organization and build a nimble organization that helps in facilitating fast decision making and, you know, building the right tools and culture for you. Like, for example, what we are heavily working is maturing our microservices strategy. And not for the sake of tech or because it's a cool word, it's because we want to shorten our time to market. We wanna get nimble microservices architecture so we can internally release many codes, right, as we go very faster, but also be able to talk with external world, partner with third parties and partners to be able to exchange information. So it's so important. And as you know, we all know how AI and ML is playing such a massive role in transformational organizations, and I'm very big on that. We have a big hiring plan for ML engineers. If you go to our website, you already find ten, twelve ML engineering positions, data scientist positions. And we are heavily looking at every aspect of how we do business and how do we transform them, applying AI and ML.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:10) You're like a dream. Who would have thought? You walk through the mall, you see the kitchen store, and you guys are insane. This is awesome. I'm very excited. So, yes, having that ability to know that you need to invest into looking at your business, and sometimes there's, you know, data science, ML applications. Everybody has so much data. It's like what's happening with it. There's this one company called Sift Science, and they're in San Francisco too. Have you heard of them?

(Yasir Anwar at 00:26:40) Yes. I've heard of them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:40) Oh, okay. So their co-founder is Fred, and I made friends with Fred on the show, and then I was out here visiting them and hanging out in their office. But, yeah, he was talking to me about how they work, and it reminds me of what you were just describing in the sense that smart people tend to almost always figure out the outcome and then work backwards. Right?

(Yasir Anwar at 00:27:03) You got it. You got it. You know, I'm a heavy practitioner of driving outcome-based cultures. How do you shift a culture from output to outcome? And, you know, it becomes even a major problem for IT or technology groups because engineers quickly get to the point of output. How many lines of code can I produce? What quality can I produce? But the first question I ask my teams is what customer dial are you moving? What business dial are you after? And what's your way backwards into technology? I never worry about that little bit aspect, you know. Being a technologist myself, I spent all these years coding. I worry about, are we after the right thing? It's so important. And a slight insight from my own—the way I kind of look at big data and machine learning and how it's coming, and I kind of share with my other friends too is, you know, a decade—the last decade or five years ago, everybody was after big data. Big data data has to be collected, create, you know, data lakes in the organization and build those kind of things. And companies spent millions and millions of dollars producing those big data lakes. Right? However, because the outcome was not very clearly defined, the lakes were there. In my mind, the water got collected in the lakes and remained stagnant. And, you know, and sometimes it was also smelly. Right? Right. So I believe and I'm also writing a design pattern for instead of a data lake, a data channel and data streams design pattern. So data is fresh, and it's coming. It has deepening, and it is coming and leaving the system also. But, you know, with the advent and proliferation of machine learning to your point of outcome, you don't have to wait for building for three years to build a data lake. You can start with the outcome-based approach that here's my business process. For example, a supply chain process, I want to drive it for a very much lower cost and a faster time of information to the customers and start doing some ML model on whatever data that's available to you. And let the ML outcome drive what more data you need to inject in your lake. Right? So you can chisel and shape your data through the outcome you wanna drive through machine learning. So that's the kind of paradigm I'm trying to apply here as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:16) Yeah. And that really comes down to the core competencies of the executive team. Right? So if the individuals are outcome driven, then they're not being sold by the market on the buzzword. They're instead sitting back saying, this is what I wanna do. I wanna answer this question. Where are the tools in the market to answer this question? And you're just leveraging the power of the market to accomplish what you want, not sitting there with meetings saying, how should we spend this money? You know? Yeah. You decide. This is what we need to be doing. We need to be understanding what we can do with machine learning. You know, you have your specific outcomes. I love it. I love your style. I wanna hear—are you giving talks in the near future?

(Yasir Anwar at 00:29:58) Actually, for the past year and a half, I've been very heads down in transformation. Internally, my previous job too, and here also, it's a big transformation thing. So I haven't, by design, picked up any big speaking engagements. I've been, sort of, respectfully declining some of those participations. Because I think here at Williams-Sonoma, I think after a few months, when I think my org has been structured as nimble org and I have the right leaders in place and teams in place and some of the great tech initiatives on the go, on the fly, on the run, I think that it would be the right time to go and share those. I'm a big believer not to speak just for the sake of, you know, booking speaking. I always believe do something great. It should naturally radiate out of your company, and then go and share with people that, you know, what you're seeing. Here's the recipe or here's how we did it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:51) Yeah. And even mentioned in that talk, your skill of prioritization of time and not speaking prior to having completed the objective or the outcome. Right. But the thing that excites me about you is that whatever book comes out or whatever series of talks you end up giving, I very much am interested to hear because, you know, truly great leaders are rare. They just are. They're very valuable and they rise to the top, so it's pretty easy to identify them. You just have to talk to all the top people and then find the 20% of all the top people. Right?

