Mark Goldin - CTO at Cornerstone OnDemand

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(Joel Beasley at 00:00:31) Visit us and ask us all the questions that you have at leaderbits.io. Today, we are talking to Mark Goldin, the CTO of Cornerstone OnDemand, and we discuss communicating your value effectively, bouncing ideas off of your peers, and optimizing your people by finding out what makes them tick. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:09) So were you a leader at Cornerstone when they went public?

(Mark Goldin at 00:01:13) Yes, I was. I was CTO. I've been here for eight years.

(Mark Goldin at 00:01:17) I've been a CTO for twenty-plus years, so not my first CTO gig. But I would have to say, honestly, the most fun, most adventurous that I've had. So it's been good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:25) First time going public as CTO?

(Mark Goldin at 00:01:28) No, a third, I believe.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:32) That's amazing. Well, each one was a—

(Mark Goldin at 00:01:36) Little bit—each one was better than the last, and each one was a little bit different. So not your traditional taking a company public. The first one did go public, company called Elite, but it was sort of a reverse takeover of a parent organization that got us listed. So we went public, but it was in a bit of an unconventional way.

(Mark Goldin at 00:01:55) Green Dot went public actually after I left, but I was still a shareholder, so that was good, but I wasn't there. And then Cornerstone finally was the traditional going public while working there. So there you go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:09) Well, that's exciting. How did you get involved with Cornerstone?

(Mark Goldin at 00:02:14) I have a favorite recruiter. Maybe I'll mention his name. Yeah, I'll mention his name. Name is Jim Jonasson.

(Mark Goldin at 00:02:20) And he has placed me twice successfully. Once at Green Dot and once at Cornerstone. And I got a call from him one day and he said, "Cornerstone would like to talk to you," which was quite a funny coincidence because in researching places where I wanted to be, Cornerstone came up. So I thought, well, that's good happenstance. And he connected the dots and we took it from there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:41) It stood out to you as a place you wanted to be. Are you a lifelong learner? Is that what stood out to you? Or—

(Mark Goldin at 00:02:47) I would like to say, "My life," but that's not the reason. I was interested in Cornerstone because right about the time I was working at Elite, which was a traditional software company established late eighties here in Los Angeles. They imported me from England where I was working previously as their first head of technology. And we were developing on-premise systems because it was, you know, back in the early nineties when I joined, on-premise systems for law firms and large professional services firms: time and billing systems, practice management systems. Company grew very quickly, became very, very successful.

(Mark Goldin at 00:03:19) And towards the end of the nineties, the dot-com era was at its peak, and I got very interested in building a software-as-a-service version of Elite. The name SaaS wasn't invented, but that's essentially what we did. We took a team, took a crack team, and we built a brand new product from scratch, Internet hosted. It was very, very ahead of its time, actually. Probably it was too ahead of its time, but it was exactly what you would think of SaaS today.

(Mark Goldin at 00:03:47) Zero touch, enter credit card, and just start going—really software in the cloud. And that was exactly the same time Adam Miller was building the Cornerstone business. I was very aware of him. I was aware that Cornerstone had been a SaaS pioneer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:00) There's Salesforce or Cornerstone. Early pioneers. I actually just read yesterday that Benioff, one of the co-founders of Salesforce, and his wife, they bought Time.

(Mark Goldin at 00:04:12) I know. Amazing. You heard about that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:14) That's crazy.

(Mark Goldin at 00:04:16) Yes, that's very, very interesting. That led me a little bit of research to see who owns the other major publications, which tech titans.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:22) You have Bezos with—

(Mark Goldin at 00:04:24) The Washington Post. And Laurene Powell Jobs' widow owns the Atlantic. Really?

(Mark Goldin at 00:04:32) Yes, majority stake in the Atlantic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:34) Their design is always super classy. I don't particularly read it, but whenever I see their covers or some of their articles, I'm like, "Oh, that's such a good design."

(Mark Goldin at 00:04:44) Well, let me ask you. So, you know, Benioff is a very colorful character. He's larger than life. He's a very strong personality. And he's purchased Time magazine, and he says he's going to be completely hands off. What do you think of that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:55) I think if you know any high achievers like that and doing a purchase that big, that he's going to be hands off, I just don't—I mean, he's not going to be writing the articles.

(Mark Goldin at 00:05:07) Well, maybe, maybe not.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:09) Who knows? I don't know. There's always that undertone of they could be hands off but also have creative input. Right? So I don't think he will be nonexistent because why would you not? If you buy a $190 million or $180 million toy, you're going to play with it a little bit.

(Mark Goldin at 00:05:29) You know, we're used to such big numbers these days. It seems like not a lot of money for something so iconic as Time magazine also.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:35) That was my initial reaction. Time magazine, the whole brand. Right? Because they have other things other than just the magazine. So I'm curious, what does your day look like at Cornerstone? If you were to divide your day into a pie chart, what would the three big areas look like?

