Andy Sen - CTO of AppDirect

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. I'm curious to know how many of you have a leadership pipeline. We know that great leaders grow companies because we talk to them here on the show every day. But what are you doing to create great leaders within yours? If you're a CTO, it is 100% your responsibility to grow and improve your people beyond just their coding abilities.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:20) We've built a tool that improves your people in their craft and in leadership. Visit leaderbits.io to learn more. Today, we are talking to Andy Sin, the CTO of AppDirect, and we discuss being accountable to yourself, AppDirect's platform for innovation, and why individual ownership is one of the core values at their company. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:47) This is the Modern CTO podcast. I'm so excited, man. You having a good day?

(Andy Sin at 00:01:00) Yeah. Well, my day just started here on the West Coast. But yeah, it's so far so good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:05) Nice. Is it bright outside? Is it beautiful outside?

(Andy Sin at 00:01:08) It is not. After a month of beautiful weather, it looks—I don't know if you can see it—it's just covered with fog in San Francisco.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:16) Oh, you're getting that season, man.

(Andy Sin at 00:01:17) We are. Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:19) I was just there last month, and I got, like, the last end of the good, beautiful weather all day.

(Andy Sin at 00:01:24) You know, that beautiful weather lasted for weeks more than it should have, but we're back to, kind of, I guess, what's normal.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:31) Alright. So your day is just starting. Right? That means it's, like, 9 a.m. over there. It is 9 a.m. over here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:36) Right? See, I just had lunch. So I'm, like, I've already—I've got, like, crazy productive day. Right? We've shipped code. We've done everything. We're, like, on cloud nine and just finished up some lunch, so I'm all, like, pumped up. And, you know, are you a morning person?

(Andy Sin at 00:01:54) You know, I am a morning person. I'm joking that my day started, but we actually have the company—we have our dev teams all over the world with a lot of people in Montreal, so that's Eastern time. And more people in Buenos Aires, which is even one hour further east. So I get up in the morning, and there's just a whole slew of emails and Slack messages.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:17) Oh, yeah. That's actually one of the most recurring guests on the show is Slack. We have a show to be—

(Andy Sin at 00:02:25) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:26) Love AppDirect. I was very excited when I saw we're gonna have you on the show. But what is AppDirect?

(Andy Sin at 00:02:33) Sure. Let me tell you what AppDirect does. So we call ourselves a cloud commerce company. And the way I think about it is if you're a small software vendor—and, you know, that's what really gets me excited because our customers are software vendors—AppDirect gives you all the tools you need to really sell or monetize your software. We offer marketplaces through which you can sell your software. We offer you the billing, something like what a Stripe or a Zuora does. We let you power resellers. Anything to do with getting your product out there and selling it and making money. That's one side of the business.

(Andy Sin at 00:03:10) The other side is for users. As cloud computing just becomes more pervasive and everyone's using it, we offer tools to make it easy to manage multiple cloud software from multiple vendors. So single sign-on, doing kind of charts, doing searches across apps, getting feeds across your different apps. So we provide a suite of products for that as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:33) That's awesome. So do you have any line of business where developers find you through your tools?

(Andy Sin at 00:03:41) In a sense, yes. What we do is we have these third-party marketplaces all over. And let's say, you know, Comcast is one of our customers. And if you're a developer and you want to, let's say, sell your product through Comcast, you probably pick up a phone, talk to a business guy, and they'll tell you, well, you need to go in and integrate with AppDirect. And we just have a—

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:02) Oh, alright. You did you hear that noise?

(Andy Sin at 00:04:07) I did.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:08) That was me getting it. That was me having the idea. No. I let me make sure my notifications are off.

(Andy Sin at 00:04:14) No. I think that was mine. Unfortunately, that's my—I think that's my antivirus which pops up every couple of hours in the morning.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:21) Oh, no. See, you know what? Now I get it because, I gotta be honest, when I was first looking up the site, I was like, alright, I kind of understand, but my mind started to try to imagine use cases for it. Like, I could see the collection of tools. I was like, alright, I could see this. But when you just connected it with, like, an enterprise saying, hey, you know, we serve Comcast. So if you're gonna be one of the 100,000 vendors Comcast uses, they just say integrate with AppDirect, and that makes their life easier. Is that—am I getting it?

(Andy Sin at 00:04:49) Absolutely. And if you're a vendor, the last thing you want to do is integrate once with Comcast, then once with Intuit, once with Deutsche Telekom. Instead, you integrate once with AppDirect, and then we can distribute you throughout all our global vendor network.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:04) Oh, that's really cool. It's like Zapier on steroids.

(Andy Sin at 00:05:10) Sort of. Yeah. Sort of. Yeah. I mean, Zapier—as far as I know, Zapier helps you connect with other apps. It doesn't help you sell your own app. So we're all about, like, getting your product sold.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:20) See, I'm really good at asking bad questions, and that's how we get the clarity.

(Andy Sin at 00:05:25) These are these are great questions. And, you know, I'll just expand a little bit more and—

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:29) Please. Yeah.

