Guillaume Clement - CTO at Dailymotion

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Guillaume, the CTO of Dailymotion, and we discuss creating a vision for your team to follow, the concept of autonomous leadership, and hiring A players to create an atmosphere of trust. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:32) So from end to end, you just design the entire experience to be built on trust.

(Guillaume at 00:00:38) Yes, absolutely. That's something which is by design, to be honest. One of our brand values, which is caring matters, is that we apply that level of caring, and we want to be, again, the home for video that matters. So we want all of our users—and in this business, you have three types of users: the end users consuming, the publishers and trusted partners uploading, and the advertisers. All of them need to be in a situation where they trust Dailymotion.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:12) That's awesome. I love that your focus is that. Right? Your focus is trust. Therefore, whenever you're making decisions on product or the business, you've got trust as your sort of foundational element that you're always looking at. Now is this the major pivot that you've done across the company, or have you helped lead another major pivot?

(Guillaume at 00:01:34) It's the major pivot we've made, to be honest, and the one big one that happened. But in order to do this pivot, it was not just like, let's pivot and shift slightly the business, and everything's going to follow automatically. Unfortunately, this pivot meant that we have to rebuild our entire platform and add into our product portfolio more products than we have done before. I'll give you two examples. Dailymotion has been built ten years ago, so we have some legacy issues to manage. So in addition to pivoting, we had to face the reality that we're going to probably have to throw away a big portion of our code and make sure we can iterate fast while we're transforming and changing this platform to a much more robust and scalable platform down the road. That was the one big challenge.

(Guillaume at 00:02:13) The second challenge was, if we really want to be trusted, then it means we need to rely on ourselves only. We can't rely for part of this business on a third-party company that would do something we actually don't control. So the second challenge was to make sure from the management of the content to the distribution, including its monetization, that we're 100% owner of the scope. And that meant for us, in addition to just building a great video platform, we had to build a great monetization platform as well. So end to end, again, we control it. Otherwise, there is no trust with your partners, no credibility. If you don't control your own tool, you cannot be trusted.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:19) Yeah. Especially, like, there's a lot of the platforms. That's one thing. I've been in the room where they've made the decision to either use some sort of third-party network monetization platform and build an infinite amount of API connections to and from it and seeing all the—I'm sure a lot of people know what I'm talking about right now. But, and then almost 99% of the time, what we opted for instead was, let's just build the most basic version of it, like very ultra simple, and do a two-week, three-week version of it, and then build on top of it as the platform gets success. And I've actually never made the decision to purchase one of those other platforms because the amount of effort to integrate it into your business logic is the same amount of effort it is just to build it from the beginning.

(Guillaume at 00:04:10) I mean, I'm glad you say it because I'm trying to—it's very interesting to share the same thoughts on that matter. When you have to select and identify your partner, how can you select and identify the right partner if you haven't tried on your own to build a little bit of knowledge to be able to take the decision? So you have to go through the process and unfortunately enjoy the pain of learning so you know what you're talking about, and then you can take the appropriate decision. Finally, we're going to do it on our own, or sometimes you might find a partner that will help you accelerate your business. But when it comes to—if it's on the critical path of your business, if it's the crux of the matter of your business, then you might want to do it on your own, especially when companies like Dailymotion bring scale issues. It's fine to find a tool. It's okay to find it on the market that does something. Can it do it at your scale is always another question.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:08) Yep. How many servers are you going to boot up to power the inefficiencies? Is it even possible? What type of maintenance headache? Oh yeah. I love it. So you're all in on that because you guys are one of the more popular websites on the Internet. How much traffic, just to give me a ballpark, how much traffic does Dailymotion get?

(Guillaume at 00:05:25) About three billion views per month, more than 215 million users as well. So it's quite significant. And to your point, I mean, the company has been started ten years ago. And ten years ago, you didn't have all those platform-as-a-service, SaaS platforms, I mean, infrastructure-as-a-service, et cetera. So the DNA of this company is there's probably a way to do it on our own for less money and as efficient, if not more efficient, which is very, very exciting for talent at Dailymotion.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:04) Now when you started, I mean, I was building web apps ten years ago. Right? So there wasn't, like, Amazon—there at least weren't Herokus around then. Right? It wasn't a common thing to have some sort of, like, we push code up and build it and deploy it across this network. I was still—when I, on my first projects, we were calling up a server company. They would go into the room and build in the rack, and then we would use, like, our rsync, I think it was, to make—yeah, yeah, yeah. We had to manage our own rsync utilities, and like, there wasn't interfaces for it or anything. It was all, like, you know, just figure it out. And so if you guys were starting then, have you been with the company since the beginning?