(Mark Goldin at 00:05:54) I'm not sure there's a typical day, but I can tell you the things that I get engaged in. I spend a lot of time with people, obviously. I don't like to just sit at my desk. So I walk around to see how the team's doing, check in with various people. So that's chatting with my team and with other colleagues to see what's going on, see if I can help with anything, see what crisis there are, get some questions answered that I'm curious about.

(Mark Goldin at 00:06:12) So I'll spend some time just doing that, roaming the corridors if you like. There's always a part of my day which is dedicated to clients. We have a lot of very large clients. Large clients are demanding, as they should be. So I'm normally dealing with a client escalation or a client issue, maybe a contract renewal that involves a large client and needs some special attention or some special sort of service.

(Mark Goldin at 00:06:34) There's usually a design opportunity. We're architecting some new product, some new opportunities, something we want to focus on. So I like to spend some time in those discussions as well, making sure the team's on the right track, with the right people, they're thinking about the right things. That's always very interesting to me. And then there's the usual run of sort of regularly scheduled things. For example, one thing I do three times a week, so you can be guaranteed to find me at least an hour on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays in our what we call our PRT meeting.

(Mark Goldin at 00:07:03) PRT stands for performance and reliability team. So we're very into the metrics of the system and how it's performing in production, what's going on, any issues, any optimizations that we need to do. So spending a lot of time there. I don't really have to go to that, but I go for two reasons. One is to kind of show the team that reliability is really important.

(Mark Goldin at 00:07:21) The other reason I go is there's so much input coming into that room. It's truly fantastic. It's a very quick way of sort of continually drinking from the fire hose and being in touch with a lot of the things that are going on. I spend a fair amount of time on email, like a lot of other people do these days. And I spend a fair amount of time reading, you know, what's new in technology, what's out there, what are the new innovations, who's bought whom, things like that.

(Mark Goldin at 00:07:45) And just sort of keeping up with what's going on in the world in general. So that's probably a typical day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:51) What are you most interested in right now as far as emerging technologies, things you've been reading lately, other than the Time thing?

(Mark Goldin at 00:07:59) Well, where do I start? There's obviously a lot. So we're engaged in a big move to AWS. The public cloud space, of course, is particularly fascinating. Staying on top of the competitive nature of AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud primarily.

(Mark Goldin at 00:08:17) It's a bit of an arms race. They're leapfrogging one another periodically, so it's important to us to stay on top of that and make sure that we made the right decision and that we're optimizing our move to AWS in the best way possible. So I do a fair bit of reading there and then the best patterns for migrating applications into the cloud. So we have a traditional monolithic application. We've been in progress with a microservices rearchitecture for some time.

(Mark Goldin at 00:08:41) We're moving that into AWS. And so understanding the best way to do that, the most cost-effective way to handle that. Cost becomes a very big topic when you're moving into AWS because you're moving from a sort of fixed price data center model to a consumption-based model. It's a very good thing, but it's also very challenging. And so understanding the best way to do that, track that, monitor that—that consumes a lot of working time.

(Mark Goldin at 00:09:05) It's really important. I'm also really interested in anything to do with team dynamics, building teams, optimizing teams, managing teams, the people side of what we do. You know, you've got the technology piece—that's very, very key. Talked a little bit about that: AWS, public cloud. You've got the people piece: How do you optimize your teams? How do you motivate? How do you organize? How do you get the most out of people?

(Mark Goldin at 00:09:24) How do you allow them to do their best work at your company? That's a very big deal. Then, of course, there's the third piece on that traditional three-legged stool, which would be the process piece. You know, what processes are we following? We have a large team.

(Mark Goldin at 00:09:37) We have 600 people worldwide. How do we keep everybody orchestrated? How do we keep our projects on track? Are we doing the best job at agile development that we can be? And so we spend a lot of time looking at process, too, and process optimization, whether it's doing a better job on the planning front, doing a better job within the sprint, doing a better job automating our deployments. The process is really tied to the technology.

(Mark Goldin at 00:10:02) There are many ways to go there. So I spend a lot of time on those topics also.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:06) Do you bounce ideas off peers or others that have teams similar size to you?

(Mark Goldin at 00:10:12) Absolutely, as much as possible. I belong to a few groups. I just have a number of informal relationships and opportunities to do that. We've been invited to various companies in the Bay Area through venture capital connections.

(Mark Goldin at 00:10:23) Very interesting to go and hear and see what other people are doing. I have some friends who happen to have the same job as me, which is useful. So there are opportunities to bounce ideas off there. And then my team as well. My team is also out there, and so we kind of collectively share information about what we're learning.

(Mark Goldin at 00:10:40) We like to exchange articles. We like to exchange knowledge that we picked up outside of Cornerstone. It's very important. Frankly, could probably do more of it. I don't know how much is too much, but we could do more than we're doing.