(Andy Sin at 00:05:30) One of the reasons I love actually being at AppDirect, and what makes this question hard to answer is at AppDirect, really early on, we said, as a company, we want to be what we call platform for innovation. Now what does that mean? A lot of great companies, they get one amazing product out there, and they just iterate on that product until it becomes bigger and bigger and this massive company. For better or for worse, we don't do it that way. We, for a company of our size, we like to launch new products, try new things. Some of them succeed, some of them don't. We're always trying different things, which is really fun for me and my job, and I would say fun for the people who work here. It makes it a little hard to explain what we do because we do a little bit of this, a little bit of that. So, you know, it's a very broad mission.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:22) You're right. You're right. Because most of the time, we have this—like, I talked to DoorDash yesterday. Right? And they're a food delivery service. They're in—

(Andy Sin at 00:06:29) I use them all the time. Love that company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:31) Oh, yeah. So I was talking to their CTO cofounder. They started out at Stanford, and one of the cofounders is actually a native to, like, the San Francisco—Mountain View area. So first of all, I wanted to—before I forget, your site is beautiful.

(Andy Sin at 00:06:49) Oh, thanks. I love the guys who worked on it though.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:52) Oh, the isometric animation is really, really—I don't know. I was just—I was—this is new, though. Right? This has to be a newer interface in the past, like, month.

(Andy Sin at 00:07:05) I won't say it's the past month. It's—but at the beginning of this year. So it's a 2018 version.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:11) Oh, okay. Alright. Yeah. But it's, I really like it. And I love the isometric style. Have you noticed that design trend that happened?

(Andy Sin at 00:07:18) It is. It's becoming more prevalent over the last year or so. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:22) So yeah. So kudos on the website. I got a couple great ideas after scanning down the site. So tell me a little bit about how you got involved in technology, how you ultimately came to work with AppDirect.

(Andy Sin at 00:07:35) Oh, sure. I mean, I've always been in technology. I mean, I started out as a computer science grad at Georgia Tech, worked on the East Coast. And then in 2000, I heard there's this thing called the dot-com boom happening. It's all huge in San Francisco. So I literally put all my stuff into a car and drove to San Francisco and joined a startup. It was all shiny and new. And, of course, six months later, the bubble burst. And then, you know, we had to build up again. So since then, I've been working in different technology and product companies. I was the product manager for Salesforce's AppExchange, which is also a marketplace of software. So in 2009, when Nick and Dan were the co-CEOs of AppDirect, they just had this idea, and they were looking for people who would help build on this vision. And they were looking at, well, who's had experience doing software marketplaces? And in 2009, there just weren't a lot of people in this space. So they contacted me and said, hey, we're starting this new startup. Like, we saw that you were involved with the Salesforce AppExchange, and do you wanna be part of it? I mean, at that point, I had pretty much decided I want to do a startup next. Hopefully, it would go better than my startup experience in the year 2000. And so I joined AppDirect, and it's been great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:52) Yeah. A lot of people had not awesome experiences in the year 2000 for startups.

(Andy Sin at 00:08:56) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:57) So you were at Salesforce. How long were you there for?

(Andy Sin at 00:09:00) I was at Salesforce for about, I think, two and a half years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:04) Did you ever hear the story about, like, how he was at a Tony Robbins event, and he was, like, I'm gonna do Salesforce. And Tony Robbins was, like, great. And then that's, like, when he had made the decision to do it?

(Andy Sin at 00:09:15) You know, I haven't heard that story, but I have interacted a couple of times with Marc Benioff, and that sounds just like him. I mean, I believe that story right off the bat.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:26) So what was, like, your earliest experience with technology? How did you come to even fall in love with it? What was it? Was it a video game, a computer?

(Andy Sin at 00:09:35) Oh, man. I'm gonna really age myself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:38) Let's do it. Yeah.

(Andy Sin at 00:09:40) Back in the prehistoric ages, when I was a little kid, my dad got me this computer, but it was—it was a ZX Spectrum. It was, like, this British mini computer which ran BASIC. It was like an Amiga. And I wanted it for video games, but the only way to actually get video games onto it was you have to type in a BASIC program and get it to run. And I was like, okay, so if that's the way I'm gonna play, then that's the way it is. And I started programming at that point, really enjoyed it, took programming classes in school, and started to make it my career.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:15) Nice. So you're a fan of the agile software—

(Andy Sin at 00:10:18) Absolutely. With all its nuances.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:19) Right? And so I always like to ask people just because I'm a realist. How long did it take you to figure out that, like, you had to do that and you couldn't just, like, wild west build software?

