Leonid Movsesyan - VP of Engineering at Cadre

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(Joel Beasley at 00:00:16) Today, we are talking to Leonid, the VP of Engineering at Cadre. And we discuss data-driven approaches to decision-making, why speed is key when having tough conversations, and how practicing great calendar habits can help you avoid losing a work day. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast.

(Leonid at 00:00:36) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:37) This is the Modern CTO podcast. Hello?

(Leonid at 00:00:49) Hello. How are you doing, my friend?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:50) Good. How are you?

(Leonid at 00:00:51) Fantastic. I like the background. Look at that. Got the cream couch with the dark gray, slate gray background. It's got the contrast going and everything, man. You feeling good today? Where you calling in from?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:00) New York City.

(Leonid at 00:01:04) What?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:06) Yeah. Our headquarters.

(Leonid at 00:01:06) How's it going over there? How's New York? Are you guys freezing yet? Is it still summer? What's it like up there?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:09) It's absolutely gorgeous. It's not hot, but not cold yet. So enjoy the month.

(Leonid at 00:01:14) Yeah. It's more like two weeks, but...

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:20) Nice. Yeah. My family lives in Westchester. So they're right up there. How long have you been in New York?

(Leonid at 00:01:22) About a year, actually moved here for Cadre. So...

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:25) Oh, really? Yeah. Where'd you move from?

(Leonid at 00:01:29) San Francisco.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:31) Okay. Just jumping across the coast. Yeah. Very cool. Cadre. I love the website and the way you do the move over the city. Right? So tell me a little bit about Cadre, though.

(Leonid at 00:01:37) Cadre is an online marketplace for commercial real estate investment, targeting individual investors at fairly closed space of private equity and investment. Previously not that accessible to individuals, and our goal is to democratize the market and by doing this improve people's financial futures. So that's kind of our vision.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:38) Got it. Now democratize—now I just happen to be a little bit nerdy with investments. So just for accredited investors or for everybody?

(Leonid at 00:01:51) So right now we're working just with accredited investors because it's way easier to start like that because we're still—we're FINRA, SEC compliant. We're subject to all the regulations. And jumping right into the retail investor space is gonna be very challenging for us from the regulatory standpoint.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:56) Yeah. It's challenging for all the companies trying to enter in this business model. It's like we wanna make investments available to everybody, but there's that awkward space between the $50,000 mark and the $250,000 mark. And that's where we got a huge portion of America. It's like they have some slack income, but they can't really get into anything good.

(Leonid at 00:02:18) Yep. So that's our eventual goal to create a product that would be accessible for the folks you've just described, and also gives the same level of investment opportunity as if you are just investing in a very expensive deal and writing a $300,000 check.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:22) So how long have you been there?

(Leonid at 00:02:25) I've been at Cadre for almost a year. I'm actually gonna celebrate my first anniversary in October. So a month from now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:45) Congratulations. And you've hit every deadline on time?

(Leonid at 00:03:08) Of course. Of course. The art is just to move the deadline, and that's how you're gonna hit them always sometimes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:29) Move the deadline or cut scope?

(Leonid at 00:03:32) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:40) But never quality.

(Leonid at 00:03:44) Never quality.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:53) You never cut quality, you cut scope. That was a mistake that I watched others make quite a bit. I would say I didn't make that mistake a lot, maybe once, but just because my natural tendency is to produce high quality. Right? But I see a lot of people interpreting—you know, there's the general buzz in the industry about deadlines and everything and agile and however you've decided to manipulate that in your head. But I saw a huge wave of people cutting quality and saying, oh, we can't test or we can't do that because of time frames. It's like, no. No. No. You just cut the scope and you do high quality stuff so that you're not running in circles.

(Leonid at 00:03:55) Yeah. It's a very fine balance, though, to cut up the scope without cutting the quality because the tendency is to actually describe quality as part of the scope. And...

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:56) I like that. Describing quality as part of the scope, keep it right in front of you.

(Leonid at 00:03:58) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:24) That's why I spend a lot of time when developing product with the customers because the customer will always remind you—not the feature creep, because they only care about the outcome.

(Leonid at 00:04:25) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:37) Sorry. I don't know why we got all product-y there. It's because I've been working on product and my head's been deep in Pivotal all morning.

(Leonid at 00:04:49) That's alright.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:53) So how many engineers do you have at Cadre?