(Mark Goldin at 00:10:51) I think it can be very dangerous to become too insular and not be aware enough of what's going on in the outside world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:59) No, it sounds smart, though. That's what all the successful companies are doing. Right? Sharing knowledge, engaging with your peers, and figuring out what works.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:09) And then, of course, testing stuff, like testing in small teams different ways of working prior to deploying it throughout the entire organization.

(Mark Goldin at 00:11:17) We're always testing. We're a pretty self-critical organization. We never really get too complacent, and that's across the board. Actually, who's very good at learning from the outside is our CEO, Adam Miller. He's our CEO and founder, and I've actually learned a lot from his example.

(Mark Goldin at 00:11:31) He spends a lot of time talking to other companies, spends a lot of time networking, and he often brings back best practices that we didn't think about or haven't heard of. And that's true sort of in a general corporate sense, but it's also true in technology. He's fed me a number of ideas about things that we've actually been able to adopt that have made sense for us. Yeah, we agree.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:50) What are some of the recurring truths? You've been a CTO quite a while. You're very experienced. You're very articulate and knowledgeable, and you're saying and doing all the right things. So what are some of the recurring truths that have come up over the past twenty years in your role as CTO?

(Mark Goldin at 00:12:07) Wow. That's a really good question. Recurring truths. Okay. I'll tell you one, which maybe is very obvious, but there's a tremendous dependency on people.

(Mark Goldin at 00:12:19) I could be misconstrued actually if I say this the wrong way, but as I joke, I sometimes say to my team, "This would be a great business if we could automate everything we do," because of people dependencies. If you could just get people out of the equation, everything would be perfect. Of course, we don't really mean it like that because it's all about people. You can't do this job unless you have great people.

(Mark Goldin at 00:12:41) But it's a very people-dependent business, much more so than people think. People are not automatons. People have brains, and you're hiring people for their brains and for their independence. So a considerable amount of one's day really goes into, I think, optimizing your people beyond anything. It's how to help people do their best work, like I said earlier.

(Mark Goldin at 00:13:01) What makes people tick? What motivates them? How to make sure you can retain them? We've embarked on a number of very large technology initiatives to move the business forward, to move faster, to be successful, you know, to help the bottom line. But a big part of why we do it actually is to keep our people engaged, and that's not unimportant.

(Mark Goldin at 00:13:19) I can't say it's the primary driver because really the business need is usually the primary driver, but it's definitely high up there in terms of a very secondary driver. Bringing in new technologies, giving people things to play with, new learning opportunities, focusing on a learning culture—that's an incredibly important way to keep people retained. Assuming you're paying well and the benefits are good, you've got to go beyond that. It's got to be a completely learning-oriented environment or you just won't retain the best people nowadays.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:47) Yeah. That's really interesting. When you said that, an image flashed through my head. I have a young daughter, and she had a playroom, and recently she had her first birthday. Well, you could tell that she had very few objects in her room, not a whole lot of toys, but you could tell that she had become familiar with all her toys and would get a little bit bored and then begin to explore outside. And then we got her the new toys.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:15) She just won't leave her room now because she had her party and she's got all the new toys. And when you were discussing that concept of retaining talent by introducing different things into the environment, one of them being new tools or new technologies—

(Mark Goldin at 00:14:27) New toys?

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:28) That really resonated with me because I've never heard that or read that for a retention strategy, but it's what works. It's what does keep people around. So we're learning some new things. What's this AWS transition? What's Kubernetes? Figure out what we're going to be doing and how we're going to grow the business and be resilient for the future. And you're right, because some of the brightest people, some of the best talent, they're always needing to be stimulated in some new way or solving some big problem. And that's new toys, new technologies.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:07) I like it.

(Mark Goldin at 00:15:08) Yep. You've got to keep the toy box full. That's a good analogy. The other thing that I think, just thinking about other things that are always true, I think the other thing is people would like to live in a stress-free, problem-free environment, but you're always going to have challenges. You're always going to have problems. You're always going to have many outages, hopefully not major ones. You're always going to have challenges. You're always going to have vulnerabilities that crop up or customers that complain. And you just have to learn how to deal with that and be a little bit thick-skinned, but also responsive in the right way. You do the best you can, but you're always going to have issues. If you expect an issue-free day or an issue-free environment, it's just not going to happen.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:44) Yeah, I fully agree. So you're very bright. I'm very curious to know, when the people that you work with start exhibiting certain behaviors and you pick up on them, like that person's a future leader or that individual's showing signs of huge promise, I see they're going to go really far. What are those indicators?