(Guillaume at 00:06:48) No, I haven't been in the company since the beginning, to be honest. I joined in 2013. But even in 2013, we had a lot of things that had been built on our own to address our very specific problems. And what is very interesting in this company, and especially as a CTO, is the scope is very wide in terms of what we do manage, which is also a strength today for many reasons. But we operate our own infrastructure. We have our data centers. We operate our own infrastructure. We operate our own network. We are on our own CDN, for example. We don't rely on external CDNs, which is very interesting when you are a delivery platform, not relying on external CDNs. And everything has been done in-house. And down the road, now we're trying to select where it's important, and that could make a difference to select a piece of tool that is different from what we've built originally in-house because it will make a difference. But there is absolutely no plan whatsoever to do everything externally, put the very trendy, shiny, new tool everywhere in the company, only the pieces that make sense here and there. For example, there is no "let's move to cloud" strategy. Everybody's moving to cloud. Let's move to cloud. We have a slightly different approach where we ask ourselves where, when, and at what cost does it make sense to eventually consider moving to cloud. And yes, it does make sense from time to time for a variety of reasons, but not always. This is not a one-goal strategy. We move to cloud. You see what I mean?

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:28) Yeah. You take a pragmatic, responsible approach to your decision making, and just because the whole general public or the whole industry is hyped up on some specific topic and everyone's—it's like flavor of the week. You don't just say we have to have it like this. You instead say, how does this apply to us? Can we leverage this in our larger plan of what we're doing? And then that is what I enjoy from leadership because what that says is we have a vision and we have a focus and we're going somewhere, and we will leverage the tools and opportunities that pop up along the way instead of having the market control our direction and vision. We're in control of what we're doing, and we will utilize the market's tools as we see fit.

(Guillaume at 00:09:17) Yeah, I think the most important thing from what you say is we're in control. I think it's the most important thing to secure that we're in control of what we're doing, especially for the most critical assets of the business. Absolutely true.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:31) You're a global company. You're all over the world. Correct?

(Guillaume at 00:09:35) Yeah. Yeah. That's absolutely correct. We were, let's say, born in France, but today, France and even Europe represent a third of our business. So APAC and North America are the other two-thirds, so we're definitely global with offices in Singapore, offices in New York, offices in Brazil, offices in France, and in England. So we're global.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:00) So you said about 40% of your engineering is in New York. Correct?

(Guillaume at 00:10:04) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:04) And then how large is engineering?

(Guillaume at 00:10:09) Engineering is approximately 200 people today, covering all the aspects, as I mentioned, from the management of the content, its distribution, and its monetization, with a very strong foundation in ad tech in New York as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:29) So you didn't get your first job managing 200 people. You had to, you started out, you know, and you moved up over time. But what sort of challenges have you faced in this global 200-plus engineer setup that you have? You're right in that middle of, like—I see, I talk to a lot of companies and they, you know, everyone struggles to hit 15 people. Then you get the companies that hit 50. And then once you hit 200, you've scaled teams of teams. Infrastructure-wise, team-wise, you've essentially had to solve all the problems that you will have at a thousand or even more. So what are the big lessons that have stood out to you as far as leading this global team?

(Guillaume at 00:11:12) I think the very first thing that has nothing to do with tech, to be honest, is to make sure that the vision and the strategy is clear. So the very first thing is to define it when it's not defined or when you pivot. Make sure it's clear. Make sure it makes sense. Make sure you benchmark it enough to have something that is common sense at the end of the day, that people will start to say to themselves, "Yeah. That makes sense. That's something we can do." That's the very first step. Then the second step is to make sure that everybody, every single day, several times a day, is actually looking in that direction. Making sure you grow a team or you hire the people—because we had to do a lot of hiring—you make sure you grow a team that looks in the same direction. How do you do that on a day-to-day basis? It's on your communication and it's on clarifying and removing the blocks on the road to make sure that the team can move efficiently always in that direction. So I think two most important things: defining this vision and making sure the company looks towards it every single day is the most important thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:20) Now how does that actually play out on a tactical level? Is it through the stand-up meetings and you working with your leaders and having them work with their leaders and then just continually having the conversation? Like, what does that look like?