(Leonid at 00:04:54) We have 27 engineers right now. Still growing. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:03) I'm curious as how you've chosen to structure the teams. Have you done this pod concept or just talk for a moment to me about how the natural progression of the team structure has changed.

(Leonid at 00:05:05) So my goal when I joined Cadre was to ensure that as many software engineers are working on the product features as possible. And they're spending their entire time working on the product features as opposed to wrestling and battling the development environments, figuring out how the infrastructure works, and so on and so forth. So the way our team is structured is that we have a very small amount of engineers. As of today, it's basically three engineers out of 27 whose entire job is to work on the infrastructure and platform, including the corporate security and corporate IT.

(Leonid at 00:05:06) And we're actually growing this team. It's gonna be three with some change. A new person comes in who is gonna be solely focused on development efficiency. And then everyone else on the development side are actually building features, and they're not dealing with any sort of microservices architecture or whatever you wanna call it. We're trying to build as simple as possible for the problems we have right now and may have in the future, but we don't try to build technology for the sake of building technology. So that's kind of the philosophy we have.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:14) I love it. Now having gotten my start in real estate software, I'm very interested in what you're doing on a personal level. So I'm curious, does Cadre actually source their own investments or is this more of a platform that other companies can license? How does that work?

(Leonid at 00:05:15) No. We do source our own investments. We have an investment team. They go outside and look at the deals. They review them, underwrite them. Then we finance the deal, put it on the platform, and then syndicate the deal using our investors' capital—investors meaning customers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:17) So if I'm doing a Cadre deal—it could be proprietary deals.

(Leonid at 00:05:23) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:34) I'm loving it, man.

(Leonid at 00:05:37) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:39) So you were at Dropbox. You were at Yelp. You've had quite the career.

(Leonid at 00:05:41) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:41) What did you learn coming from those big companies to doing Cadre?

(Leonid at 00:05:45) Never build your own data centers. That's...

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:46) I was drinking water. Never build your own—yes. Never build your own data centers. Amazon.

(Leonid at 00:05:50) Right? Well, I mean, for a company like Dropbox that makes sense. For Yandex, which was my previous gig in Russia, which is a giant search engine...

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:55) I know Yandex.

(Leonid at 00:06:02) Yeah. And anywhere else, unless you are Dropbox, Google, Facebook, or Yandex or whatever, just don't do that. That was my learning. Don't touch hardware. It's cursed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:11) Yeah. I've actually—so how long did you live in Russia for?

(Leonid at 00:06:12) I've spent my entire life basically in Russia. I moved out of there about four years ago.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:28) Oh, pretty good. That's all I know how to say. And then at... Yeah. Yeah. I try. We have two people from Russia on our company.

(Leonid at 00:06:32) Oh, that's nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:37) Yeah. Two of nine. So we're 14% Russian.

(Leonid at 00:06:47) Not too bad.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:48) No. I'll tell you what, though. When I have a need, right, I deploy job posting, talk to people I know. And then whoever comes that's got the strongest work ethic, that has the skills to do it, I don't care what they look like, who they are, anything. I just if they can do the job and they've got a great work ethic, come on board.

(Leonid at 00:06:55) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:19) That's how we roll.

(Leonid at 00:07:21) I'm very much the same.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:23) Are most of your people remote or are you guys hanging out in New York?

(Leonid at 00:07:26) No. We have our main—the bulk of our team is in New York City. Then we have a relatively small office in Toronto. It's actually seven, eight people as of right now. And then we're opening another office in Chicago. The office in Toronto is focusing on the software development. It's mainly software engineers and product manager. And then the office in Chicago is working on sourcing of the deals. It's on the investment side of it. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:56) So you've got some people. You get to come in in the morning, do your stand-ups, talk with them.

(Leonid at 00:07:59) Yeah. Of course.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:00) Yeah. You find yourself inspiring the other engineers?

(Leonid at 00:08:04) Well, that would be very arrogant maybe to say that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:14) No. No. No. No. Do you inspire them?

(Leonid at 00:08:17) Well, I try my best to inspire them, but I don't wanna claim that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:22) No. You gotta inspire them. You don't have skills to intentionally inspire them? You do it naturally, I'm assuming. You've got to. To get to where you are today, you have to have this natural ability to inspire others. Otherwise, you couldn't be in the position you're in. You're a leader.