(Mark Goldin at 00:16:08) Communication is really important. You know, you look for people that can do good work, that can solve problems, and that's a key part of it. But those that can't communicate what they're doing or communicate their strategy or interact effectively with their teammates aren't really going to go that far. So we look for people that stand out from a communication standpoint. And that doesn't mean you have to give public speeches. Sharing what you've done in an effective way. Sometimes it can even be in writing. People that share information, they want to get people together, they want to share a solution, put something out there, even communicate a problem, even ask a question in an intelligent way. People that can show some leadership potential through good communication. Those are some of the things that we look for as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:54) Those are great items, and they all take time to really refine. Going through the process of writing a book, that was a big leap for me in communication because you have it in your head. Some people are great at speaking, but then when you get it down into writing, that's a whole different medium.

(Mark Goldin at 00:17:14) Completely. That's a very nice achievement. Congratulations on publishing a book. I'd like to do that one day. I haven't done it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:19) Oh no, you need the knowledge inside of you, my friend. The book needs to happen.

(Mark Goldin at 00:17:25) And then the other thing I think that we look for is people that really, really care. That also comes across. You know, the guy that stays late because they want to get the job done, that kind of thing, or the person that really cares passionately about completing something. Doesn't even require you to stay late necessarily. It's just, I really want to get this thing done. It's like a sense of completion and execution. Really caring about the client, caring about the solution. When you talk to them, you can see they're really engaged in the problem. That's another thing that I think we look for. We're very fortunate at Cornerstone. When I joined, it's not even that long ago. It was 2010. But the company was much smaller. We had a very unsophisticated HR department. Today, we call HR talent. It's a fancier name. We have a chief talent officer who's also a CTO, if you think about it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:14) CTO by title.

(Mark Goldin at 00:18:15) It's quite funny. We're very, very different people, of course, but we can joke about that. So our chief talent officer is the person that we call our HR director or VP of HR, but the function is now very, very sophisticated. So when I joined, we didn't have any centralized leadership development function. We didn't have dedicated training functions or anything like that. But today, it's a much more sophisticated organization. It's a large team, and there's a good central resource I can tap. So I can invest in my people much more easily than I could do a few years ago. There's a certain amount we do ourselves, obviously, with mentoring and just through team meetings and encouragement and so on. But we also have this great centralized leadership development function that's now quite formalized. And if we see people with potential, we can put them in that program. We can focus on them. We can develop them, and we can help create our future leaders.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:03) Oh, that's awesome.

(Mark Goldin at 00:19:04) Just doing a better job in tech specifically, improving new hire onboarding and really focusing on building some of these next generation leaders. So because we're a learning organization, this is really important to us, and I think we focus on it maybe more so than some other companies.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:20) That's really interesting. I totally agree with that. I'm curious to know, so you have this function, you notice some people you want to develop, and then what does the program look like?

(Mark Goldin at 00:19:33) It's a good question. We have a number of off-the-shelf programs that we deliver. We have one that we call critical communications. So we help people communicate clearly, which actually is good because, you know, I talked a few minutes ago about communication and how important that is. So we help people have these crucial conversations, I think we call it. I'm blanking on the name exactly. But it's a communications course on how to deal with people, how to resolve conflict, how to deal with challenging situations, how to be direct. At our large user conference earlier in this year, we brought in a speaker actually who's dedicated her life to writing about how to be direct and how to have these tough conversations with people. So conversations that really, really matter, conversations that have the most impact. So we help people to be direct and talk to that and be very focused and critical, not critical in a negative way, but be very direct about what your ask is and about what you're looking for. The other thing that we do is we have something called Motivating Achievement. It's a leadership program that we purchased off the shelf. We became certified in it, and we help our future leaders how to get the best out of their people in turn. So it's called Motivating Achievement. The whole company has been through that just about. I just did it myself recently. My entire team has been through it. And it's a very good way of learning more about yourself, what motivates you, what motivates other people, and how to take advantage of some of those skills. It goes into things like goal setting, team building, conflict resolution, and so on and so forth. And there's more. That's what I can think of right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:09) You don't have to tell me the whole thing. I'm just curious. You just went through one of these. So are these programs, like, you just go into it for six weeks and it's like you complete it? Is that how they work?

(Mark Goldin at 00:21:20) No. It's actually, first of all, we don't have six weeks to send somebody off to a program.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:24) Right.

(Mark Goldin at 00:21:26) We engage in something I would call micro-learning. Have you heard the term?

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:30) Yes, I have.