(Andy Sin at 00:10:31) Okay. So I got indoctrinated into agile a long time ago. Salesforce was a huge agile shop. I was a product manager there, and they made everyone go through agile training. After Salesforce, I worked for a while in a different company. And the guy in the office next to me was Jeff McKenna. He was one of the original guys who signed the Agile Manifesto. And we were creating software for agile project management at that time, and I had a chance to really talk with Jeff and kind of absorb the philosophy. And what I take from agile is—agile is true. It's not some magic technique that'll make your software development process better, but it's a way of thinking which will expose what exactly is going on and then give you the tools to make improvements. So I don't really buy, oh, this is what agile means. This is exactly what you do. I like the idea of, okay, am I measuring how things are going? What's going well? What's going not well? And being able to iteratively fix that or improve on that. And over the long term, frankly, even over the short term, that is so much better than wild west. We wake up one morning and you say, oh, I've got this amazing idea for doing development. Let me try it out. Yeah. That just doesn't work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:51) Yes. I found it out. I got started very early. So my father was in engineering, and then I got into programming. You know, I think I wrote my first couple lines of code around—I'm in my early thirties now. And then I'd say it took me about, you know, it took me working with a team to figure out how to really organize it, because that's when I got away from my checklist of things I needed to do, and then we got into a group where you would, you know, delegate and iterate, and so, yeah, so it took me—but that whole process from the time I started programming and writing code till I got with an actual team was probably about four or five years. So I did it wrong for a good amount of time.

(Andy Sin at 00:12:30) Absolutely. The other thing, I mean, I've discovered is—I mean, I've worked in—well, even at AppDirect, like, we've been around for about eight years, and we've grown from three people in a room to now about over 700 people. As you scale the number of people, as you scale the number of locations your team's in, you have to change your processes. The same agile process which worked amazing when there were, like, five people in a room doesn't work with 300 developers across three continents. And I like the fact that agile gives me the framework to be able to measure what's working and not and be able to change as the company and the mission and the team changes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:09) Yeah. You know, I was actually reading a pretty good article by one of the engineers at Intercom, the chat company.

(Andy Sin at 00:13:18) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:18) I'm sure you come across them. But they were talking about exactly what you just said, that how they have to adjust their processes at different stages of growth and based on what they're doing. And he gave a really nice, like, roadmap view of several different stages as they had progressed. And I enjoyed that because it allowed me to give this, you know, essentially, like, ten, fifteen-minute read to someone to say, look, it's not just do this, and it's perfect. I was like, look at what actually happens as your company grows. And so that was a good point of reference.

(Andy Sin at 00:13:48) Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, if I look back at AppDirect and the journey we have done in terms of the development team—so we started out, you know, it's all collocated. There's five developers in a room. You've got a whiteboard behind you. You put down the—you put down sticky notes. It's very agile. Then we started growing as a company. We started having team members in different locations, and we said, oh, we really want to recreate that. And we had a lot of collaboration. Obviously, we used, you know, collaborative tools like GitHub and Atlassian, make sure everyone's on the same page. We used to have stand-ups with video conferencing. We even bought one of those robots. You know, those little robots with an iPad on it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:28) Come on. Like the Segway looking things? Yeah.

(Andy Sin at 00:14:32) We had a robot in every office so that, you know, if there's a stand-up and someone's remote, they could pilot the robot in. So we did all of that. And after a point, it's like, even with all the technology we threw at it, it just wasn't the same. So about a year or so ago, we actually said, you know what? All of this technology is great, but now we're at a point that we can see that nothing really is as good as it was in the old days with, like, five people in a room.

(Andy Sen at 00:15:00) So instead of trying to use technology to enhance the teams, we started distributing the work and said, "Okay, you know what? If you're in the Montreal office or you're in the San Francisco office, you've got a team, and as much as we can, we need to co-locate people in there." And you go back to using just the yellow sticky notes and drawing on the whiteboards. And, you know, it's almost come full circle in our journey.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:25) I love it, though. And you know what? I've gone back and forth in my life about loving and hating the remote work. But what you just mentioned is there's just this—it's a multiplier of being able to look at someone in the eyes when you're talking to them.

(Andy Sen at 00:15:41) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:41) And being able to describe the idea and being able to point at the board and the energy in the room and the excitement and all of that. It's like, this is definitely the way life was meant to be. Right?

(Andy Sen at 00:15:53) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:53) And as much as I love that, I'm also interested in seeing what's going to happen with, like, the HoloLens and stuff.

(Andy Sen at 00:15:56) Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:58) Yeah, right? Because the prototype things I've seen come through, like on LinkedIn videos where people have these lower-res renderings where they can all have the camera set up, and it looks really promising.

(Andy Sen at 00:16:13) Absolutely. We're always looking at things like that. So we actually have an Oculus in the office which we're trying out. Yeah, I think that could be the game changer. I mean, in the end, whether it's looking someone in the eye, maybe you can replicate that with the HoloLens. But after work, letting off steam by having a beer down the road, that you're not really going to get with the HoloLens, and that's important too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:39) Well, yeah. That's once we're all in the matrix, man.

(Andy Sen at 00:16:41) I'm looking forward to that day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:44) That's when we have the direct taps to our consciousness, right? So how large—you mentioned you have several hundred people, right? And how large is the actual engineering team? And then a little bit about the structure of how engineering is divided up. I mean, I know it's specific to the nature of your business, but everyone likes to geek out and hear how people do it.