(Leonid at 00:08:37) That's fair. That's a fair point.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:38) Double down over some Simon Sinek. You like him?

(Leonid at 00:08:42) Simon Sinek?

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:43) Yeah. Have you come across him before?

(Leonid at 00:08:48) No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:48) Oh, man. You're missing out, dude. Alright. So he's a person.

(Leonid at 00:08:50) Okay. Yeah. That I figured.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:52) Carbon based like the rest of us. And he's just got some really great thoughts. He's got one of the top 10 most popular TED Talks in the world. A lot of the start with why, like, why you're doing things. He's got a lot on leadership. And he is very inspirational. So you listen to some of his ideas, find ways to integrate them in your daily life with your team.

(Leonid at 00:09:18) Oh, okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:19) I'm telling you.

(Leonid at 00:09:20) That's a good advice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:21) People will be like, what is he on? How do you say your first name, by the way?

(Leonid at 00:09:24) Leonid.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:26) Leonid? Yeah. Okay. Leonid. Alright. I didn't wanna call you Lenoid.

(Leonid at 00:09:31) That's—I really appreciate that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:34) I was like, when I felt that instinct to call you Lenoid, I said, no. That's not right. Leonid.

(Leonid at 00:09:40) Yeah. You are one of very few people who does that. So...

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:44) Oh, man. See, I've gotten really good at telling when I'm wrong. You know? Yeah. I feel it inside. I'm like, oh, I'm probably wrong right now. But then I get cool names. We moved in right now, we're in the old—this is actually—this is the last—you're a special guest right now because this is the last episode being filmed in this office. We're moving this evening.

(Leonid at 00:10:04) Nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:04) So we got a bigger office about 10 minutes away, and my neighbor there at the new office is an oral dental surgeon.

(Leonid at 00:10:13) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:14) And I'm like, hope you're excited to hear us record a podcast all day. And there'll be somebody because I could tell that there were people right against the wall where we're gonna be recording where he's doing surgery on them, and they're all drugged up because it's oral surgery. And so they're gonna come out of there the next day and be like, did I hear the CTO of Microsoft giving advice on technical leadership? I am just imagining stuff.

(Leonid at 00:10:42) Yeah. But his name was Prashant, to bring it back to—his name was Prashant, and I happen to know a handful of people named Prashant. And so when I met him, I was like, hi. He's like, oh, you can call me Sean. No one can say my name. I'm like, your name's Prashant. He's like, how did you know that? I was like, I'm a wizard from the future.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:43) Give me some—give me some tips. What would you give—you've made this transition. You're an individual contributor. You started out, became a team leader, all the way to VP. Right? And it's not easy. There's some struggle. You've gotta learn some things. Give me some advice for some of the newer technologists listening that they wanna make that transition.

(Leonid at 00:11:02) Well, the biggest struggle that I had personally was the desire to do everything yourself. Because every time you're transitioning from being an individual contributor to a manager at any scale, like you're managing one person, and chances are you understand what they should be doing. You have a desire to do it and you know that you can do it faster and better. And yet you have to let it go and just give the person space to actually execute and grow and even sometimes make mistakes.

(Leonid at 00:11:19) And this understanding doesn't come as given to a lot of people. Definitely didn't come as given to me. So that was one of the biggest challenges that I had. And then the more you grow, it's a very fine balance between still caring deeply about things, but also not being stressed out all the time and trying to micromanage and trying to direct everyone to do their job. It's a very fine balance. It's sometimes really hard to find that perfect spot.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:52) Refusing the urge to be a technician. Yeah. Right? It's really tough because not only do you have to refuse the urge, you gotta sit there and watch them. It's like watching your baby walk.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:33) You can't. Yep. You can't cheat. You can't do the experience for them. And then you're like watching the time and you're like, oh, man. And so what will happen is the companies that get really good at this, they get really big really fast.

(Leonid at 00:14:44) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:44) And the companies that get really bad at it, they get bottlenecked by their inability to delegate.

(Leonid at 00:14:50) Mhmm. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:51) It's tough. You're doing well with it though, right?

(Leonid at 00:14:55) Oh, I hope so. We have a very small team and everyone is doing their best and works pretty hard, so hopefully it works out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:03) I want to build a picture in my head of what your day looks like. Give me, like, if it was a pie chart, what are the three biggest slices?