(Mark Goldin at 00:21:32) So micro-learning is kind of a buzzword. There are a lot of companies that have dedicated themselves to micro-learning. Very short videos that you can take. So I don't necessarily mean, oh, I'm going to teach you something for thirty seconds, although we do that too. But the MA program, for example, is a three-day off-site course. You go off-site for three days. But then you come back and you have regular check-ins with our leadership development team to see how you're doing. There's assessments that you do on a regular basis of your team to see how you're doing as a team and so on and so forth. So it's kind of a constant learning and a constant refocusing on the program. It's not just something you do once and then move on. We're also doing internally a micro-learning-based MBA program, which is cool. It's an in-house MBA program. You won't be an MBA through it, but we're using existing MBAs at Cornerstone to teach courses in different aspects of things that you would learn on a formal executive MBA program using that micro-learning format. Short talks on things like strategy, on operations, on motivation, on finance, and so on and so forth. Our CEO actually likes to do a lot of this himself. I don't think he's doing the micro MBA thing, but we bring senior leaders together periodically and he'll teach a course in Cornerstone finance, for example, or Cornerstone growth or Cornerstone strategy. So it gives a really good chance to sort of connect with the business and understand more beyond what's just in front of them in their day-to-day jobs. And it doesn't matter which department you're in. Finance, technology, product support, product management, sales, you name it. Anybody could benefit from this stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:03) That's amazing. So you're 100% for the micro-learning.

(Mark Goldin at 00:23:07) I'm 100% for learning. I think there's many ways to learn. Micro-learning is one good way to do that. And because we're kind of a short attention span generation anyway, it makes sense. People want to incorporate learning into their day as opposed to necessarily carving out large chunks of time. I was concatenating amounts and chunks. Large chunks of time is difficult to do. So micro-learning helps.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:34) I fully agree. And what I found for myself as a learner was if I read a book and there's like twenty, thirty great things in it, but I don't try any of them, and then therefore they don't really move into long-term memory because I don't have experience with them. So I only need enough information to then go create experience with it.

(Mark Goldin at 00:23:52) Actionable information. Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:54) Yeah.

(Mark Goldin at 00:23:54) Yeah. If you think about it, you know, the pioneers for this sort of thing were the general public. Right? Years ago, you started to realize, hey, I could go to YouTube and find out how to change that air filter or diagnose my fridge or, you know, fix my amplifier or whatever. Very democratic, very easy to do. So at Cornerstone we've developed applications. You know, we're a company that does learning at our core, but we do many other things in the talent realm. We do performance management and succession planning and compensation planning with a large recruiting module with learning at the core. And one of the things that we offer is the ability to do user-generated content. So you're a manager, you're on-site someplace, and you can take a quick video to illustrate how to perform a task, upload that into the system, that becomes a course. Very democratic, very easy to do, very low touch, very low friction to getting something into production.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:51) That's awesome. And so the employees get to, you know, the team members of Cornerstone, they get to use their own system at work. Right?

(Mark Goldin at 00:25:00) We call it dog food. You may have heard the term.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:02) I've heard it, yes.

(Mark Goldin at 00:25:04) We actually call our implementation of Cornerstone dog food. And you can go into dog food, and you can look up your colleagues. You can look up your compensation information. You can see your HR dashboard. You can take a course. We have thousands of courses available to Cornerstone employees. Many of them are generated through machine learning. We make recommendations to people about the thing they might like to do. We run our performance review schedule annually or quarterly or monthly, however they're doing it, through the Cornerstone system and so on and so forth. We use as much of it as possible. Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:36) So do you, Cornerstone, make content or are you just the infrastructure for it?

(Mark Goldin at 00:25:40) That is also a really good question. So we were not a content company at all, really, until very recently. Up until a couple of years ago, content was a very small part of our business. We made the platform, and we allowed our clients to source content from wherever. So it's an open system. We follow open standards. Clients either develop their own content or purchase content off the shelf. But we realized we were leaving a lot of opportunity on the table and also that our clients really wanted us to provide content offerings. So now we're very much a content company. We're doing both software and content. Today, it's mostly through content partnerships. So we sell content in a very big way and it's very significant. We have curated content subscriptions, machine learning-based recommendations like I said. But we are starting to get into the content development business also, which is very exciting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:32) Okay, Amazon.

(Mark Goldin at 00:26:35) Why not copy Netflix, copy Amazon. At some point in the not too distant future, you'll see Cornerstone-developed content also. But we've got to differentiate. We can't just do another me-too course. But we're here in Hollywood or pretty close to Hollywood. You have a Hollywood, Florida as well, yes. So we have Hollywood here, right on our doorstep. So it makes sense for us. We're building a studio, and we've hired some people. And, you know, let's see what comes out of the Cornerstone Studio.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:02) That's really exciting. When does that hit?

(Mark Goldin at 00:27:04) I don't know exactly. I think sometime next year you'll see the first courses come out of Cornerstone. And it's always been a very fertile place. There's a lot of challenges and opportunities and a great learning culture. And I do want to add as well, you know, we have about 600 tech people worldwide. We are constantly looking for new people. So any of your listeners are interested in checking out Cornerstone in more detail, they should check out our career site online, csod.com/careers. We're hiring everywhere for all job functions, particularly in technology. And as everybody knows, maybe you do, maybe you don't, it's really an employee's market today. There's such a war for tech talent. And so we really have to work hard, and we do, to be an employer of choice so that we can meet the people that we want to keep and grow and retain through the Cornerstone life cycle.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:50) No, I love it. You know, that actually does happen. I've gotten emails from past guests that they've told me, hey, somebody heard me talking on the show, and I shared some story, and they resonated with it. And I ultimately hired them. They moved across the country, and now they're one of my top people. And I was like, that's amazing that that's happening.