(Andy Sen at 00:17:08) Sure. So our engineering team, by broad sense of use—anybody in technology, systems, DBAs, networking guys, everybody—it's over 300, about 350 people. And the way we are broken out is we have a couple of vertical teams, and the vertical teams means product teams. Again, AppDirect loves to have a lot of products. We believe that a collection of well-made products which work with each other really enhances the value to our customers. So, you know, we have people on our billing product or marketplace product or reseller product or search product. So you have people split out like that. And then you have a couple of horizontal teams like the platform team, the people who are rolling out our Kubernetes and our container structure. You've got our DBAs who are keeping a lot of the database stuff alive. So it's sliced up in that sense. And then the product teams themselves—they're very, very cross-functional. You've got not just the developers on the team, but we've got our designers, our product managers, and they work very much like you'd expect an agile team to work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:18) Excellent. So I'm really curious. If you were to take your day and slice it up into a pie chart, what would the three biggest slices look like?

(Andy Sen at 00:18:28) That's a good question. I'm going to answer it in the sense of what would my week look like because it's lumpy. It's more—I think context switching is generally bad, so I like to take usually bigger blocks of time and say, like, you know, "Today I'm going to focus on this," and another day I'll focus on something else. But if I had to slice up my time, I would say, on average, there would be three different things. One is just—I think one-third would be technology problems, like thinking about whether it's architecture or whether it's a certain technology choice that we need to make, or how we implement the feature. The classic design architecture stuff is one-third. One-third is people. We have 350 people, so it's all about, like, you know, what's the right org structure, what's the right team structure, how do we resolve any issues. And then another third, the last third, would be kind of dealing with how does technology at AppDirect work with the rest of the world—whether it's internally with our own salespeople, with our product folks, or externally with our customers. Like, how can we come up with new solutions to the issues or problems people are having? I would say it's an even split between those three things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:49) Awesome. That's a good one. Yeah. The people, that's super important. Especially since you've been there, you know, nine years. You went, like you said, from three people all the way up to this large number, over 350. How has your role changed? What were the big moments where you're like, "All right, we're at this point now, so I really can't do this part of the project. I have to hire someone." What are some of the big milestones over nine years?

(Andy Sen at 00:20:16) Sure. I would say the biggest milestone was the day where I kind of realized I just can't be hands-on in code anymore. I still have access to the code. I still, whenever there's issues, I still look it up to see what's going on. I still look at the commits going in, but I don't contribute any code. I don't submit any pull requests. And I think that was a big shift, and I think it's a shift for pretty much every guy in technology who joins a startup which goes big. But at some point, you just realize that as much as you think you're a great coder, you're just not going to be putting as much value if you're sitting down there trying to knock out a feature as you would in doing something else. So that was a big transition. The other transition probably was—and it all happened, I would say, almost around the same time—when I realized we needed layers of management in technology. You know, it started out with me and a couple of guys, and then I was the manager of everybody in engineering. And then we had a bunch of managers, but we still all knew each other. We're still a small group. But once you reach about, let's say, 100 people, you start needing to have spans and layers. You need to have—we brought in a great VP, actually one of the guys I worked with at Salesforce. And you have to kind of think about org structures. That was another big change in the evolution of my role.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:47) I noticed that when you get to that 100, a lot of people, that's when you get into the real teams of teams and you need that extra management structure. I actually spoke with one company who tried to flatten it out, and they didn't get the best results. But I'm just sharing that because that's what the conversation I had with them was, right? They completely eliminated an entire layer and then tried to shift the responsibility to an individual in the structure, and then it just didn't work out the way that they wanted it to. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't work out for another company. Every company is different.

(Andy Sen at 00:22:23) Absolutely. And the other thing that is maybe a little bit different that we do at AppDirect is, despite this, we try really hard to put the pressure on individual ownership. Ownership is a big—it's one of our values. So one of the things we do for any feature that we roll out, any large feature, we have this concept called the PDO. That's the acronym we've used. It's called the Primary Development Owner. And we single out—there's one guy in development who almost never is a manager. It's somebody who has skin in the game, who's writing a lot of the code. It's his or her feature, and they're responsible for raising their hand, making sure the estimation is done correctly, and making sure it goes through the process—that it's done on time, it's high quality, it moves to production throughout the process. And, A, it's a way of making sure that individuals get that responsibility and ownership. It also fosters that culture where you don't have an issue where people are saying, "It's not my problem." It is your problem. You are the owner, and you get that culture of ownership. And it's also great training for people who want, at one point, to move on to management, to see that, you know, this is what it takes. This is the kind of bigger picture you have to keep in mind. So, you know, we need the spans and the layers, but we try really hard to keep that culture of ownership going as well at the same time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:52) Responsibility—essential feature of every great leader, right? I'm curious. So 2009, it's been several years, large company. I want to know where you learned your discipline.

(Andy Sen at 00:24:06) Well, personally, I mean, I've worked at large companies before. I used to work at Salesforce. I've worked at Walmart Labs. I've worked at IBM. So I'm familiar with large companies, and some of it is there. And then some of it is just the school of hard knocks that you learn as you grow big.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:24) That's what I'm looking for, right?