(Leonid at 00:15:11) Well, the three biggest slices would probably be spending time with my direct reports, who are engineering managers and the senior leadership on the engineering side, because we have both individual contributors and engineering managers considered the senior leadership of the engineering side. The second biggest chunk would be to spend time with my peers on the business side, because as head of engineering, I have to spend a lot of time with the head of product. I have to spend a lot of time with the investment team folks because they are producing the product that we're trying to sell on the marketplace. And it's very important to be on the same page and be aligned, so that takes a fair amount of time.

(Leonid at 00:15:50) And then a lot of tactical things that happen day to day and a lot of, not saying firefighting, but just the ability to react fast and also get a pulse. Like, 27 is not the largest engineering organization I've ever managed. So it's relatively easy to have context on what every person on the team is working on, what their personal struggles are, what their professional struggles are. What their career goals? And so on and so forth. So checking on those kinds of things would probably be the third bucket.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:21) I love it. You spend time with customers?

(Leonid at 00:16:25) I do not spend time with customers per se, but I get the information about customers' desires. And we do have a team that, you know, gets on the phone with the customer, sends them questionnaires, things like that, trying to measure their engagement on the website. We're gathering a lot of statistics from our website, and I obviously get this information in a relatively boiled down version.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:51) Hey, have you come across any of the products like Hotjar or, I think, Smart Look or something? I just came across them this weekend.

(Leonid at 00:16:58) Oh, no. What does the product do?

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:00) Dude, it's insane. So apparently this whole class of products existed. I just wasn't in the market to buy them. I mean, I was in the market to buy this product like twelve years ago, you know. But since then I've just been building apps and producing. You know, I haven't gotten into marketing. Now that I'm getting into marketing and more usability stuff, the premise is JavaScript embed, right? Inclusion. It records all the sessions and plays them back to you like a movie. Like a movie. Yeah. You have to watch what they do.

(Leonid at 00:17:30) Yeah. We're using FullStory and Segment.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:32) That was the other one. Yeah.

(Leonid at 00:17:34) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:35) Yeah. You liking it? How's FullStory? That was a more expensive one.

(Leonid at 00:17:39) It is a more expensive one, but it actually gives us a lot of leverage to understand. Like, it's all the way to the point of, oh, this button makes no sense to be here, or you should change the name of a thing, because it's really hard to get yourself outside of the box and get yourself unbiased and try to be a customer. When I was back at Yandex, we would literally invite people from the street. We would pay them money, and we would record their eyes. We would record their struggle, trying to understand what's going on on the website. But having a tool like that when you can just play back the entire session of the user and see where they were struggling on the platform, it's actually very cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:24) It's got me excited to create some ads this week. We haven't done any advertising yet. Just been getting referrals from, like, word of mouth stuff. So that's great, right? But I wanted to know. I started to watch these videos. I was actually watching them this morning, and I was like, this is unbelievable. I can see the person reading. I'm like, oh, man. That's where they're all dropping off. They're all dropping off at that one point in the story, and heat maps can't tell you that. Yeah. You gotta watch them do it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:58) Mhmm. And it's unbelievable. So that was my weekend this weekend. I was installing that and now I'm watching it, like the equivalent of Netflix of my business. So alright. So you spend a lot of time with direct reports. You got individual contributors managing. Now your customers, they're mostly there for the investments and your technology is the vehicle to review them, search them, look at them, and then learn more about them.

(Leonid at 00:19:26) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:26) Can they actually make the investable transaction through your platform?

(Leonid at 00:19:30) You mean the customers? Yeah. Of course. Yeah. We have the deals on the platform, and you can invest in the deal through the platform. So yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:40) Excellent, man. So what are you most excited about right now? Like, what's the big thing that's happening that you're jumping out of bed in the morning for?

(Leonid at 00:19:48) Well, I think that right now, we're working really hard on increasing the engagement with the audience and bringing, we're at the point in our history where we want to get as many individual investors on the platform as possible.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:04) Mhmm.

(Leonid at 00:20:04) And that keeps me very excited. Just the opportunity to get as many investors on the platform is actually very appealing to me. Because I personally resonate with the goals of the company and the mission of the company just because I think that giving people an opportunity to invest in a very stable and very good, from the return standpoint, investment is something that I'm passionate about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:33) That's the big drive for you? Yeah. Nice. I'm loving it. I want to talk about some leadership stuff. You down?