(Mark Goldin at 00:28:10) That's a win-win, obviously, because we are a great place to work, and people can build a really great software career here. And we're always needing people. Always, always, always.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:19) Yeah. You've got a, that's, you know, that's one of the recurring concepts that's come up a lot recently is the always be recruiting idea. You know Asana?

(Mark Goldin at 00:28:31) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:32) Okay. So Prashant is the CTO at Asana, and they actually have a hashtag called ABR, and that's how they promote it internally. So they will recruit on their Uber ride.

(Mark Goldin at 00:28:46) Yeah, yeah. All right. Do you mind if I

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:50) No, he might come over because you guys are, well, you're really close. You're not in San Francisco, but you're down the road. I went and saw their offices too. I'm actually out in California every two or three months. There's so many guests that come on the show, I get to just fly out there and then hang out with everybody.

(Mark Golden at 00:29:10) Nice. Feel free to visit if you're in Los Angeles. We have cool offices too. We have, you know, lots of special features to keep people happy. We have a candy wall for those that want to spend more money at the dentist. We have a video arcade for those that want to waste their time doing that. So, one place to be. And honestly, we actually do believe in work-life balance. We don't just say it. We want people to have, the best way I can put it is, we want people to have fun at work. I mean, work is serious, and we do have to work hard. We do have to meet our commitments and satisfy our clients. But really, we want people to have as much fun as possible while they are doing that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:45) Yeah, and that's what life is. We're doing life, and we're all here together. It's like, let's just be professional, hit our metrics that we need to hit that show our productivity, the reason why we're here, the reason why we're able to be here. Because business ultimately provides value into the marketplace, which exchanges for capital, and then we get to grow the business if we're doing well. And so for as long as we're providing that value to the market and doing what we need to do, then there's, that's how we have space for fun.

(Mark Golden at 00:30:15) Exactly. And it's important to have a sense of humor, and I think we do. We encourage that. You know, it can't be deadly serious all the time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:22) No, that's why you have the elephant in the room. That's right. I've got the unicorn in the room. So what are you most excited about today? Like, what gets you jumping out of bed in the morning happening at Cornerstone?

(Mark Golden at 00:30:35) Well, we just came off a fabulous, fabulous event that I'm still coming down from, to be honest, because we do an annual hackathon at Cornerstone. And so, you know, we like to brand everything. So we just finished Hackathon 5.0. That just means it's our fifth annual hackathon. I don't know why it's not 15.0 at this point. But anyway, for whatever reason, we didn't always do hackathons. But five years ago, we did our first hackathon. It was very successful. Hackathon entries ended up in our product, and so that was really encouraging. And every year we've had something really good out of it. So this year was just awesome. I just, I mean, I couldn't go on enough about how great it was. It, we had worldwide participation. And so we have teams in Mumbai, Bangalore, Tel Aviv, Auckland, New Zealand, Sunnyvale, Santa Monica, and I hope I'm not forgetting any. So the, Cornerstone, there are Cornerstone sales offices there, but that's where I have engineering teams. We just announced that we're building a new office in Salt Lake City, Utah as well. One of the main reasons we're doing that specifically is to attract tech talent. So there's many places we can recruit into. And we wanted worldwide, oh, London, England as well. I forgot the tech team there too. So we wanted worldwide participation, so we got it. Every major office was represented. And the finals were just fantastic. We had a really hard time picking winners, but we got great initiatives out of there. Things that will end up in our product and also things that will help with business process improvement. Not everything has to be client facing. Some of the entries were around things like accelerating our move into AWS. One team did a fantastic job showing how we could do that. Another team did something that would make it much easier for clients to engage with Cornerstone to get product support help. So something which is really good at engaging the client and patient coming out of our team. We didn't tell them what to do. We gave them some theme ideas, but the teams came up with their own ideas. Every team self-formed. Every team was cross-functional. Every team was diverse from a gender standpoint and an ethnic standpoint. And what I liked most of all actually is the winning team came out of Mumbai, India, which was truly fantastic. And it's challenging to be, you know, a little bit far away from the mothership and to come up with an idea which was so compelling and so useful that it was the standout number one hack of the litter. So that was great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:47) What was the idea?

(Mark Golden at 00:32:49) It was a product idea actually. It's a little hard to explain. I don't want to bore you with it. It's a very arcane part of our system, but it's a very important part and it's something that will appeal to a very important audience of ours, and that's the learning administrator. Big companies have learning administrators that administrate our system and push out learning. Sometimes it's required learning, sometimes it's optional learning. And so when you're assigning learning to your users, if you're a company, one of our clients is a large bank, they have over 300,000 employees, and every single one of them has to use the system on a regular basis. So you can imagine the headaches around managing the learning assignments. So it was a dramatic improvement to the way that they could interact with that tool, get data out of that tool, understand the status of all those learning assignments. It's a very, very rich set of functionality that I know will appeal to all of our learning administrators, particularly in large companies. That make sense?