(Andy Sen at 00:24:25) Yeah. And again, going back to my example—and this is where I think agile really helps—when you look at every team that you have, when you can measure every sprint, and we do weekly sprints, what's working, what's not working, then it makes it easier to kind of step back and see, "Okay, this is the kind of discipline we need." We need spans and layers. But wait a second, if you've got spans and layers and you've got a manager managing everything, the whole individual responsibility stuff is going down. People aren't as excited and motivated as they were before. So how do we fix that? Well, maybe we say that people can now step up and be owners of entire features. We look at—and one of the things we do as a company, not just in engineering, is we have engagement surveys. At one point we started from every quarter. So we really keep a pulse on how people are feeling, what they like, what they don't like. And, you know, this is important for retention. This is important for attracting great talent. And it's also really useful for improving processes as we grow bigger and getting that discipline as you go along.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:35) Yeah. Well, it's like for me, I just started to get busier and busier, and it was like this slow, you know, climb. And then I noticed that I kind of figured out discipline. I was looking for the area. I'm like, "All right, so I'm having to improve over here, then I have to improve over here." And I'm going through all these things. And so I was listening to Elon Musk talk, and that's where I got one of my favorite things—his whole concept of first principles, you know?

(Andy Sen at 00:26:01) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:02) And I'm sure you've heard that.

(Andy Sen at 00:26:02) Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:02) And so what I looked at—I started actually just researching, looking for first principles that would help me amplify everything I'm doing in my life, and then how I could actually practice those things. And wouldn't you know, I kept seeing the word "discipline" come up and listening to different people talk about it. And I thought, like, historically, discipline is like what you do as a child when you're getting in trouble, right?

(Andy Sen at 00:26:30) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:30) And so I started looking up discipline. And see, now, I had an opposite experience to you. I never worked in a company that I didn't own or wasn't a backer or a part of. So I didn't ever have that—the structure forced upon me. I was always responsible for forcing it upon myself, and I was doing it at the degree to which I was comfortable with doing it, which, as you know, until you're forced out of necessity, you don't push as hard as you can.

(Andy Sen at 00:26:55) Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:56) So then I found some of these great people talking about discipline, and like, through your own habits and your own routines, you can build up this discipline with yourself. And it's not like a negative thing. It's just, you know, essentially being responsible to do the things you say you're going to do simply for you. And that I found was really an interesting life trick—like, getting up on time is not necessarily about getting up early, but it's about saying you're going to do it and then doing it, and then you get this credibility with yourself. And so I don't know why I went off on a tangent about discipline, but I was just improving this week.

(Andy Sen at 00:27:33) Absolutely. I mean, it makes sense. And I think it's one of those universal things that a lot of people do unconsciously, and they don't even realize how important it is to their success. This idea of setting goals and being accountable to yourself is just critical. I mean, you almost find it hard to know how you can be successful if you aren't doing that. Maybe unconsciously. Maybe you've never heard of the term "discipline," but my sense is that successful people just do it anyway.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:02) Yeah. You just have to do it. The conversation I have most often is about testing. People ask me. They're all hoping I'm going to open my mouth and say some excuse—some golden excuse that would relieve them of the concept of having to learn how to test, right?

(Andy Sen at 00:28:19) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:19) And I'm just like, "No, you just have to do it." It's just something you do. Obviously, when you get into the details of it, there's variances, but if you're writing code, you have to be testing to some degree.

(Andy Sen at 00:28:33) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:33) You just do it. And it's like—I say it's like working out. Everybody knows there's benefits to it. It just sucks to get into the routine.

(Andy Sen at 00:28:42) Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:43) But once you do, you're like jacked, and everybody wants to be you. It's like you're David Heinemeier Hansson all of a sudden—I don't know if you're a Ruby on Rails fan—or you're Martin Fowler instantly, right? Uncle Bob. So, yeah, you just have to get into it. And that's where I got a lot of it too. When I started looking up at some of the best programmers and buying their books and the best engineers and project managers, all of this stuff, what I realized is they literally just have the patience and the discipline to develop the habit the right way. And then they execute. And then everything from there on, it's like this curve, right? Because once you have the solid foundation, everything you do, you do with that as a second nature thing that's just happening.

(Andy Sen at 00:29:30) Absolutely. That makes sense. The other thing which you just touched on is the idea of learning from the best, and I think that's also a universally good thing. It's always, "Take the time to look at who are the pioneers in the field." I mean, whether it's a Martin Fowler or Elon Musk or whoever it is, and seeing what is it that made them great. And some of those things you'll take. Some of them you won't. Some of them you think are not applicable. It doesn't matter. But always just exposing yourself to those stories, to those learnings, just makes you better and more successful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:10) Yeah. And that's literally why we're here talking. I try to find the best technology leaders in the world, and I come hang out and talk with them because, you know, I always want to be better. And reading is great.

(Andy Sen at 00:30:22) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:22) But getting to hear the real value, I find a lot of value in the backstories too. One of my personal goals is to have a net worth of over $1,000,000,000. And so the way I accomplished that goal, or am accomplishing the goal, is I first went out and I didn't read business books. I found the life stories of three billionaires: Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and Elon Musk. And I read their stories about how they grew up as children, how they went through their business, and where they got today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:53) And that told me more than any business book on how to make money would tell you about becoming a billionaire.

