Nic Di Iorio - CTO of XO Group

(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 Nick, the CTO of XO Group, and we discussed the transition from individual contributor to leader, making the most out of the resources that you have, and empowering your people at all levels. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast.

(Nick at 00:00:45) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:46) This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Nick at 00:00:57) Hello, hello. It's you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:03) It is. And it's you. You're beautiful. Look at that. I love the background, man.

(Nick at 00:01:07) And it actually makes me look much taller than I actually am. It's off the screen. I'm not tall.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:16) Oh man, Nick, larger than life.

(Nick at 00:01:18) Larger than life. That's it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:20) How's your day going, Nick?

(Nick at 00:01:22) Pretty good. Yours?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:23) Oh man, life is beautiful. I got a little baby girl. She just turned 11 months, have her first birthday coming up, and just every morning's amazing. Only kid?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:35) First kid? Yep. And we found out, I guess we'll say it for the first time on the pod. We found out last week we have number two on the way.

(Nick at 00:01:44) Wow. Yeah. They're called Irish twins. Are you Irish?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:50) No, I'm not. I'm actually Greek and American. It's very strange, mate.

(Nick at 00:01:56) That's a mix.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:58) Yes. I had a traveling family.

(Nick at 00:02:02) Well, congratulations. It's great. It's a great ride, the kids. They grow up extremely fast, so keep an eye on them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:08) I will. You have two kids, or how many kids do you have?

(Nick at 00:02:12) I have two kids. I have a daughter and a son, 17 and 14, respectively.

(Nick at 00:02:19) So it's a challenging time. They want cars. Well, we live in the city. We live in New York City, so they're not really big on cars. They just want to own the city. That's it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:33) Okay, Jay-Z.

(Nick at 00:02:35) Yes, exactly, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:38) That's amazing. Oh man, I'm looking forward to that. So have you always been in technology?

(Nick at 00:02:46) Yeah, essentially, yes. I started out as a computer scientist during very early days when computer science was essentially a spinoff of the electrical engineering department for practical purposes. So I had a degree in computer science, both undergraduate and graduate.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:04) And then so when you entered the workforce, what was your first gig?

(Nick at 00:03:08) Well, before I entered the workforce, my first gig was actually programming for money, trying to get away from doing other strange money-making chores. So we started programming early on as soon as we learned to actually do some good coding. But my first official gig was at GTE up in Massachusetts. Doesn't exist anymore. GTE stood for General Telephone and Electronics. It was supposed to be a competitor of AT&T at the time, prevalent in the Northeast that has since disappeared. But I worked primarily in R&D-type activities, projects funded by various institutions to explore data communication, which was my graduate work was in data communications as well. Naturally, I gravitated toward that path.

(Nick at 00:04:04) Then from there, I ended up at Bell Labs, which was similar type of work, data communication, networking, more applied to the commercial environment. The early work was more exploratory. So I spent 10 years doing that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:25) It's a long time, but you learned a lot, and you were writing code, working with communications, just getting all of your individual contributor experience in?

(Nick at 00:04:34) Yeah, right. Primarily protocols, communication protocols. The early days of the TCP/IP and other related protocols to facilitate the data communication evolution. People coming to the Internet at the time. It was everything from local networks to wider networks and trying to do an end-to-end transmission mechanism. So all the protocols from the ground up controlled that kind of data exchange.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:06) Did you end up with any crazy patents?

(Nick at 00:05:09) Well, I did some work with at the Organization for the Standardization of some of these things. So I wrote some stuff there for some protocols. They were published at some time that may be not relevant anymore because they employed technologies that no longer exist, like packet data networks, which people don't even know what they are nowadays. But the stuff that the telecom companies used to do to get into data communication.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:36) They just automated a robot to pull out the wires and plug it in the switchboard?

(Nick at 00:05:42) Yeah, okay. That's what we're doing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:45) Yes. So what was your first opportunity where you got to transition from doing the actual technical work to leading a team?