(Leonid at 00:20:39) Yeah. You interested? Yeah. Of course.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:41) Losing a workday. That sucks. We all do it. You got any advice for that?

(Leonid at 00:20:48) Losing a workday?

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:49) Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Like, you go to end the day and it just ends up being not a good day. Like, you failed at something, you got squirreled. Right? Distracted. Something happened. You lost the workday.

(Leonid at 00:21:01) Yeah. Well, I try to ask myself fairly regularly, is that the best use of my time? Like, whatever I'm doing right now. And if I'm stuck on something that is clearly not a good use of my time, I'm just gonna abandon it. So for me, the philosophy of failing fast is incredibly important. Plus throughout the years of managing people and managing projects and teams, I trained myself to do things that are on my calendar and to say no to a lot of things that are not on my calendar. So I have a very good calendar hygiene, and I'm trying to keep it up to date every day before I go to work. So I know exactly what I'm gonna be working on, and I know where I can slack a little bit and work on something that is interesting and not necessarily impactful, as opposed to doing things that are absolutely necessary.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:56) So you're pretty disciplined with the calendar?

(Leonid at 00:21:58) Yeah. Like, I only do what my phone tells me to do. That's basically it. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:03) You got the Australian voice for Siri?

(Leonid at 00:22:05) No. No? I have trouble with accents.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:11) It's worth it. Oh, man. Alright. I'm very disciplined in my calendar.

(Leonid at 00:22:17) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:17) I'll rock between, I don't know, six and eight meetings a day. Mhmm. And whether that's internal or external, right? But I always like, I cringe at the white space. Like, I have two full time employees whose job it is to make sure that there's no white space in my calendar. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I just roll from call to call to call to call.

(Leonid at 00:22:36) These are the worst, like the thirty minute break between seven meetings. And it's like, what am I supposed to do with this time? Like...

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:44) You can't get into anything you want to because the moment you get into it, your first productive thoughts are happening at like minute twenty one.

(Leonid at 00:22:51) Yep. And...

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:52) You get yanked right out of it. It's just like, ah, now I gotta prepare for my next one.

(Leonid at 00:22:56) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:56) Yeah. That's tough. And then I noticed that, you know, you do this build up over time and you realize that before you had, because there was a time when you and I, when we didn't have a calendar like that. Mhmm. I'm like, what was I doing with all of that time? I was just wasting it. Like, now I just, if I can inject a positive habit into my life, like then you just don't even have to think about it. Like, I started these 05:30 AM runs. Mhmm. Right? Crazy. I do them seven days a week. So even on Saturdays and Sundays, I call them my Looney Tunes run because I used to watch cartoons early in the morning. Okay. Right? And so, I got it to the point, it's been about, you know, sixty plus days now. Mhmm. But I don't think about it anymore. Like, I get up, I've completely optimized the process. Yeah. So before I go to bed, my full stack of clothing is there, shoes, everything by the bed, headphones. Mhmm. The alarm goes off. I use that app called Sleep Cycle.

(Leonid at 00:23:53) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:53) So like, have you ever used that?

(Leonid at 00:23:55) I use a similar app that basically wakes you up before a certain time trying to measure your sleep cycle.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:02) Yes.

(Leonid at 00:24:03) Yeah. I use it as an alarm clock like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:06) Yeah. So I actually took the window from thirty minutes like the default down to fifteen. Thirty minutes is too much of a range for me. Yeah. So I got that. So that thing goes off, right? I train my mind to instantly, when my eyes open, the moment that alarm clock goes off, I say, the faster my feet hit the floor, the quicker I become a billionaire.

(Leonid at 00:24:26) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:27) Boom, feet hit the floor, thirty seconds flat. Then I kiss my wife, because we made these lists and I was like, you know, what do you want me to do? And she's like, well, I want you to love me more. And I was like, alright. So I put you in my schedule, girl. Right?

(Leonid at 00:24:44) Very generous.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:44) Love wife. Very generous. I know. She gets her own entry.

(Leonid at 00:24:47) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:48) What a guy. Father of the year. Alright. So feet hit the floor, headphones in, motivational audio of Jocko. Have you ever come across this guy, Jocko? He's like a Navy SEAL.

(Leonid at 00:24:59) Oh, yeah. I know. I read a couple of his books. Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:02) He's got Extreme Ownership.

(Leonid at 00:25:03) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's a very high level jiu-jitsu black belt. So...