(Guillaume at 00:12:36) We've based our, let's say, operational principles on a very simple principle, which is once we have defined a centralized strategy, then we have to do everything we can to have a successful decentralized execution, meaning the team needs to be autonomous, the team needs to have the capability to, the freedom to do entrepreneurship even in tech and select the best solutions they believe they have in hand to ensure a very simple and clear problem. And our job, the management team, is actually to qualify, detail, and explain what the problem we're trying to solve is instead of trying to push "we should use this piece of tech." We've hired better people than ourselves. I think that's what everybody should do. And so I'm only here to say—and especially because of Dailymotion's specificities—where my team, they could all be CTOs of their own scope in whatever company in the world. So I'm not going to teach an expert in a given domain what he should do. I just can make sure that the problem they're trying to solve individually resonates at the global level about the problem we're trying to solve. And then they have the freedom to operate the way they want in trying to solve that problem. Again, all relying on having hired better people than ourselves.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:08) I love it. That's one of the most recurring pieces of advice. So we started the show. We've been going for over a year now. Done over 200 interviews and—whoa—just, yeah. I've done, like, 500 meetings this year. It was a busy year. But what I learned was—well, there's a lot. But one of the ones that came up more than a lot was hire people who are smarter than you. So about six months into the podcast, we ended up starting a company, a leadership company from it. And then I built a basic version in Ruby of the application that deployed the content in, like, ten days. And I think my first hire before I got someone to help me with video, because it's like a video-based company, was one of the smartest engineers I'd ever met before, and his name's Nick. And I said, "Look. I know a lot about programming and Ruby, but you know it on a really detailed level." And so I hired him, and he has just been amazing the entire time. But yeah, that's how I took some advice that I heard from some great leaders, applied it, and then got the results. I haven't had to worry or think about the platform. It's built—nothing. He just does everything right. He has a good amount of pushback when I'm pushing too hard. You know? Sorry. I just—shout out to Nick.

(Guillaume at 00:15:35) Hey, Nick. Congratulations, Nick. I think it's very important because the better and smarter the talent you hire, the less you worry, the easier it is to create a notion and atmosphere of trust because you just don't worry because you believe things are going to be done. And if they're not done, it means that's for a good reason. And that's the moment then you jump in again and try to remove the entropy and try to release the pain of a blocker and a problem. And then at the end of the day, I sometimes describe our role as an entropy reducer. I'm just here to reduce the entropy. That's basically what I do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:13) I love it. And it's when you get a lot of great people, getting them to work together is part of the task too. Right? Focusing on that vision, getting them to work together. Now you said something that I thought was poetic. I wrote it down the moment you said it. But I never heard it described like this, and I just want to bring it up again. You said centralized strategy with decentralized execution. I want you to write a book.

(Guillaume at 00:16:41) All right. I had that to the list. It was quite empty, I have to say.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:45) Yeah. You got to write your book now. No. But I'm going to make that a clip and share it with people because that is—like, I don't know if you came up with that or if you borrowed it or mixed it and mashed it, but I've never heard it stated so clearly.

(Guillem at 00:17:00) I think, to be honest, I probably have heard here and there over my career, but that's something I've tried to put in place for everything we do, and that goes beyond tech, to be honest. You could apply it to many, many things you're trying to do. It's based on the foundation that you have to have a great team, and you have to elevate the level of collaboration within your company, meaning that you need to make sure that it only works if the collaboration is there. And we're very happy because at Dailymotion, the collaboration is there. But then it brings another issue, which is if your company is not set up to succeed in the collaboration, how do you elevate the collaboration that is? But this notion of decentralized applies to various dimensions from just the fact that it's going to be autonomous teams, but it also applies to the fact that they're going to be spread through the globe.