(Andy Sin at 00:30:59) That is very interesting. I haven't read the Richard Branson story. I should put that on my list.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:05) You got the Musk one though?

(Andy Sin at 00:31:06) I've got the Musk one. I've got the Bezos one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:09) Yeah. Those are good too. Right?

(Andy Sin at 00:31:10) Those are great. And, you know, even some of the non-technology people, like, I read the Steve Jobs when I was in technology, but it was the Walter Isaacson book. And I just got hooked on the author, and then I read his books on everyone from Benjamin Franklin to Einstein to Leonardo da Vinci. You know, those are very inspirational as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:29) Oh, man. I gotta check this out. That's actually one that I haven't done. I saw the size of it, and I was like...

(Andy Sin at 00:31:39) It's really good. The Steve Jobs one. Right? The Walter Isaacson one on Jobs is really good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:44) Alright. You sold me. I'll check it out. I'm a big fan. Do you do the Audible stuff?

(Andy Sin at 00:31:48) I don't do Audible, as a matter of fact. I actually read an enormous amount just on my phone Kindle, but I don't do Audible.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:57) Really? On the Kindle? Right. Okay. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:59) That's like, that's your habit. You sit down, relax, and you have your reading routine.

(Andy Sin at 00:32:06) Right. Absolutely. It's not very relaxing. I do it on my commute. I commute by train, so that's when I get it done.

(Andy Sin at 00:32:12) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:13) Nice. Now is there a, do you have, you written a book? Is there one coming in the future?

(Andy Sin at 00:32:17) I have not written a book. Not something I've thought about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:21) Not something you've thought about?

(Andy Sin at 00:32:22) Something I've thought about. I mean, I would say that at least the last decade, even before AppDirect, I've just been so focused. Like, you know, you mentioned one of your goals is to have a net worth of $1,000,000,000. Yeah. I'd say one of my personal goals was to take a company from start until it's a large company.

(Andy Sin at 00:32:42) Whatever the net worth makes it. Just to be able to say that I've had that journey from, you know, startup where I'm buying a computer and writing the first line of code to an actual well-established global brand. And I've just been focused on that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:00) You are doing it. It's unbelievable.

(Andy Sin at 00:33:02) It's been quite a journey. Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:04) Okay. So what I'll do is I've got my second book coming out called Everything But Code.

(Andy Sin at 00:33:10) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:10) And it's everything you need as a technology leader other than just code. Right? So the coding stuff, there's many great people who solely focus on that. And then so what I'll do is I'll include you in that. I'll just give you a little shout. Take some of your advice from the call and be like, hey. And then I'll send it over to you, and you can be like, yeah. I won't sue you for that. I'll be like, alright. Cool.

(Andy Sin at 00:33:32) And I appreciate it. And, you know, regardless of whether you give me a shout out or not, that's kind of the books I like. So you'll probably get me as one of your customers anyway.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:43) Oh, excellent. Yeah. Because, look, it's important. I had this realization. My brother and stepmom are both physicians, and so I got, and I'm a geek, so I'll take a, instead of like, watching Netflix, I'll take a small course on understanding the basics of physics or something or medicine.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:02) And so I was watching this one on DNA, and it was showing me how DNA actually replicates and clones itself and passes information on to the next generation of DNA. And I was like, that's the most human thing I can do, is just pass information on to the next generation and the media. We got the podcast media, we got book media. And so, you know, I figured if I'm gonna, everyone's looking for their purpose and responsibility, I said, alright. Well, I'll just do the thing at my core, my lowest, code-level component, right, down to the metal, my DNA, and I'll just do what the DNA does.

(Andy Sin at 00:34:36) Yeah. Just replicate all your knowledge. That's amazing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:42) So if you were, like, let's say Elon Musk calls you up, because you're in a very similar city, he flies you on his jet. Right? You go visit the Tesla factory. He's got this time machine, and you get to go back 10 years and give some advice to your previous self. Like, one small piece of advice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:59) What would it be?

(Andy Sin at 00:35:01) Just one?

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:02) Yeah. Just one. Very small. You could get, like, you know, you could have like, 10, 15 seconds to speak to yourself.

(Andy Sin at 00:35:08) Oh, man. That's really interesting. There's a ton of practical things I could say, which is around, you know, take this decision versus that decision that might have, you know, helped the company go faster or something like that. But I don't think I would give any of that advice. The advice I would actually go back and tell myself is all the experience that you're gonna have over the next 10 years, just be in the moment a little bit more.

(Andy Sin at 00:35:40) As you're going through all of those things, reflect on what's happening a little more than you have. I've seen that a lot of times I look back and I was like, okay. Those last three years, you know, here are some of the experiences that happened. Oh, that's great. Oh, maybe I should now change my course.

