Raghavendra Prabhu - CTO at Thumbtack

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. I am so excited and so grateful to be speaking all over the world this year. You can find the dates on moderncto.io. The topic of the talk is the habits and patterns of the greatest technology leaders on Earth. So I'm headed out to Williams Sonoma in California, Trimble and Boulder CU in Colorado, and the Tennessee Tech Council.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:23) If you want to follow me on this adventure, we have a vlog and it's done really well by Alex, our director of video. So to follow this vlog, add me on LinkedIn or follow us on YouTube at Modern CTO. Today, we are talking to RVP, the Vice President of Engineering at Thumbtack, and we discuss advice to CTOs experiencing hypergrowth, tips on delivering critical feedback, and the importance of setting goals and having a vision for the future. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:00) This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:01:13) How are you? I'm good. How are you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:16) I'm fantastic. It's a wonderful day. It's beautiful here. We're down in Florida. Where are you at?

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:01:22) We are in San Francisco.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:24) San Francisco.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:01:24) It's a little bit cloudy and colder than Florida, I'm sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:28) San Francisco is always cold. Even in the summer, it's cold.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:01:31) Yeah. It's the same weather throughout the year. There's almost no seasons here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:36) So I've gotta ask, how do I pronounce your first name?

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:01:39) I go by RVP. So my name is Raghavindra, but I've gone by RVP since undergrad. So that's what I usually go by.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:48) RVP?

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:01:49) Yeah. That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:50) Is that your initials?

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:01:52) Yeah. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:53) That's pretty cool. RVP is actually, that sounds pretty cool. Yeah. I like it. Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:57) I'll call you RVP.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:01:59) Sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:59) Yeah. Alright. So it's early for you right now. You just get to work?

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:02:03) Yeah. I usually get into work around 8:45. I have a commute. So I commute from one hour away from here, so I take a train. And so I try to get in early and then try to leave early so I can spend some time with my family in the evening.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:20) Yeah. I saw you have a daughter, it says?

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:02:23) Yeah. I have a three-year-old.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:26) I have a 16-year-old daughter.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:02:28) Oh, wow. That's awesome. I thought I saw that in your LinkedIn profile photo.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:32) Oh, yeah. She's amazing.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:02:34) Much smaller then, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:36) Is that your only kid?

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:02:38) Yeah. That's my only kid.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:41) It's hard right now. She's, as I'm leaving in the morning, she runs to the door and doesn't want me to leave and yells. Did yours ever do that?

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:02:50) Yeah. Yeah. Well, nowadays, I leave early enough that she's not up yet. My wife's doing the drop-off in the morning, but I get to spend time with her in the evenings before she goes to bed.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:03:04) So I'm home by about 6:30 or so, 6:45, and then I get a good two hours. She's having dinner in the middle and just hanging out a little bit. Talk about her day. There's some photos from her preschool. I mean, she doesn't remember her day at this point. She's like, "I did the same thing." But then we look over those photos, and that sort of jogs her memory. And then when we talk about what she did, it's just always fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:33) Yeah. One of my friends, his daughter is, I think, five or six, and the preschool she goes to has cameras everywhere. And it has the vision system, so it tracks her and tags her. So no matter where he is, he can pull up his camera and see where she's at in school.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:03:50) Oh, wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:51) It sends updates. You could set it up to send updates. So it's constantly watching. I was like, that's totally different than how my school was.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:04:01) That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. This one is not that fancy. It's more like one of the preschool teachers takes a few photos during the day, things that she does and stuff like that, and they send a small note. "Hey, this is what your daughter did today." And it's fun to see that. But that sounds fancy, right? Having that continuous monitoring, just check whenever you want to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:25) Yeah. It's, I'm used to seeing the videos on social media or something where it's got the AI detection rectangle around the object. But if you're not used to seeing that in a preschool classroom.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:04:38) That's pretty fancy. Yeah. That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:41) So how did you fall in love with technology? What was your earliest memory with technology?

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:04:50) So that's the interesting thing. I think I always wanted to do something with computers and computer science since middle school or elementary school or something like that. Growing up in the eighties, nineties, right?