(Guillem at 00:17:54) So by definition, you cannot be at many places. I cannot run the scrum of scrum of the 15 teams everywhere in the world. So they have to have something that makes sure they are always connected to what we're trying to do and the problem we're trying to solve, even if there is an eight-hour time shift.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:15) I love it. I'm so interested in all the different things you do now. I want to ask you—I'm going to make a list of topics. Don't be surprised if I email you in a week or something and say, "Hey, we got a question about—"

(Guillem at 00:18:28) Bring the topics. Bring the topics.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:30) I'm curious to know. So I was having a leadership conversation last week about this concept of margin in your schedule, in your life. And the person I was talking to said that they actually schedule time to think. Right? They'll take part of their schedule and say, "This is when I'm going to reflect on everything that I have learned."

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:55) And I thought that was interesting because usually I'm the opposite. I'm thinking, let's fill up my schedule as much as possible so I feel productive. And I make sure that they're aligned with my goals, but to intentionally cut out time for thinking, right, and being strategic—do you do that?

(Guillem at 00:19:14) Yeah, I do. I think the more senior I become, the less I try to be an addict to dopamine and checking the to-do list. And I was having a conversation very recently with the team about something simple, which is I want our team to use more our product—not just to make our product more successful, but just so we put ourselves into our users' shoes. But clearly, in order to do so, you need time.

(Guillem at 00:19:48) And you won't find time to think or prepare for something or use your product if you don't dedicate and make sure in your schedule that you have room for that. And I do this every week. I have scheduled moments, like Friday morning, where I spend time using the product, trying to think if what we've built is always aligned towards the direction of this North Star vision we have. So I personally do it, yes.

(Guillem at 00:20:19) And I think that's a great idea, and I encourage everyone, especially my team, to dedicate time to think and step back and look at what we've been doing. Because we're always in this—you know, the agile methodology has a name for the iteration, which I believe is the worst name we could have given to the iteration. We call that a sprint. Then after a sprint, you can do another sprint. And after the second sprint, you can do another sprint. So you can run and run and run again.

(Guillem at 00:20:48) At a point in time, it's very important to step back—first, because it's a great feeling to see what you've accomplished, but also, you need proper time without all the hassles and things that you need to think about just to step back, think about what you're doing, and be able to adapt and adjust, which I believe is very important.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:09) I found that true with writing. So I'll write and then it all is sounding good or whatever it may be, and then I always leave and come back a couple hours or a day later and read it from a completely different emotional perspective or just, you know, whatever state of energy I'm currently in. I read it, and then I'm asking myself, "All right, does this make sense? How does this feel?" I also, when I use our platform—because I use it once a week as well, because our platform's designed as a weekly thing that you do—so I just am a user on my platform, but I actually have a separate account and a separate email that's just personal that I will never commingle with testing, like when I'm making accounts or whatever I happen to be doing for testing. And then I only use it on my one specific iPad. Right? And so whenever I'm touching that iPad, there's no deletion or creation of accounts. There's only this one experience of this one individual.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:12) And I found that for me, at least right now in our growth—I mean, we only have eight people right now, so we're small—but I found that separating my device and not bringing all my workspace stuff into it really allows me to be in a different mind frame and feel more like a normal user.

(Guillem at 00:22:29) Yeah, it makes total sense. And I think that's something that just doesn't happen like that in a company. You need to put in place the framework. You need to make sure that people feel safe about doing so.

(Guillem at 00:22:45) So you need to encourage it, but it's actually much more than just saying you should take time to do something. So you need to put in place the structure so it scales. This is not only about five or six people in a company—and in my team, obviously, more than 200. It's about making sure that it's something that hits through the entire organization.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:03) Video is going increasingly mobile. Right? I'm noticing—yeah, I have less reasons—my bank account has gotten really good. Like, I can do anything I need to do from my bank on my phone. I need a laptop less and less. Are you seeing that? And then how are you responding to that?

(Guillem at 00:23:23) So we do see the trend. Interestingly enough, we still have a significant portion of our users and usages on desktop. I don't know, to be honest, if it's coming from some people during work hours checking out a video or a tutorial or something or a content that is important on a publisher website.