(Nick at 00:05:55) Well, I was hired away from Bell Labs in the early nineties, essentially '91, from a large company that still exists. It's called Young and Rubicam. It's an advertising marketing communications company. And it was interesting because the CIO there was enamored with the idea of getting somebody from academia like myself to work on data communication with the idea of interconnecting all of their offices worldwide. And now this is very early years. There wasn't a lot of availability of data communication services, and there were some, but not extensive. So I started building a team there. Essentially, I became the central team that was going to provide from the ground up the interconnectivity of all these offices. And I'm talking about 150 offices in 70, 80 countries.

(Nick at 00:06:56) With the basic services to move data around. So we're talking about email, essentially, and file transfers. The very simple things to be able to... Now they wanted that, of course, because this is a company that used to service these large clients—I'm making it up, but like a Ford or a Coca-Cola or somebody like that. So they did work out of 30 or 40 countries. And therefore, they wanted the ability to move information around a little bit faster than just shipping it overnight, which at the time was really overnight, or trying to fax it. And so we started that and we started employing some of the new technologies that were coming out at the time to weave together all these offices around the world and to be able to move stuff on very, very low bandwidth lines—9.6 kilohertz, 19.2, 56k, something like that.

(Nick at 00:07:56) And that's how I started building a team. Started with three, five people, became 20 people, and became people that were spread around the world. And then from there, I went to the next company that was even larger. I had even more offices. Then I climbed up the ladder from just doing the communications and the standard data movement or information movement services to the actual application, application development, strategic application development. And so I started thinking, and then I became the CIO of this larger company called McCann Erickson Worldwide Group and then IPG, which was even larger than McCann. And then I went off and did the startup for a while, and then I ended up at XO Group.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:41) I love the journey. You're like, I feel like I'm interviewing someone who's climbed Everest, and they're telling me how they did it. So I'm curious to know, Nick. People ask me all the time when I talk to these great leaders like yourself about transitioning. So you'll come on the show, people will hear this, say, "Oh, wow. You started out, you were writing code, you were working on telecom, and then you ended up putting in a lot of great work as an individual contributor, mastering your craft, and then all of a sudden you started—you had this progression. You went up, then you went up, then you went up." And so what is going on in your mind? What do you attribute that to? What are you looking for? What gets you to that next level?

(Nick at 00:09:22) Well, usually what gets you to the next level is the ability to deliver, and to deliver in a timely fashion, and to really try to, as much as possible—I know it sounds like an impasse—but you have to make your constituency happy. My climb towards starting leading people and then expanding the team was unorthodox because I was hired by the CIO, and in the transition between when he hired me and when I actually joined, which six months went by, his whole organization had been disassembled and distributed at the individual company level. So I ended up becoming a single person, doing the becoming the central single person.

(Nick at 00:10:14) But because I started taking on projects that I could handle myself with the help of third parties, with the delivery from third parties, I started delivering functionality that at the time was, first of all, it introduced something new. But honestly, at the very beginning, I went for stuff that really delivered value and economic value. So I started delivering basic interconnectivity across the most important offices of that company. The two or three that allowed me to pull out an enormous amount of costs so that what I was taking out was five times the cost of what I was putting in, and what I was putting in was moving a lot more information than what I was taking out.

(Nick at 00:11:01) So that got the attention of people much higher up than my CIO because it got the attention of the people that actually wrote the check. So they said, "Well, this sounds interesting. So let's talk with this guy, see what else he can do with it." So I started getting that exposure. And then, of course, it started snowballing. Because you deliver something, and they say, "Well, can we do more of this? Can we do it wider? Can we go to other offices? Do you need more people? Do you need more people in New York? Do you need more people in London? Well, let's do that." And then that's how it ended. Then they said, "What else would you like to do?" And I said, "Well, I'd like to actually do business systems." "Oh, okay. Where do we want to do it?" "Let's do it in the flagship office. Let's see if it works out, and then we expand." Never take on more than you can actually chew reasonably. And then whatever you can chew, chew it and then swallow it and then move on to the next piece. That has been my experience.