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:07) Yes. He is. Yes. And so I got him going in my ear saying, get out of bed. You know, like, do something with your life. Discipline. Discipline. Right? I run in, I get headphones on and I'm in the garage. Going in my Jeep, pull out my notebook.

(Leonid at 00:25:22) I got...

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:23) My notebook, right? And in the motivational audio, it switches to from Jocko yelling at me to get out of bed, essentially, to discipline and to thinking about who you need to be that day. Not what you need to do, but who you need to be to have success that day. Right? You agree with that?

(Leonid at 00:25:41) Yeah. Except running at 05:30 in the morning, everything else seems pretty normal.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:45) Everything else seems pretty normal. So then I'm like, who I need to be, getting my mindset right, and then I'm writing things like, you know, everything that I want and imagine in my little journal thing. Got three or four minutes of that until the audio runs out. Right? Mhmm. Just anything I can think of. What would be the perfect future for me? Right?

(Leonid at 00:26:01) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:02) Right? Boom, do a little stretching on the road, 6 AM, right?

(Leonid at 00:26:06) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:07) So out there running, breakfast. I don't know why we're talking about this. I completely forgot. But that is what my morning looks like. And then, oh, because my schedule. Because then it's just...

(Leonid at 00:26:19) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:19) Like, I'm not gonna bore everybody with everything, but then it's just half hour after half hour chunk, boom, all the way down from producing content, editing content, deploying, writing, follow up on pipeline, pipelines review. Because, you know, I do the CTO thing, but I run the business too, so I have to do all that. And deploying and then growing, we went from three to nine people in the past three months. So I've been continuously doing what we were discussing earlier, but finding out process, orientation of what I'm doing, and then giving it to somebody else. Yeah. Crazy. So all of that comes back to something completely unrelated about having tough conversations.

(Leonid at 00:26:57) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:57) Right? Having tough conversations, not easy. The first time you have to do it is pretty difficult. You are a leader. Yeah. You have to have all the types of, when you have those tough conversations, maybe you gotta deliver some bad news.

(Leonid at 00:27:08) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:09) What are your thoughts on that? Like, how do you go about that? You gotta deliver some bad news.

(Leonid at 00:27:12) You see, I started my career in Russia. Mhmm. And the hard, tough conversation measure in Russia is very different from The United States. Like, we're using metric systems in Russia, and Americans are using the imperial system for measuring the toughness of conversation. So when I came from Russia to The States, having a tough conversation for me was like lifting weight on Mars. There is no gravity. Like, it's so much easier because the conversation that was considered tough in The United States would be just a normal one on one back in Russia.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:50) Give me an example.

(Leonid at 00:27:51) Well, just having performance, like a candid performance issues conversation in The States. And I've noticed that, when I just started as a manager, it was like, oh, you're too transparent. Because apparently, that's a thing. Being transparent can be, you can be too much of that, right? Yeah. And in Russia, it was for me, back at Yandex, it was just a regular one on one and just telling a person what they are doing correctly, what they are doing incorrectly, where they need to improve, where they need to keep doing and double down on things that they're doing good. And I had to adjust a little bit. And that's why to me personally, it is not that hard to have these kinds of tough conversations.

(Leonid at 00:28:33) And also there is a framework that I've been using ever since I started managing people: if you have a hard conversation, you probably did something wrong a long time ago. Because these hard conversations, with rare exceptions, are not happening out of blue. If you're having a performance issues conversation, it should have been discussed months ago before it gets to a point of being hard. Right? So if you are doing everything right, if you are doing your job correctly, you are not gonna have a lot of these conversations.

(Leonid at 00:29:09) So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:09) I think right now we're gonna post-produce a crowd clapping in there. I love that. That is so true. Right? Let's go on. Fully, 100% resonate with it, but I want some more.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:23) Okay, because you're just bringing so much knowledge. I've got it. Alright, tough conversation, let's say general best practices.

(Leonid at 00:29:33) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:34) I go with speed. So let's say somebody comes to you and says, "Hey, for some reason this person did something and you've gotta perform this action with them. It's a tough conversation to have." I say one of the core values is speed. I don't like to wait to have tough conversations.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:47) Yeah.