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:40) Oh, that totally makes sense. Yeah, you made your product easier to use for your customers.

(Mark Golden at 00:33:44) And that's good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:45) Then they won. Yeah, that'll win, right?

(Mark Golden at 00:33:49) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:50) So as we wrap up here, I'm curious to know if, are you a fan of Elon Musk at all?

(Mark Golden at 00:33:57) I actually am a fan of Elon Musk.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:58) Recent events excluded.

(Mark Golden at 00:34:05) Yeah, now he's, yeah, he's off the reservation a little bit. I wish he'd maybe go quiet for a while. But I'm a big fan. He's a tremendous innovator, and he's very inspiring. He's done some really, really great work. And certainly, when somebody asked me that question a little while ago, who should they invest in, it was his name that I came up with. So, notwithstanding his current performance, yeah, for sure, I'm a big fan. I've read his biographies and followed him closely for a long time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:33) Me too. I actually swapped this one out between him and, between Bezos, Branson, and Musk.

(Mark Golden at 00:34:39) Okay, these are good. Yeah. Before Musk, I guess, if you were to look at all-time greats, it would have to be Steve Jobs. Yeah. But unfortunately, deceased. But if you look at the living, I think it would be Elon Musk.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:51) Yeah. I was curious to, I wanted to know more about billionaires. I'd started to interview a few and get to know a few and I was—

(Mark Golden at 00:34:57) Oh, really?

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:58) Yeah. And so—

(Mark Golden at 00:34:59) Which have you interviewed?

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:01) Not on the podcast, but Arnie Bellini. Oh, goodness. I can send you a list after the show. I've actually, just so you know, in the past year, I've done over 200 interviews. Uh, I'm sorry. In the past eight months, like, since December, I've done nine months, over, I think, 212 or something.

(Mark Golden at 00:35:22) Wow. Fantastic. I'm a huge podcast consumer, just so you know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:27) Are you?

(Mark Golden at 00:35:27) Yeah. I listen to podcasts all the time. I keep finding new things to listen to and to download, and it's, like, it's a great medium.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:33) What podcasts do you like?

(Mark Golden at 00:35:35) I'm listening to a number. Freakonomics, but of course, everybody is. Yeah. That's a good one. It's one of my favorites. Masters of Scale is pretty good with Reid Hoffman. Have you heard that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:44) No. But I know Reid.

(Mark Golden at 00:35:46) Founder of LinkedIn.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:47) LinkedIn. Oh, yeah. He's, you know Kevin Scott, the CTO of Microsoft? Yes. Yeah. He got that gig through the LinkedIn acquisition. He started in AdVoice.

(Mark Golden at 00:35:58) So Reid has got a fantastic podcast. He's no longer a VC now, but he was the founder of LinkedIn and he gets really great people on his show, which is so good about it. The BBC has fantastic podcasts. There's one called In Our Time, which is from Radio 4. Melvyn Bragg is, I lived in England for seven years. I know the market pretty well. He is an incredible interviewer and he gets amazing guests. It's very academic and it's unlike anything else. He gets three professors typically from different universities around England, and they talk about really, really interesting topics like how do bats navigate in the dark. Wow. I know a lot about bats.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:36) Yeah. I know. It was, that was a fascinating episode or something out of history. There's a ton of great stuff out there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:45) My dad's an engineer and a big nerd as well as myself, and I got my start in engineering, coding from a very young age. And as a parent, I realized he was doing this to buy himself time. Because now I'm always looking for things to keep my children busy, right? And so as a parent, I realized the tasks you were giving me at age eight, like, to, you know, move items in a buffer, right, or to look up stuff in datasets, were tasks to keep me busy for 20, 30 minutes at a time. Little did I know it has completely shaped my career and my life, and so I'm so grateful for it. But—

(Mark Golden at 00:37:23) What's your favorite podcast?

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:26) Modern CTO. Well, yeah. Okay. Yeah. You know, the Elon Musk, Joe Rogan podcast. The topics they covered in that. No. So I, I don't listen a whole lot to a lot of podcasts. I just, to be honest, I listen to a lot of Audible books.

(Mark Golden at 00:37:53) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:54) Like, for some reason, it's like I've yet to burn through the Audible library.

(Mark Golden at 00:38:00) Oh, you can't. It's not possible. Yeah. Yeah. It's a huge one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:03) And it's just there's so many different areas that I need, you know, because I do the podcast, I do business, and we're growing our business and it's doing well. And so there's so many different areas. You know, sometimes I find myself reading books on understanding different aspects of the financial parts and the P&Ls and the different types of reports and how they differ, right? Because based on type of CPA you have, you know, just nerd stuff like that all the way up to the bat stuff. Like, when I was young, my dad taught me, you could, how the bats navigate. And so you get little rocks and gravel. You could throw them up and watch the bats chase them down to the ground because they would think that they're little insects for a second.