(Andy Sin at 00:35:57) Whereas I think it would be awesome to be one of those people who would just continuously analyze themselves and be able to adjust course faster. So going back to the geeky agile terms, I would love to be a person who could have a one-day sprint cycle. Right? And that's the advice I'll give myself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:20) That's amazing advice, and it's incredibly unique. I love it.

(Andy Sin at 00:36:24) I don't know about uniqueness, but yeah, that's one of the things I would tell myself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:29) So what are you most excited about right now? Like, what are you springing out of bed for? Like, what's on your mind with AppDirect? As leaders, we're always getting ourselves excited about what's coming next and reevaluating so we can drive ourselves forward. What's currently on your radar that you're pumped up about?

(Andy Sin at 00:36:45) So what pumps me up the most, I'll be very honest, is that I deserve no credit for it. As much as I like to say that, you know, I'm helping build this great product, this great company, there's a global trend right now where everybody across the globe, in every country, businesses are just using more and more cloud software. Right? What happened with consumers with the iPhone is now being replicated across businesses and enterprises everywhere. And what that means is, you know, just in a little bit of a selfish way, the work that I've been doing for the last 10 years is just becoming more and more relevant and useful for people everywhere.

(Andy Sin at 00:37:30) So, I mean, that really pumps me up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:33) Dude, it should. Right? Yeah. It is. It's massive, and once I understood what you meant, so one of my first projects was real estate software, but it was only useful to real estate companies that had over 1,000 agents, which, you know, boils my total approachable market down to 100 companies in the US.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:50) Right? And what was happening, and this is in early 2000s. So this is before everybody got all shy about integrations because they had the expense and the issues with them, and everyone was like, yeah, let's do everything.

(Andy Sin at 00:38:04) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:05) And yeah. All I could see is everybody rebuilding the same thing and trying to build these apps. But your product, it was incredibly valuable. And then to know that it was born in that time, you guys were definitely born out of necessity of what all the enterprises were experiencing.

(Andy Sin at 00:38:24) Absolutely. I mean, you know, when we first came out, like, in 2009, 2010, if you were a small startup and you got your product out, the only way to really sell is to do web marketing and get people onto your website, which means not only do you have to be a great engineer to build your product, you have to be a great product person to understand what the market wants. You also have to be this amazing web marketer and know everything about SEO, SEM. Like, there's no other alternative. And while that's still incredibly important, at AppDirect, we're now just giving software vendors other tools.

(Andy Sin at 00:38:59) You can now get your product distributed across our different marketplaces. You can set up reseller networks using our product. You don't have to worry about complicated billing or pricing plans. We make it easy for you. And, you know, that again, you asked what keeps me motivated, what gets me pumped up.

(Andy Sin at 00:39:16) I mean, this does.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:18) Awesome. So do you use Twitter, LinkedIn? Where do you hang out most online when you do?

(Andy Sin at 00:39:24) I would say Twitter. I don't post a lot. I'm way more of a lurker. I like to retweet than post stuff. Yeah.

(Andy Sin at 00:39:32) And I don't really do a lot of other social media. I mean, I'm on LinkedIn. Everyone's on LinkedIn, but I don't use it much. I'm not active.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:40) Okay. So what's your handle on Twitter?

(Andy Sin at 00:39:42) It's SenAndy. So my last name and first name.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:46) That's really easy. Yep. A little bit too easy. Alright. So people wanna find out more about you, connect to you, they can look you up on Twitter at SenAndy?

(Andy Sin at 00:39:56) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:57) Awesome. Man, we did it. We made a podcast.

(Andy Sin at 00:40:00) We did. It's amazing. I mean, I'm a huge podcast listener. This is the first time I've actually been on the other side and making one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:07) Yes. Have you listened to any of our podcasts?

(Andy Sin at 00:40:10) Yeah. Of course. I learned about you guys. I definitely went downhill.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:14) Oh, man. Yeah. Kevin Scott was a cool one, the CTO of Microsoft.

(Andy Sin at 00:40:19) Yes. Yeah. I got that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:21) And then, just so you know, so you're in San Francisco, some awesome CTOs in San Francisco. You got Fred from Sift Science.

(Andy Sin at 00:40:29) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:29) And have you come across him yet?

(Andy Sin at 00:40:31) No. I have not.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:32) He was actually, he did some work at Google. His company was purchased by Google, and then they had the team that they kind of like aqua-hired rebuild Google Payments. So if you do Google Payments, you're using Fred's technology.

(Andy Sin at 00:40:46) Oh, it's interesting. We do use Google Payments. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:49) Yeah. And then now he has a large startup that's actually, one of the investors is Kevin Scott, the CTO of Microsoft, and it's called Sift Science, and they do this like, anti-fraud thing that's massive. Like Airbnb, all the big companies, basically like AI fraud detection. And so he...

(Andy Sin at 00:41:08) What's the name of this company? Because, again, we're actually looking for a software like this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:15) Oh, Sift Science.

(Andy Sin at 00:41:17) Sift Science. Okay. Got it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:18) Yeah. And they're in San Francisco. I actually was just, I was out there for like almost a month, or a month ago for several, like, two weeks, meeting everybody that had come on the show that was out in San Francisco. It was really cool. Leadership guy, Yasser, the CTO of Williams-Sonoma.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:38) Mhmm.