(Nick at 00:11:53) And also, I think, ultimately, to really be able to grow teams is that you have to be followed. I always tell my people it's not good to be a leader. You can't just lead by demanding what you need. People have to follow you in battle. So they have to perceive that what you're doing for them, what you're asking them to do, there is a value to it. There is a motive that is worth their while so that when you actually move forward, they're actually behind.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:26) I like what you said because you identified the value. The thing that would be most valuable, and then you made it into something manageable to deliver the value, then the other people noticed. And then what the other people did was they found someone who was resourceful, and then they gave them more resources. And that's how it always goes. So whenever I see people say, "Oh, we don't have enough resources," you know, be more resourceful with what you have, and the people will notice, and they will come and give you resources.

(Nick at 00:12:54) I agree completely with the way you summarize. That's exactly right. I have many debates even today. I have a large organization, but there's always sometimes a tendency for people to say, "Well, I can't do that unless you give me X, Y, and Z." And I say, "Well, but you have already A and B. Why don't you start with A and B? Let's see what we can..." You know, it's easier to make an argument if you are starting to make progress to actually add to that than to start by saying, "If I don't get these before I start, I can't even start." So I never approach anything that way. People always say, "How do you actually decide how to get to..." You know, "How are you going to deliver that?"

(Nick at 00:13:37) And I always say, and I truly believe this, that in general, the first assessment that's made is where I am going? Am I going from A to B? Where is B? Is B east? I start gradually moving east. I don't spend an inordinate amount of time plotting the perfect trajectory to get from A to B. What I do is I start moving in the general direction that I know B is at, and then I course correct all along the path and try to course correct as soon as I have more information to course correct. But I don't stand there waiting to make sure that I have exactly the straight line. I use that in everything that I do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:24) That's unbelievable advice because often, as you know, I have an engineering background, so I usually go to planning. But then when I got into the business side of things and I started having to deliver value and accomplish bigger things, that immediate action is the thing that gets you forward. Because every single time you take the action, like you said, you get more information to work with. You learn more about your constraints, and then you can leverage your constraints to correct your course. And then those breed creativity in order for you to find clever ways of solving the problem.

(Nick at 00:15:01) And as you make progress, people around you that can help you with more resources identify, it's easier to make an argument that a little bit more investment here will allow us to speed up when you're actually already demonstrating something than trying to do it from a hypothetical situation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:19) You mentioned that an important part of leadership is your ability to get people to follow you. In your history, what have you noticed is a way that you get the people to follow you?

(Nick at 00:15:32) Well, first of all, I share as much as I can about what I know and what I can legally share. So I try to get everybody engaged in feeling like they're part of the resolution of, part of the process of getting to a decision. And second of all, I would say that I like to empower people in general at all levels. I like to push down the decision-making as much as possible within the constraints of what I believe the person could be making a decision on. Allow them to make that decision. So that, you know, they get a sense of, they have thought about it, and they decided that that's something to do. And then when they do that, they also know that they have to defend it. They have to know how to defend it.

(Nick at 00:16:25) And then that, I think, makes people increasingly more comfortable. So we are organized—we are a relatively flat organization from the size that we are. So we try to push down a lot of the decision to the squad level.

(Nick at 00:16:41) And squad really is like five, six people. So you have the leadership of that squad making some decisions for themselves that they can defend. They become accustomed to it. They are respectful of working with their peers. That allows them over time to either decide to move on or to aspire at the next level and potentially lead multiple squads, or they decide that they like leading the technical part of it, but they really want to stay on the technical side, and we give them a path to try to grow and going up toward the principal engineering type of path or an architect type of path if they have that kind of an aptitude.

(Nick at 00:17:21) Right? So that we don't constrain them to have to be people leaders from a human relations perspective. Right? We put them in leadership from a technical perspective, and then we give them the opportunity to go either on either side. And we push down the decision making so that they feel increasingly more, you know, the right opportunity to make the decision.