(Guillem at 00:23:45) Because I don't know if I've been clear on this one, but Dailymotion is a platform, but we also provide technology to publishers for publishers on their own properties. And there is a trend today where all the publishers are trying to regain control to exit from the duopoly of Facebook and Google, controlling their own audience and their own content. Then we offer technology to do so. So if you are—to be sure—you have great content, but you want to distribute and monetize this content on your properties to engage your audience, then we provide the tech solution to do so as part of our partner solutions.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:21) Oh, I didn't know that.

(Guillem at 00:24:22) Oh, sorry about that. So yes, that's definitely something we do and offer. And there is—and I will answer the question around mobile—there is a big trend right now where every big publisher is trying to engage their own audience because at the end of the day, that's the most valuable asset they have. So how do they make sure their most valuable asset—they control it. Going back to if you want to be successful, you're going to have to control the elements of your business. So they want to control their audience, and then we're offering all the tools to our partner solutions, to the big publishers globally.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:56) So I have a question. Would I choose—like, you know, you got a Wistia and a Vimeo—and then, would I—is Dailymotion—would you compete in that product lineup?

(Guillem at 00:25:07) Yeah, definitely, yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:08) Oh, wow. I got to check you guys out because, you know what? I've been watching—we use Vimeo for our platform, right? But there's a lot that I don't like about the options that I have available because they're primarily built for being on Vimeo.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:27) Like, you can host the content, but all their tools are—either you're doing something that we don't support, you know, here's a link to the video for you to embed somewhere else, or you're also putting your content on vimeo.com. And then we're integrating it into our app, right? So we need permission concepts. We need features. And so I was looking through—Wistia kind of had some stuff, Vimeo kind of did it—but I'm going to check you guys out to see what type of features you have.

(Guillem at 00:25:52) You should, honestly, because we've built this partner solution with an intent to be as friendly as possible to our partners. Clearly, it didn't work in the past, and that won't work in the future—we're not trying to lock you down into Dailymotion, and so everything you're producing will benefit dailymotion.com. Obviously, if you have great content, that will benefit dailymotion.com users, but we want to provide the best services to you so you can operate your business in the best possible way.

(Guillem at 00:26:27) An example of that—we have been working on what we believe is the best HTML5 player on the market, and this player has been optimized to work on native apps directly. So you can easily integrate an HTML5 player in a native app, in an iframe, or in a WebView in a native app. Because if you're a partner and you want to customize the experience, change your brand, the color of the player, et cetera, you want to do it once and for all, and you want it to work across platforms. So you want to integrate players into devices as easy as possible. So we shifted from "let's provide a bunch of features that's going to make our partners happy to use dailymotion.com" to "we need to keep our partners happy on dailymotion.com, but we need to make sure we provide the tools"—and it includes API, content API, data API, third-party plugins—so you can operate your business on your own, on your platform, relying on our technology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:30) So when you—I have a question about—you're putting all these awesome images in my head, right, with the whole company as a whole. So now I'm curious. For some reason, what popped into my head is I'm curious about what your relationships are like with the CEO and head of sales and how you work together to find the vision.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:50) Because you're getting a lot of good information and feedback from technology, right? Because you're a technology company. And so there's a lot of opportunity there. And so how do you pick and balance what you're going after?

(Guillem at 00:28:03) It's a very good question, and it's a question I get often. And as unfortunate as it sounds, at the end of the day on this, we have to sometimes compromise. As I explained, if I put it straight, we have three clients: advertisers, content owners, and users. And every single platform has the same problem, and every single team within every single platform that is that is plagued with this type of responsibility draws the same pain. Let's take an example of a recommendation system.

(Guillem at 00:28:36) Would you recommend a video that you will make sure will make a higher CPM in terms of monetization because buyers and advertisers are more willing to pay on that type of content? Would you make a recommendation that will make the content owners happy because more users are going to discover new pieces of content that might not be so relevant, but it's going to make your content owners happy? Or are you willing to make recommendations that's going to make your users more happy and more engaged with the platform, bearing in mind this notion of trust and safeness of the platform? So that's the type of mindset, framework, and questions we ask ourselves for every single feature we have in the backlog. We have to do it. We have to go through that. The answer to recommendation system is obviously users, but that's not the—the answer is not systematic to every single question we have.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:29) That's smart. I like that.