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:05:06) I remember my dad, my dad was into computer parts and supply at the time. He's done different things in his career, but he's an engineer, sort of an electrical engineer by training. And so he got me one of these, I forgot which one it was, but I did basic programming in grade school or something like that. And that was when I really got into it. And very early on, someone asked me what I want to do. I was pretty sure I wanted to be in computer science, which I think turned out well because this was sort of an area which, as I was growing up, was booming. There were so many opportunities, so many cool things to do, and that's sort of how I went into it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:47) Dude, my father, electrical engineer too, and he had this, yeah. And one of my earlier memories is he had this breadboard. You know? And he was so pumped because he had gone to Radio Shack, and he had one of those cases that has all the little tiny drawers on it so you can have all your little electronics in it.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:06:05) I see.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:05) And he's like, "Check it out. We got LEDs." He was really pumped about LEDs.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:06:11) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:11) "Oh, they come in different colors, and they're amazing now." And so he was showing me how to take the LED with the breadboard and actually get it to light up and do something.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:06:21) That's awesome. Yeah. I was looking at the toys that you get these days. There's some pretty fancy toys, right?

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:06:26) I sometimes look at Amazon, what are some toys I can get for my daughter? And then there was some electrical circuit thing, which sounded good. It was more like for eight-plus-year-olds. I was like, yeah, maybe I can get that and start sort of looking at it myself and then at some point, my daughter might engage with it. But it's so fancy what the types of things you have access to these days.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:50) I know. It's like the Arduinos are $60 or something, right? Or the Raspberry Pis. It's just, it did not exist when I was a kid.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:59) It just wasn't even close. I mean, I'm about 31. I don't know how old you are, but about 31. Okay. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:06) So we're not too far off because right when computers started, I was rare to have a computer.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:07:14) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:15) Not like, none of the kids around had the computers. It wasn't until about middle school, but I started really young because it was just my dad had to have it for work.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:07:25) Yeah. And it was even rarer. I grew up in India, in Bangalore. So Bangalore is now sort of known as the IT hub and so on in India, but it wasn't then, right? Most of that was in the nineties to late nineties. That's when a lot of those IT companies in Bangalore started up. But my dad was into this earlier than most, and that's why I sort of got into it. And then, of course, video games and all of that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:56) Of course. You gotta have some Call of Duty type stuff. Yeah.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:07:59) How do you go from some basic programming to VP of Engineering at Thumbtack?

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:09) Yeah.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:08:09) So yeah, like I said, so I was always into computer science, so then I did my undergrad in computer science in Bangalore, near Bangalore. And then I came to the US in 2002 or something. And then I studied computer science at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. And then my first job was at Microsoft. So I kind of started at larger companies. So I was at Microsoft for a few years and then Google for a few years. And I started in sort of developer tools, compilers, that sort of thing. But then I got super interested in search. So the next many years of my career were in search.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:08:44) And so this was Bing, except that it wasn't. So basically, Bing starting up, right? It wasn't even called Bing. It was called back then MSN Search because MSN was a big brand at the time and that was called Live Search or something. But this was basically the first 25 engineers or so at what is now called Bing, where we were like, "Hey, search is big. Google's doing great. Let's do something here." And this is sort of a high-energy moment. "Let's go build a search engine. Let's beat Google at their game."

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:09:16) And then I was doing that for a few years and it was fun. It was kind of like a startup within Microsoft. So I was used to sort of the more traditional Microsoft for the first couple of years. And then I got into this in four different worlds. It's a small environment. We felt like we could do whatever we wanted, build out a whole stack from the ground up and given a lot of freedom and a lot of resources. And so that was fun. We essentially built pieces of a search engine from the ground up. So I was working on sort of index serving, how we build the index, search engine index, and then how do we serve that to millions of users and all of that. But eventually, at some point, I decided, actually, I think I'd love to do this at Google.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:09:55) And so I came to the San Francisco area, the Bay Area, and I was at Google for a few years, working on the crawler. And that was a lot of fun. Technically, super interesting. Working on the crawler at Google felt great at the time. "Hey, this is sort of the biggest crawler out there. We are working on sort of the cutting-edge problems in web crawling." And it was fun and I learned a lot and got to work with some really good people. But at some point, you start to think of in large companies sometimes, what's my impact on the company, right? How can you do that? And then I was looking for going into something earlier stage.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:10:35) This was 2010 or 2011 or something like that. And that's when I moved to Twitter and Twitter was not a small startup, it felt to me like a small startup because I came from these large companies, large public companies, and Twitter was at the time, I think 80 or so engineers, 70 or something like that. It was not small, but for me it was a pretty big change, but it was a lot of fun. And so I started by doing search at Twitter. So that was my background. And then at some point I moved to storage systems. How do we store data and so on? Because that's sort of where at the time Twitter's problems were, the hardest problems at Twitter were managing scale. I don't know if you remember the fail whale and some of these things. Twitter saw this huge rapid growth very early on, multiple percent week over week, month over month, and the systems are not keeping up, right?