(Leonid at 00:29:50) The longer you wait, the tougher it's gonna get. That is the mentality that I try to give to everyone who works with me: problems don't solve themselves. And the longer you give the problem time to resolve, the harder it gets. So again, I think it's coming to waking up at 5:30 in the morning. If you're gonna be like, "Okay, I'm gonna wake up at 5:30. I woke up, but I'm gonna actually get out of the bed at 5:45." Next thing you know, it's 8:40 and you're still in the bed, and no running is being done, and Joel is yelling at you for four hours. Right? So you just gotta do it.

(Leonid at 00:30:33) Problems are not gonna resolve themselves.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:36) I love it. Yeah. The distance between knowing what you have to do and taking action and doing it—discipline. Right? You gotta reduce that distance down real small and not have time to think about it.

(Leonid at 00:30:47) Yeah. And also it helps you not being stressed out about a lot of things. Because if you're managing a large organization or a lot of projects and you have to juggle them around, and you know that there is this thing that can result in a hard conversation in every single area that you are doing, it's gonna be pretty stressful. Just carrying this weight on you for weeks and knowing that you have to deal with certain problems.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:13) Isn't that what stress is though? Stress is knowing that there's something we need to take action on and we don't do it. Because how can you have stress without that?

(Leonid at 00:31:22) That I do not know, but I know that my life is pretty not stressful because of this. Right? So yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:28) I noticed that when my life is feeling stressful, I have to take a break and figure out what am I messing up.

(Leonid at 00:31:37) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:37) If I'm feeling stressed, right, why? What am I not doing that's causing stress? Because my default state isn't stress. Am I not handing off a responsibility that I should be delegating out? Am I keeping myself in the middle of something? You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:53) I love it. Decision-making—you seem pretty good about making decisions. Speed, speed's another one. You like to iterate fast. Do you have any decision-making processes or frameworks? How do you approach a big decision? Let's say something's going to happen, big decision's coming up. Right? You have to decide to go, make something up, React Native or native-native. Right? Some big decision's happening. What are you gonna do? How are you gonna approach that?

(Leonid at 00:32:19) Well, there are two types of decisions. Right? There are irreversible decisions and then there are relatively reversible decisions. And if the decision is completely irreversible—you're saying that, "Oh, we're gonna rewrite everything in Haskell," and then you do it and there is no way you're going back or something like that—it has to be very data-driven and it has to be measured. So I prefer to get as much information about the decision as possible before we make it, but it has to be sort of a deadline, a cutoff for making the decision. You can't go on endless research just because it's not R&D. We're actually doing things that are supposed to be working. So that is basic.

(Leonid at 00:33:06) And you make a decision about the deadline based on the business needs. So, "We need to deliver X features next year, and there is no way we're gonna do it using seven JavaScript frameworks. So we need to unify and pick one. Right? But we need to do it before the end of Q3 because otherwise, we're not gonna be able to do the unification, and next year we're gonna struggle meeting our deadlines." So it has to be a very data-driven decision on the deadline, and then you do your research. I think at Cadre, we're actually very good at this. We have a process that we called ERD, Engineering Requirements Document. And basically, the individual who is responsible for the decision-making puts together this document with all the pros and cons. And the goal is to make as non-biased a decision as possible. And then the team reviews the document. We discuss it. Sometimes we'll argue. Sometimes everyone is magically aligned right away.

(Leonid at 00:34:06) And then the question is, how hard would it be to reverse the decision after it has been committed? And that is basically the level of rigor you need to apply for this ERD. If the decision is irreversible, it has to be a very, very rigorous process. And then if the decision is relatively easy to reverse, you can give yourself a little slack and make the decision faster.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:32) Oh, nice. That's fully logical, certified logical. Right?

(Leonid at 00:34:36) Yeah. I've been on the teams where the analysis paralysis is a norm, and that is incredibly frustrating for everyone, including the management and the peers. Because for them, this team appears as a team that actually doesn't make any decisions, even though they are all coming from the best place possible because they want to do the right thing. So it's a fine balance. I don't think it's science. I think it's more like art.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:07) I agree. When you're trying something new, big upside, and I see companies—alright, small price, big upside, easily reversible—and they think about it for three months, I'm like, "Whoa." There's blockers there. People are blocking, because if they're doing that with this type of decision where they believe that there's a big upside and there's a low cost and it's easily reversible and they're taking a long time, then they're doing that with all those types of decisions.

(Leonid at 00:35:32) Yep. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:33) Maybe they want to end their market.