(Guillem at 00:29:31) Thanks, Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:32) That's a good one. So that's how you balance the—because, I mean, come on, coming to that ultimately, that wasn't a very simple thing. Like, it took a lot of work as the company to come to, "This is how we handle this." So, yes, in its simplicity, I see the effort, right? I appreciate it. So that's how you balance the three distinct user types.

(Guillem at 00:29:54) Yeah, yeah, yeah. Obviously, there has been a little bit of pain to figure out that this is as simple as I put it. But yes, at the end of the day, that's how we take a decision.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:03) What are you most excited about that's happening right now?

(Guillem at 00:30:08) To be honest, as I was mentioning to the team, my passion in this company is about building and growing a team. And I've been very lucky over my career, to be honest. I don't know why, but it's fine. If I can continue to be lucky, that's fine. I've been very lucky in the people I've met, the coworkers, the teams, the talents I have in my team.

(Guillem at 00:30:34) And as I was mentioning to them, I think we've done something very difficult, which is in less than two years, we literally threw away 80% of our code—all the front ends. We moved from a 10-year-old monolithic platform to a geo-distributed, global platform. We moved from a REST API to a GraphQL API, allowing tons of new possibilities. And I'm very, very proud about the team and what we've achieved. And I was mentioning to them, I was sure we would be successful. But now, with what we've built and the team we have, I'm 100% confident that we can achieve this mission of building a product that will deliver the great content that matters to our users in this moment where people are looking for content and platforms they can trust.

(Guillem at 00:31:29) And that's what I'm the most proud of and what I'm looking in the near future to happen.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:36) You mentioned lucky, right? And I find that I've had an interesting view of luck over the past couple years, but more recently, luck is misunderstood. I think luck is misunderstood. It's a guaranteed thing that happens when you work hard, when you're humble, when you care about your craft, when you put time into it, when you care about your people, when you try to be selfless, when you try to give credit to others and raise up leaders and improve other people for the sake of them improving.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:06) And so I just want that to be clear, though. Like, when you do those things, luck is a byproduct of that. I don't think luck is as mysterious as—

(Guillem at 00:32:17) You're right. It's absolutely true. And there is a way to describe it in sport where we often say you've got to create luck, meaning you have to put all the ingredients to nurture luck, and then luck's going to come. Luck is not a mean. It's an end. If you put things right or everything together, then you're going to trigger luck, and that comes as a bonus in everything you're doing. You're absolutely right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:44) Yes. And so it's been—I just turned 30 last year, I'm going to be 31 soon—and that's been, I think, the biggest realization of 30 is that while, I guess, in my twenties, I'd sit around and say, "Oh, that person's lucky. That person's lucky." But then realizing that when I have—I only have a little bit of luck and then how to replicate it—it's a very useful tool. Because when you start experiencing it, it almost becomes addictive. It's like the universe's incentive for you to keep improving and doing well. And so, yeah. I don't know why you got me thinking deep. Come on.

(Guillem at 00:33:23) I'm sorry about that, Joel. But to try to come back to something a little bit more tangible about luck, I think—and that's a lesson I've learned from most of the new generation of talent—which is the level of caring they put into what they're doing and the willingness to have an impact and not just a job. I realized recently that the more caring you put in what you're doing and every single level of what you're doing, the more likely you're going to create luck. And I think it relates to the level of caring you put in what you're doing, and that's a great lesson I got from the new generation, to be honest.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:09) How do you—I know you've hired great people, and the organization will definitely take on the personality of the leader. And so I almost asked this question kind of knowing the answer, but they follow you in your leadership, and your personality, whether you like it or not, spreads throughout your organization, right, because you're the CTO. But do you have any other ways that you specifically spread your knowledge? Do anything different or intentionally? Do you meet with different people regularly?

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:42) Do you have any other way that—

(Guillem at 00:34:46) I think, yeah, the answer is yes. I mean, we have to have ways to communicate, and not only to our direct reports. I mean, it's important to communicate to the entire company. I think the other big learning over my career I had is the most important thing that you can give to people in addition to direction is time. It's your time.