(Mark Golden at 00:38:45) Alright. So you know a lot about this already.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:48) Yeah. Well, that just really just that one bit because, I mean, as a child, we had, for some reason I lived in Florida, but we had some bats and you throw the rocks up and get them to chase the rocks and, then that and driving around to get Slurpees and using lasers to knock out street lamps. Now as an adult, that was really, really bad.

(Mark Golden at 00:39:09) Okay. Good to know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:10) Yeah. He was in the Air Force and did some very cool clearance-related projects. But one thing I remember from my childhood was he had this two and a half, three foot long laser that would hook up to a car battery. And—

(Mark Golden at 00:39:23) Big one?

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:24) Yeah. And we were being restless one night, and he needed to get us active. So he had us run around the neighborhood and go get a Slurpee, like, 7-Eleven drink thing. And in the drive to 7-Eleven, he's like, hey, let's go see if this laser is powerful enough to, you know, overcome filament inside of a street lamp. We owe the city probably $25. So if you go back in time, let's say Elon Musk invites you over. He says, I've got a time machine, Mark. You can use it. You go in. You get one piece of advice to give to your past self. Let's say 10 years ago, like, a specific moment in time 10 years ago, you're going to give this advice to your past self. What would it be?

(Mark Golden at 00:40:05) My past self. Ten years ago, I was no doubt a CTO someplace. I would say I'd give myself some words of encouragement. Yeah. I'd say, Mark, it just keeps getting better. Oh.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:30) I like it.

(Mark Golden at 00:40:30) It keeps improving. Hang in there. As much as you like this job now, it's going to keep better. Don't switch careers. Stick with what you're doing. Because I might have been maybe thinking about something else back then. I would say, no. No. No. Stick it out. This is a good job. Technology is getting even more interesting. You know, we're going to get past the depression and the large numbers of people. Because if you think about it, 10 years ago, it was 2008.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:50) It was, right? Yes.

(Mark Golden at 00:40:51) Financial crisis. There were more people than jobs back then, so it's the opposite. So I might have been discouraged about that in the future of tech, but I would have said, no, hang in there because the best is yet to come.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:04) I love that. That makes me happy.

(Mark Golden at 00:41:06) That pops into my head.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:07) How early do you wake up in the morning?

(Mark Golden at 00:41:10) I wake up between six and 6:15 every morning.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:12) Nice. Do you do some sort of, like, exercise, aerobics type stuff?

(Mark Golden at 00:41:19) I exercise at night. The morning, I set aside for learning, actually.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:24) Nice. I'm up at 5:15. I do a run. You know, stretch and run takes about 30 minutes. And then shower, kick on the Audible in the shower, right? So now I'm learning. And then through breakfast, and then I'm at work by, you know, 7:15. And that's when I start doing my writing and preparing for, yeah. I get an hour and a half, two hours to prepare before my team arrives. And then, yeah, then I record videos and do shows and all this stuff all day, and it's amazing.

(Mark Golden at 00:42:02) It's good to have, I don't have a routine once I get to work, like I said, because every day is a little different. But it's good to have a routine outside of work that you can sort of set aside for things you really want to do. So, you know, I guard that time very preciously, time in the evening and time in the morning that I want for things that I want to do. Yes. And then the rest of the day, I kind of have to stay flexible and go with the flow to some extent.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:23) Yeah. I'm flexible once 9 a.m. hits. But you're right. I control what's within my reach. I control my time in the morning.

(Mark Golden at 00:42:32) Yeah. Box things and guard your personal time carefully and that way you have time free for other things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:37) Yeah. Fitness is one of the big ones for me because I just, I don't know. I find it incredibly, if I don't get to work out or run, I am just not myself. Yeah.

(Mark Golden at 00:42:50) I go for 30-minute walks every evening, usually with the dog. That's my primary exercise.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:55) Well, thank you so much for coming on and making a podcast with me. I'm real excited. You have a good time?

(Mark Goldin at 00:43:02) Yes, I did. It was very easy, very conversational, just like you promised. I enjoyed it. Thank you.

(Mark Goldin at 00:43:06) Thank you for your interest. Yeah, thank you for inviting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:08) It's always great to hear from CTOs all over the world, what you're working on, where your mind's at. You're right at the top. I just sincerely appreciate your time. And if I'm out in that neck of the woods, I'll send you an email and say hello.

(Mark Goldin at 00:43:25) You're absolutely welcome to. I look forward to that. Please do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:29) Have a fantastic day, Mark.

(Mark Goldin at 00:43:31) Thank you. You too. Bye-bye.