(Leonid at 00:35:35) Even more than that, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:36) Alright. So if I were to break it down, if I were to just kind of simplify what you described a little bit, your decision-making process is collect—

(Leonid at 00:35:47) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:47) You listen. You execute. Right? Collect the data. You listen. What's going on? You do your document. Yeah. Then you execute. You take some action.

(Leonid at 00:35:56) Yeah. And also, it's very important to understand that for pretty much any decision that we're making, we're creating the scope ourselves. Right? The decision—again, going back to a JavaScript framework—the decision is to get a unifying framework that is good for everyone, but the decision is not to create or get the JavaScript framework that is absolutely the best. You need to understand what problem you're solving and not over-engineer, which unfortunately a lot of engineering teams tend to do that. So yeah, verifying those as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:34) What do you notice? What are you learning right now in your technology teams?

(Leonid at 00:36:39) Personally? I knew nothing about front end when I joined Cadre. So that was kind of an interesting experience. I'm a very infrastructure sort of background kind of person. I was working on reliability engineering for the last twelve years. And then joining Cadre and just focusing on the entire product was a very interesting experience to me, because I've never—it's really hard to understand the complexity of the problem if you are incompetent in the domain, which I was with front end and I arguably still am. But right now, it's way easier for me to give an estimate of how long a certain project will take just because I'm more in the weeds and I'm understanding the process a little better.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:24) Yeah. You're learning important parts of the business that are gonna drive you forward. You're upskilling yourself. It's standard operating procedure for any leader.

(Leonid at 00:37:32) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:33) There's no such thing as not learning. It's just what are you working on right now? Have you ever spent a twenty-minute conversation with the CFO, learn a little bit about what they're doing?

(Leonid at 00:37:44) Yes. It was actually my first few months. It was basically a crash course in finance because I'm an incredibly financially illiterate person, and I didn't have any experience investing. I didn't know what commercial real estate investment is and why is that so amazing. Right? So I needed to spend a ton of time understanding not only how we're making money as a business and what is our unit economics and the future and all these kind of things, but also understanding various fund structures and limitations for the operations. Because a giant portion of our engineering efforts is to automate the back of the house, automate the user operations. Right? And there is a lot of regulations that come into place, and just understanding what limitations are is very important for us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:37) I built a financial software—

(Leonid at 00:38:38) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:39) And the purpose of it, the mission of it, was for it to be able to ingest any financial product in the market and then incorporate that into retirement plan projections, withdrawals, tax rates, all this stuff—every different type of financial vehicle from real estate, assets, depreciation, everything. Yeah. It took two years. We got—day one, we built something and produced it. Right? We're not crazy. But until it got to the vision, it took two years and we had people on it right away. But that was—I have a feeling a little bit of what you were just describing. Learning—you actually have to learn the financial product.

(Leonid at 00:39:22) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:22) And then how it operates on a detailed level because your systems ultimately are mirroring that somehow. You're writing the specs for it or, you know, I was—it was a small team I did that with, so I was heavily involved with that one. But yeah. That's fun though. Right? That's why we get to do what we do. As you move from the search engine to Yelp, Dropbox, all those different companies, you got to learn entire new processes and businesses. Yeah. Alright, man. We made a podcast.

(Leonid at 00:39:50) Wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:51) You feeling pretty good?

(Leonid at 00:39:52) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:53) Yeah. People want to find out more about you. Where? LinkedIn, Twitter?

(Leonid at 00:39:58) I do not use Twitter. I have LinkedIn though.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:01) Twitter's pretty dead, man.

(Leonid at 00:40:03) Yeah. I've never actually got it. It's hard for me to squeeze my ideas into 140 characters.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:10) Right? Awesome. And so you're in New York. Where exactly are you in New York?

(Leonid at 00:40:16) Soho.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:17) So you're in Soho? Alright. I'm up there at least three times a year. I'm gonna stop by and say hello next time I'm up there.

(Leonid at 00:40:23) Sure. Yeah. That would be great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:25) Awesome. Well, thank you so much, man, for coming and hanging out with me. It was fantastic. You dropped some extraordinarily amazing pieces of knowledge for everybody, and I just can't say how thankful I am for you to come on and hang out.

(Leonid at 00:40:37) Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:39) Alright. You have a fantastic day.

(Leonid at 00:40:40) You too. Alright. Bye.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:42) Bye.