(Nick at 00:17:41) Then if you do that, the people respect that you're doing the right thing. There will be errors along the way, and there will be people dissatisfied along the way all the time. But by and large, majority of the people know that you're not hiding anything, that everything is in the clear, that they're part of the process of the decision, and that they're part of the process of moving it in the direction through the right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:04) I love it. I like, Nick, you got a fan. I'm a fan.

(Nick at 00:18:08) Thanks. Thanks. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:09) And you guys, XO Group, it looks like you've acquired a couple companies as well. Right?

(Nick at 00:18:14) Yes. Yes. We made a few acquisitions. We acquired Gigmasters a few years back, I think in 2015, which is essentially a marketplace to hire talent for events, to celebrate variety of events. Right?

(Nick at 00:18:32) So you can hire as much as you can hire bands for your birthday party as maybe your daughter's.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:40) Years old.

(Nick at 00:18:40) You need a balloon? You need a balloonist? Call up. You need a clown?

(Nick at 00:18:48) Gigmasters can get you a clown. You need a clown in leather chaps, they'll get you a clown in leather. Whatever you want.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:56) That's amazing.

(Nick at 00:18:56) Gigmasters is the place for you. So we acquired Gigmasters. It's really an excellent member of our family. And we also acquired TwoBlightLights. We also acquired the How He Asked other brands to complement our flagship product, you know, The Knot. I hope you used it when you were in there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:19) You know, I did. If you look me up, I did definitely use The Knot.

(Nick at 00:19:23) Okay. I'm gonna look you up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:24) You should. Yeah.

(Nick at 00:19:25) I should have looked you up. I should have looked you up before. Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:28) So how long have you been at XO Group?

(Nick at 00:19:31) Just over ten years, actually. I joined XO Group in February 2008. Yeah. And XO Group at the time was called The Knot. The official name of the company was The Knot.

(Nick at 00:19:42) It was founded that way. And we became XO Group a few years after when we decided to take on the corporate name because we had introduced at the time, over the course of the years, The Nest and The Bump. And we also had Wedding Channel. So we had a number of, it probably seemed like using just the name The Knot was too restrictive. We needed something that was all encompassing.

(Nick at 00:20:05) And as we were moving from NASDAQ to New York Stock Exchange, somebody cleverly realized that the X-O, X-O, four letters were not taken yet. And so we grabbed for them, and we became XO Group. And so that's what happened. So now we are XO Group, and we're the parent company of The Knot and The Nest and The Bump and Gigmasters, and now We Asked Them and TwoBlightLights. And Wedding Channel is no longer with us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:31) And then so you have lots of engineering. You have lots of people. How many people in technology across the whole organization?

(Nick at 00:20:40) We have, I would say, about 330 to 350 people. I'm not sure I would call 100% of them technology, but 90% of them technology. We have a few people that are really dedicated to our data cleansing process, data augmentation. Right? That do a lot of the tagging of data, the cleansing of the information about, you know, whatever the local—

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:09) Data planning. Whatever data we're dealing with. It's a lot—

(Nick at 00:21:11) It's a lot of work. You know the story.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:13) It's a lot of work, and you're always scratching your head, making sure it makes sense.

(Nick at 00:21:18) Yes. And it has to make sense to allow everything else to make sense. So we are, as an organization, we are essentially almost fifty-fifty split between United States and China.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:29) Oh, really?

(Nick at 00:21:29) And in United States, we're almost fifty-fifty split between New York and Austin, Texas. That's really it. So our technology organization split across those three. There is a city in China called Guangzhou.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:45) Yeah.

(Nick at 00:21:45) Which is just below, a couple hours from Hong Kong. New York City and Austin, Texas. Yeah. That's our organization.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:53) Yeah. My sister just came back, just moved back from China. She was living in Shenzhen for five years.

(Nick at 00:21:59) Guangzhou is very close to Shenzhen. Yeah. Just another half hour.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:03) Very, very cool area. Very interesting language. I just was completely fascinated when she was explaining it. So what are you right now most excited about every day getting up and going to work? What's the thing that's coming that you're really pumped about that you can talk about?