(Yasir Anwar at 00:31:28) Hey. Here's your use case of CTO words, machine learning and artificial intelligence. You have done so many interviews. You can produce a very good social and talent graph of CTOs by applying machine learning.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:41) Amen. You should see the data we have. I keep incredible amounts of data. Like our show notes, we have Jake, who's actually the producer on the show right now, who's typing out every topic minute by minute in a live Google Doc, and we tag the shows. We engineer our questions based on what people want, and so we're constantly reaching out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:05) You know what's interesting? I really like this part about humans. We have 70,000 active listeners, and what I'll do is I'll send an email out and ask people what challenges they're facing this week. I'll do that every three to four weeks just to figure out what's going on that week. And there's always five things. Everybody says the same five things. You know, when GDPR was going on, everybody said the same thing. I was like, do you understand it? They're like, no. Do you understand it? I was like, so you know what I do, and that happens. So I do what any great leader does.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:36) I go find an expert on the subject, and I have them teach it to me under the Feynman technique, which is explaining it to a child. Right? To teach me like a three-year-old, because if you can't teach a three-year-old physics, you don't understand physics.

(Yasir Anwar at 00:32:51) Yeah. That's true.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:53) Okay. So you're gonna knock out some work, enjoy the transition, and learn a lot and grow a lot. And then we're gonna hear some talks. A book in the next five years? Can we get a book?

(Yasir Anwar at 00:33:07) Yeah. I mean, you know, that's a stretch goal you just gave me. I have always been thinking about writing a short book, which is more like experiences. Rather than writing a long verbose book, I believe in sharing some of the problems and how my experiences were related with those problem solving, either it was me who was helping solve the problem or learn from others. Right?

(Yasir Anwar at 00:33:32) So that's something, it's in my mental notes, mental journal. At some point, if I have time, I'll definitely take a vacation and try to put it down.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:43) Nice. Well, if you have any questions, so I got through the first process of writing a book, and it was really unique. I surrounded myself with experts and had them, they actually wanted me to make it real long, but I fought them on it and made it real short because I don't like when I read books and they're fluffy. I just give me the experience, give me the value, I've got life to live, and give me the takeaway. So I learned a lot from the first book. The biggest one being that you will write a chapter and you will have very specific feeling and it'll be very clear what you want to communicate, and there will be six or seven different ways the whole world sees it. They'll think you said things that you didn't even say. And it's very interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:25) And then from that process, I learned how people saw, at least my writing, and then now I'm working on the second book, and then it's going to be much better because I know what people want based on the feedback from the, it's just the iterative approach.

(Yasir Anwar at 00:34:40) Yeah. That's great. Good to know you're doing that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:42) So we'll be doing it. It'll be wrapping up next year because I didn't want to release two books in the same year. I figured maybe one a year. And so the first one is called Modern CTO, and the second one is called Everything But Code, which is all the technology leadership, everything but the actual code, because people write so much on the project management and the different libraries and languages. We need to write on the technology and the leadership part.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:08) So I'll send you a, you know, after the summer when it's done, I'll send you a pre-version. You can throw something in there or make comment.

(Yasir Anwar at 00:35:15) I would love to. I would love to see your insights, and if any inputs I can give you, that would be great. That would be great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:21) Awesome. It's so great talking to you. Anything I can do for you? What can I do for you?

(Yasir Anwar at 00:35:26) No. I think we should stay connected. This is our first time talking to each other on this podcast. We should stay connected and, you know, share insights. And like you said, you're gonna share some of your writing things. If I have written something by that time, I will send it to you and see if you have insights there. So I think stay connected is important. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:44) Awesome. Thank you. It was so much fun. This was great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:53) Thank you so much for listening to the Modern CTO Podcast. Share this. Get the word out. Thank you guys so much. I couldn't do it without you. I appreciate it. You guys are the absolute best.