(Guillem at 00:35:09) And it's not a total sacrifice. We have to put together the moment to share and discuss, and it comes from just talking about the strategy at the coffee machine, which I honestly very much enjoy. Because if the people of your company can share in two to three sentences the strategy and the direction at the coffee machine when they're talking about what they're gonna do today, then it's a big success. But to answer your question, yes, I have regular meetings with everybody, couple of teams, separate teams, and in a very casual, informal way where we just discuss the items. And it's not only about, "Hey, guys, this is what we've done. This is what we have to do. This is where we are on the KPI." This is much more about the inspiration about what we're trying to do, how well we are doing, the level of confidence in the team in what we're doing. At the end of this, where everybody feels safe in what they're doing, which I believe is the most important and most dominant feeling you should have in your opinion.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:16) That's a great answer. Yeah. I like to just explore around because every once in a while, somebody says something amazing, like, "centralized strategy and decentralized executions."

(Guillem at 00:36:29) Doesn't come for me. I don't know that, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:33) If you could—as we wrap up—if you could go back and talk to yourself ten years ago, what piece of advice would you give your past self?

(Guillem at 00:36:42) Trust someone. I think I would start by: it's very important that despite you may have an expertise and a good vision of what you believe should be done, you're gonna have to listen very carefully to ideas from other people. Very, very careful. And I think that's the one piece of advice that I learned through some pain, which I would give myself. Because everybody starts with a domain of expertise. Every CTO has something that they've been very, very good at doing at some point.

(Guillem at 00:37:21) But the more he grows, the more the company scales, the less—I mean, it's unrealistic to be an expert today in every single technology that you have to run in a company like ours. I mean, ten years ago, if you were good in PHP, SQL, Apache, then you could have been an expert across the board. Today, it's over. If you just add the data team into the scope of what you were used to do, then everything is new, everything is different. You can't be an expert anymore.

(Guillem at 00:37:51) So you gotta be very careful in listening to everybody's—I mean, to every single idea and making sure you create the foundation so those ideas can grow without you. I think that would be the piece of advice I would give to myself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:08) Your past self thanks you because that was fantastic advice. That was—

(Guillem at 00:38:14) Good, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:15) That was super unique. I—first of all, instantly, I resonated with it because as a young engineer, I was a little bit rude because I wasn't accepting of other people's ideas early, very early on in my career. Thankfully, it didn't work out for me not being that way. And so I learned really fast, but yeah, that's a—I connected with that for sure.

(Guillem at 00:38:45) Yeah. Thank you, Joel. I mean, that's—I'm happy to see that it resonates because it's a—so it was a pleasure to share thoughts and see that it resonates, and that can be applied in different contexts, which is always interesting. Excellent.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:58) Is there anything that we didn't cover that you would like to cover?

(Guillem at 00:39:04) No, Joel. To be honest, I think we've covered a lot.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:07) We did. We covered—glad to be so. We did. Actually, I—

(Guillem at 00:39:10) I know I got a book to read—to write, so thank you, Joel, for that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:14) Yeah. You have a book to write. Oh, man. This is a fantastic time. Now if people wanna find out more about you or connect with you, LinkedIn or Twitter, where can they find you?

(Guillem at 00:39:27) Yeah. Both—Twitter is probably the easiest way to connect.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:31) Okay. Excellent. And they just search Guillaume, but it's not how it sounds.

(Guillem at 00:39:38) We'll put—

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:39) We'll put it in the show notes. We'll put it in the show notes.

(Guillem at 00:39:40) Yeah. We do that. Thank you very much.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:43) Excellent. Well, thank you so much. I look forward—I'm sure one day we'll cross paths at a conference or something.

(Guillem at 00:39:49) I would love to. I would love to. I mean, I'd be happy to have another chat. Thank you, Joel, for having me. Thank you very much for your time today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:56) Yep. Have a fantastic day.

(Guillem at 00:39:58) You too. Bye bye.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:00) Bye. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to help, please take a moment right now to open up the iTunes app and leave a review of the podcast. If you take a screenshot of the review and text it or email it to a friend who needs to listen to the podcast and then CC me, [email protected]—if you CC me on the email, I'll send you a copy of the Modern CTO book or give you a shout out on the podcast, whichever you prefer.

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