(Nick at 00:22:21) That I can talk about. Well, I mean, the biggest thing for us is our expansion of our marketplace. Right? We are, you know, we have become a marketplace. We went from being a media company to a marketplace.

(Nick at 00:22:32) There is a significant transformation because what keeps us going every day is the excitement of increasingly making the tools that we are delivering to our couples and to our vendors the best tools possible to allow them to execute this very complicated event called the wedding. Right? Very complicated and very expensive for many, for most people. And so we are obsessed with delivering the perfect tools that really make that process as simple as possible, as uniform as possible, both for the bride and the groom. And to a great extent also for the vendors so they can present themselves and their services in the right way to the right couples for the right event.

(Nick at 00:23:25) Right? We're trying to increasingly make the process simpler, be as intelligent as possible, know a lot about what they really want, know a lot about what our vendors offer. When I say vendors, I'm talking about the venue, the photographer, the cake maker, and the florist, et cetera, et cetera, which there are tens of hundreds of thousands in reality. Right? And so we have a huge opportunity on the upside because as of today, we are obviously the largest provider of the services, but we really only have about 30,000 paying clients, 30,000.

(Nick at 00:24:06) So there is an opportunity for 300,000 of them in our ecosystem now, and there is an even bigger opportunity that will extend it to 400 or 500,000. So for us, the excitement is in continuing to build the marketplace or continuing to make sure that all the data about all these vendors is accurate so that when we actually try to match the couple in the planning process to the vendor, we're delivering the right people, the right opportunity, the right budget, the right style, in the right location, with the right number of resources. Everything. So we capture a lot of information that they give us voluntarily. We help them define their style through our inspiration and our content and our knowledge and our know-how. And we employ a lot of techniques at the back end. We have a dedicated data science team only focused in actually personalizing our delivery and trying to make the perfect recommendations.

(Nick at 00:25:07) So we're continuously improving our algorithms and feeding it with data that they give us and event data that we capture as a result of observing them navigating our site and looking and liking and disliking so that we progressively, you know, be more refined in what we actually provide to them. And that's all throughout the process. Ultimately, we want them to communicate with the vendor to book the event and to move on to the next thing and try to fill in all of the activities that need to take place over that weekend or that day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:43) When I was about 16, and I'm in my early thirties now, so this was a while ago, I was looking to make some money online, and I had a strong history. I started programming at eight, so I had a really strong skill set in engineering because my father was an engineer, he taught me. So I started scanning this website that was people listing their digital businesses for sale that they were just uninterested in anymore. It was costing too much work. I found this girl and she had divorcePapers.com.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:15) And she put in there that she was selling it because she had grown it to like 30, 45 people. And they were all like at-home moms working remotely. And this was, you know, 20 years ago. And they would just get the request from a form, submit a payment, and then they would just manually type in the divorce papers for them. And they were just different based on each state.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:35) So they would literally just copy it from one form, put in the other. And so I found her and she had, you know, I think it was like $75,000 a month in cash flow. And I said, I will build, I will write a program, and we went state by state, and I automated it out.

(Nick at 00:26:52) To auto-populate—

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:55) Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. So now she kept her business, and she ended up keeping like two or three people of the 45 on. And then she had a business that she could now maintain because she was going crazy with the logistics of just managing the people.

(Nick at 00:27:12) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:12) And that was one of my, that's just what I was doing because I wanted to, I don't know. I just seek out opportunity and execute. Right? It's just naturally a driven person.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:22) So—

(Nick at 00:27:23) It's always fulfilling to solve a problem no matter what problem it is. When it's a problem and you actually say, well, I think I have a solution for that and actually do it, then it's really very rewarding. We feel the same way here. That's where every day we're trying to solve a problem that we think that couples are, the couple is at the center of everything that we do. Right?