(Andy Sin at 00:41:39) You think...

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:39) That they're like a kitchen company. Right? Like, they own the Pottery Barn. But man, they're really, really smart and strategic. They just bought this large augmented reality company, and they pulled the whole organization, like, 100 people in to digitize all their products. You could, like, put your Williams-Sonoma stuff on your countertop with the AR.

(Andy Sin at 00:41:59) I believe that. I mean, because like I said, I've been in the e-commerce retail. I used to work for Walmart Labs. And yeah, these guys do, I mean, just generally that retail industry, they do a lot of interesting things with the technology, whether it's like the kiosk, the augmented reality. Um, yeah.

(Andy Sin at 00:42:18) Fifteen years ago, Walmart Labs was using this, Adobe Flex to do these interactive things on the web to sell clothes. So, I mean, there's a lot of cool things happening in that space.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:30) You just brought me, like, chills. I remember Flex. Oh my goodness. Oh, really? Yeah, dude.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:36) That thing was...

(Andy Sin at 00:42:36) I don't think I've heard it. I mean, I used to develop them that, like, a long time ago, so it's really rare that I hear someone else who knows about it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:44) Oh, yeah. I can see that, like, the blue color in the background? I know that you know what I'm talking about. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:52) It was like a blue UI. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:55) That Flex, man. Because I got into scripting, like, some ActionScript when I wanted to make some, learn Flash stuff. And then I got into Flex, and I was like, this is really interesting. And yeah. And then, you know, Yasser used to be at Walmart.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:10) I'm pretty sure.

(Andy Sin at 00:43:11) Yeah. For some reason, his name sounded really familiar.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:15) Yeah. Yasser Anwar. I think we probably have some mutual acquaintances. Yeah. So and he's in San Francisco too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:23) So a lot of great, and then DoorDash is in San Francisco. They're over a $1,000,000,000 valuation and their co-founder's under 30. Super sharp guy.

(Andy Sin at 00:43:32) Mhmm. Talked with...

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:33) Them yesterday. So I highly recommend. Anyways, there's a lot of, I know you know that there's a lot of great people in San Francisco, but now if you ever wanna connect with anyone directly, I could just straight introduce you to them.

(Andy Sin at 00:43:45) Great. Well, thank you. I might take you up on that. Let me look into Sift Science a little bit, but I might take you up on that and just talk to them. Because we're a, we're not a huge e-commerce player. We're pretty big.

(Andy Sin at 00:43:57) We're not in the billions, but in the hundreds of millions. So we're always looking for anti-fraud or, you know, security products.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:05) Yeah. And then the offer is open for anyone outside of San Francisco too. Any past guest, anytime you're listening to the podcast, like, oh, man, I need Joel to just send an email and introduce me to that person. I do that and it works, like, surprisingly well. I guess I just facilitate the introduction, and like, I've done this about 15 times, and it's almost always relevant and useful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:29) And, I don't know. I feel like I'm useful. And you know people like feeling they're useful.

(Andy Sin at 00:44:35) Yeah. Look. I mean, networking is what makes this industry go around. I mean, it's all about the introductions. And the other thing unique about the tech industry is, like, people are helpful.

(Andy Sin at 00:44:45) And I've seen it on all sides. Like, you know, you intro to a VC or you need an intro to somebody to make a reference call or anything. Almost never hear someone saying, no. I'm not gonna do this. And then they'll take that time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:02) Right. And then it's always magical. Like Yasser from when someone bought that company. At the same time, I had this other guy on my show who is in Sweden, and he just did this amazing technology. They're publicly traded in Sweden.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:14) They have several hundred employees, and they're doing very well, and they're growing rapidly every day. And the reason why their growth is because they revolutionized the way you can store these digital objects. And I said, oh, you just bought a company and your whole road map is digitizing thousands of objects for a way. I was like, you two should talk to each other. Boom.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:34) Like, they have useful interactions and, you know, one ended up saving the other a ridiculous amount of time.

(Andy Sin at 00:45:41) Oh, very cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:42) Yeah. I was like, hey. Yeah. Okay. So the point of that long wind is anytime you need anything ever, reach out to me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:50) I'll connect you with whoever you'd like to, or if you're experiencing a problem, I'll connect you with anyone at your revenue size level or the level above you so that you could talk about the stages that you're going through. Because at the end of the day, you will go through a stage of going from 500 employees to 10,000.

(Andy Sin at 00:46:07) Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:08) And you will need to pull in people that have done that and, you know, bounce ideas off of them, and they're always more than happy to help.

(Andy Sin at 00:46:16) Great. Thank you, Joel. This was a lot of fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:18) Thank you so much, Andy. Have a great day.

(Andy Sin at 00:46:20) You too. Bye.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:21) Bye. Thank you so much for listening to the Modern CTO Podcast. Share this. Get the word out. Thank you guys so much.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:32) I couldn't do without you. I appreciate it. You guys are the absolute best.