(Nick at 00:27:42) We're trying to provide the right experience for them. So we're obsessed by that. And so what makes it, but we're not discounting the fact that ultimately, the paying vendors are the ones that need to be presented. But we think we're doing a service to them also if we're actually delivering the right couples to them. There's no point for us to deliver to them a couple that either can't afford them or is not the right style for them or is just wasting everybody's time.

(Nick at 00:28:10) So our goal is to make the planning process easy but also accurate. Right? So we're doing it both for the vendors to make sure that they really are connecting to the people that are right for their services, whatever their services are. And that the couples can actually put something behind and say, okay, I did this. I'm moving on to the next thing, and we're guiding them through the process all the time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:37) And it's beneficial for, you know, us, the couples, because from our perspective, you know, we want to find the services as quickly as possible that match our needs given our budgets, given our lifestyles, and everything. So if you're making it easier for the couples to engage the services in order to, you know, get married and go through the whole process, then you're providing benefits to everybody involved, and then that's just how you become the XO Group. You know?

(Nick at 00:29:03) Yeah. That's it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:05) So quick leadership, engineering, technology question that came in from an individual I was speaking to yesterday. He wanted me to ask the next great technology leader I spoke to, which is you. Any tips or advice when hiring new people onto your engineering team? Like, what do you look for when you're bringing new people on?

(Nick at 00:29:25) That's a good question. First of all, you know that it's extremely challenging to find people. Right? Particularly in the markets that I'm in, which are hotbeds and hubs for technologies. In general, we like people that, we've been, I would say that we are hiring people at all levels.

(Nick at 00:29:46) Right? We used to prefer to hire people that already had a number of years' experience, and we tend to predominantly go after people that already have a number of years' experience. But we have increasingly started hiring and filling our pipeline also with, we call them associate engineers, people that usually tend to spend one or two internships with us and show promise and skill and ability to work in the teams in an agile type of environment, that, you know, we're very rigorous about our environment. Right? We're very, small squads that have this degree of ownership.

(Nick at 00:30:27) We do a lot of pair programming. Everything is TDD, continuous deployments. We would like everybody to really have that kind of skill set. We don't do as much of, okay, there's a front end versus back end. We would like a lot of our people to be full stack type of engineers as much as possible. We've also hired, I must say, from the boot camps.

(Nick at 00:30:52) Right? You know, I'd like in general to have people with the CS type of background because I think it's easier for them to actually work on more, you know, to expand the complicated. But we have given opportunities for people who came in. We've had some very good outcomes from some of them. But as you get to, if you're looking at engineers that really do understand the full stack and who understand a lot of the back end, they should do the front end.

(Nick at 00:31:21) Usually, people that have a technical background tend to have a little bit easier time, right, you know, addressing some of the underpinnings of the, but, again, we are, we provide an environment, an onboarding environment at all levels. People come in, we put them in the squad. We give them all the tools. People pair with them. People mentor them.

(Nick at 00:31:46) You know, we usually assign somebody. But the process of interviewing is relatively extensive. Right? We do, we send people through multiple interview processes and do solve some problems, pair program with one or two of our lead engineers depending on the level. Right?

(Nick at 00:32:04) We're not gonna stress out an associate about it, but we're gonna stress out the senior engineer if they consider themselves a senior engineer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:12) Yeah. Let's do it. Challenge time.

(Nick at 00:32:14) And so, I don't know if I answered your question. So if I'm off the mark, correct—

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:19) Just give me like one or two things, qualities in humans that you're looking for when you pull people onto your team.

(Nick at 00:32:25) Quality in humans, I am interested in people that are respectful, but they have an opinion, that are willing to debate. These are part of our core values. We expect everybody to debate, to ask the questions, why am I doing this, to challenge when challenges are warranted, but also to, at some point, agree or disagree but commit. Or if you cannot disagree and commit because you're so vehemently against the idea, then you have to escalate. But I want people to try to resolve as much as possible within their teams.

(Nick at 00:33:01) And therefore, what I will not tolerate is a lack of respect for your peers, for your colleagues in general, whether they are downstream from you or upstream from you. That I will not tolerate in the environment. People have to be respectful of all levels and feel entitled to an opinion about the product, about the evolution of the product. And then they have the option to actually disagree. And even honestly, I'll go as far as saying that if people cannot work in a squad, but they really do not believe in that, they are perfectly entitled to go up to their management, to come up to me and say, "I want to change squads because I don't feel an affinity. I don't feel affinity to this particular product. I feel an affinity to the other product." Great. Let's talk about how you move to the other team.

(Nick at 00:33:47) As long as there is always that open communication and that positive intent. Right? Positive intent.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:03) Right. And that you're able to be a great leader and dish out what's driving them and then make sure that they're placed accordingly.

(Nick at 00:34:14) We do a lot to make sure that people—you know, because people have different personalities and people are shy and this and that—so we do a lot of things to try to bring people out of their shell if they are people who tend to be in their shells. You know, some engineers tend to be. Not you, but some people tend to be in their shells. So we get them out. You know, we do meetups. We do hackathons. We do Tech Tuesdays. We do all kinds of things for people to go up there and talk about what they're doing and why they're doing it that way and debate it a little bit. And some groups are small, some groups are bigger, some people get increasingly more comfortable. Right?

(Nick at 00:34:47) As long as it's done constructively and respectfully, everybody benefits from it because there's always something you can learn.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:54) I've got two more questions for you. Is that alright?

(Nick at 00:34:58) Yeah, yeah, sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:00) Okay. If you were to take your day and split it into a pie chart into three different pieces, what are the three biggest pieces of how you spend your day?

(Nick at 00:35:07) I would say product for sure—the product engineering part, the organization itself, the continuous evolution and fine tuning of the organization. And a third of my time is always dedicated to the business systems, because what we didn't say here is that we are a publicly listed company. So from that perspective, we have all the challenges of the large corporations, but we're a small company. Right? So, and when I mean challenges, I mean just the complexity of the underlying systems for accounting, for revenue recognition, and for all those things that are necessary to close your books every month and to do it accurately so that you don't get into trouble.

(Nick at 00:35:49) So I would say, in general, when I talk about organization, a large part of my organizational time is dedicated to the engineering organization, to the continuous evolution of the organization, the delivery of the products. Right? So we're always looking at making sure that the squads are resourced right, that we're attracting the right talent, that we're moving people to reenergize them so that they don't feel stale and actually leave us. So we do everything fast. So a lot of my time is dedicated to that.

(Nick at 00:36:24) I would probably say that I spend 65% of my time collectively on the product, the engineering, and about 30 to 35% on the business systems, on what you would consider IT or what people call IT. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:41) Excellent. And then, who's your favorite leader that you learned from?

(Nick at 00:36:46) I feel like I've learned something from everybody I worked with. So it's difficult to pick one. I would say I like my current leader. I like the passion that he puts into driving the business forward. So I work probably—and we have a similar type of band. Right? We're very driven. We're very focused. We're very passionate about what we do. Right?

(Nick at 00:37:19) So that—and I usually always gravitated toward working for people that had a great degree of passion. You're trying to make me say, name like a person, like a famous person, you mean?

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:34) Yeah, like did you like a—

(Nick at 00:37:36) Like, well, I like—you know, I do like—as much the persona, but I certainly like a lot of the principles of Steve Jobs. Yeah. Right. I mean, there's a lot of things I didn't like in that person, but some of the principles of how to approach, the passion that he displayed in going after a dream that he believed. Right? And taking no prisoners along the way, meaning making the decisions. Sometimes making the decisions almost autocratically, meaning, "I know this is what is needed" rather than saying, "Let's test and let's take the pulse and let's see how people feel about whether this is better than that." Right? That, to some extent, I think you need a little bit of that when you're trying to break a barrier.

(Nick at 00:38:36) You need a little bit of certainly the passion, but also the conviction that what you believe, you know, is something that is necessary and actually prove it. You know? Of course, you don't try to do anything that hurts anybody else in the process. Right. If you're the master of something that you can introduce and you can put your resources behind it, I welcome people that are always pushing the envelope. Right? Because, you know, otherwise things are too incremental. And there is a need for incremental things to take place in life, right, to occur—well, there's balance—for evolution. But every once in a while, you need somebody that is looking at it from outside the box. You know, "I really want to do something different, and I think people will actually prompt it." So that, from that perspective, I thought he was a visionary that—some of the things that he did, I really—

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:34) No, I very much enjoyed so much of his work. I've got a piece of it, you know, here right now.

(Nick at 00:39:39) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:40) You got the watch of it.

(Nick at 00:39:40) I have it in my ears.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:41) Better than that. You have it in your ears, on your arm. Right?

(Nick at 00:39:45) On my arm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:46) Yeah. If you were able to go back and talk to yourself at Bell Labs—right, you go back in a time machine, talk to yourself at Bell Labs—what's the one piece of advice that you would give your previous self?

(Nick at 00:40:00) One piece of advice. Why Bell Labs? I guess—why are you asking me specifically about that time or not?

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:09) Because you mentioned—I was listening to you, and you had about—I think you said you had about ten years of experience. You were a little bit into your career by the time you were at Bell Labs. Right? And because, you know, I would say a large portion of our audience is into their career, and they would benefit from the advice you would give your younger self, you know, a decade into your career.

(Nick at 00:40:33) Well, okay. So my answer to you—and the honest answer is—I would have been a little bit more thoughtful about my career aspiration rather than just, you know, "I like it. This is cool." Sometimes you feel when you're young, you know, and I was relatively young at the time—because I started very young. Right? That, you know, I always assumed I could do anything. So it didn't matter. Right?

(Nick at 00:41:01) So I didn't plot my—the natural path for me based on the work that I was doing, stuff that I published, the things that I built would have been for me to go from Bell Labs to Silicon Valley. I remember the founder of Cisco at the time—one of the technical founders—Googled one of the protocols that I had written, right, and tested it out and called me out. And said, "Hey, I think this is an interesting thing. Should we do something here?"

(Nick at 00:41:27) So I could have gone there. Right? And, or I could—you know, I'm talking about Cisco. Wellfleet was the other router, because at the time I was doing a lot of the protocols for routing. Right? Routing protocols. And so if I had been more, you know, dogmatic about what should my career path be, and given what I've done, my natural next step should have been that. Right? And maybe my life would have evolved differently and maybe I would be wealthier or more as wealthy. Who knows? Right? But at the time, I just followed what, you know, what was a little bit more—it seemed like this person was interested. It was the opportunity of doing something that I had never done before, which was something for—to really watch how people reacted to it rather than something in the LAN. And so I chose to go there instead. I don't know. But I, you know, I don't know that I regret it, but I'm saying I probably, you know, could say be a little bit more, you know—

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:27) Yeah. You made a decision. You made it work. Right? You got north. You took a step north. You corrected. You figured, and you've come out.

(Nick at 00:42:35) Look at—

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:35) Look at you, man. You're like a senior leader at one of the greatest technology companies on this planet. Come on now.

(Nick at 00:42:41) Thank you very much. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:43) And you did it all, and you're like stylish.

(Nick at 00:42:45) Slightly hyperbolic, but that's very nice of you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:47) I will make it as hyperbolic as I possibly—oh, thank you so much, Nick. We did it. We made a podcast.

(Nick at 00:42:57) Do you believe? I've never done one before.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:59) Really? Nice. Yeah. It's, you know, we got a lot of technologists, and they listen in, and then they take your advice and it's just so valuable to them. And I got a lot of great questions. You gave some amazing advice, very original advice, and I just appreciate your time. And the next time I'm in New York, I'm gonna stop by and shake your hand, say hello.

(Nick at 00:43:21) That would be great. I'd love to see you. Come and see our premises. Yes. Do you like them?

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:27) Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Thank you again, Nick.

(Nick at 00:43:30) Hey. Thanks a lot. Good talking to you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:31) See you.

(Nick at 00:43:32) Bye.