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:11:29) And so some of us who were working on other problems in Twitter were like, "Hey, let's go work on just scaling the site." And so I sort of got into infrastructure and sort of backend systems, distributed systems, that sort of stuff. And did that for a few years, then went to Pinterest. And that's sort of when I got into management, leading teams. And eventually I was leading all of the sort of backend systems teams, what we call infrastructure at Pinterest. And then I came back where I shifted into working on consumer product experiences type of stuff, still within engineering, but with a focus on more the product side of things and infrastructure and onward to where I am now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:09) So if I go on Thumbtack's website and use your search, it'll be incredibly fast, right?

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:12:15) That's what we hope it to be. We are never satisfied with how good it is. I always want to make it faster. The impact, we have some initiatives right now to make it faster and more relevant and so on.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:12:27) But yeah, in some ways Thumbtack is a search engine, but really oriented towards finding you the right professional for what you want. Right? So Google's job as a search engine is to go very broad and give you a lot of tools to research. We actually want to solve a different problem. We want to find that right match for you, right? This is the hardest problem. And this is ultimately what Thumbtack is trying to solve. It's so hard to find that right plumber or gardener for you, right? For what you want. It's not that you don't have access to a lot of tools that give you, "Hey, here's a hundred different plumbers in your area." There's all these tools that give you that, but it's hard to narrow down to, "Hey, price point, the fit for me." And in some categories, the fit matters more than others. A photographer, you want someone who maybe fits your style, whereas some other categories you're looking for price point, all of these things, but you want to narrow that down.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:13:19) And so it's interesting. Our problem is to narrow that, help you narrow down into that exact right pro that you want to hire for a particular job. It's more similar to, I think, an Airbnb or a flight search or finding that right place to stay when you travel, finding that right flight that you want to take when traveling somewhere rather than the broader retrieval problem that the search engines have.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:42) You make a fantastic point, especially with creative collaboration. So at our company, we have videographers and audio producers, and so we have this creative collaboration aspect to it. So when you talk about finding the right photographer for you, the human plays a big role. And when you open up a directory or a Google search and you get all these results of phone numbers, photographers, that doesn't tell you who is going like, who they are.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:14:12) And that's what sort of, that's what I think has made hiring a professional to do a job for you just particularly hard. So hard that as a homeowner, for example, you have a never-ending to-do list, which I feel is a challenge as a homeowner, but good for Thumbtack. You have this sort of, you fix one problem, you have one more problem. And but unless you want to do it yourself, in which case some things you can do yourself, but other things that are harder. But it's so hard. It takes so much time to do that research.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:14:46) And so Thumbtack started with that premise, and then we wanted our product, even over the last two years, to essentially try to give you a search-oriented experience, an interactive search experience, which turns out a lot of things that you do online end up being interactive searches, like buying a product on Amazon. You usually start with a search query and you see a bunch of options. You filter, you say, "Hey, I'd like four star and above," or the price range, and then you narrow down to what you want, and then you buy. And that's sort of our vision for where Thumbtack can go. Today, you can't quite book that pro, but we are getting really close and that's our goal.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:15:22) You should be, within minutes, find someone that you really like, see all the information, and this you can do pretty well. Find the information you want, like reviews, past work, past projects, photos. Give you all access to that. Give you a price. It's super key and you can't do that in all categories, like home remodel and so on. We can't give you a price, but in many things you can.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:15:42) House cleaning, like all of these things, we can give you a price. And once you have those, then you're narrowed down to these three or four people. Let me contact them, see what works best and schedule and move on. So when it works well, it's really powerful. I take a train ride home and I'm like, "Hey, I need to hire someone this weekend."

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:16:01) And then sometimes you find that right person, then you hear back, and that's magic. Right? Our goal is to make that really consistent. And yeah, a long way to go to really deliver that experience in a consistent way, works all the time, works across all the thousand categories that Thumbtack has.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:19) Well, I love the brand and the interface. The experience feels open and clean and easy to navigate the information. So I always like to give shout-outs to the branding and design teams when they do really good jobs. You know, I'm just a sucker for good design. When I see good design, it allows the company to make more mistakes with other things because you can win my heart with good user interface.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:16:46) No, absolutely. And that's the thing I always wonder. The design seems like magic to me as an engineer. That's the one area where, wow, this is magic.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:16:56) I mean, you think of a product that you want to build, and Thumbtack operates in a very cross-functional way, right? Designers, product managers, engineers, all sort of involved in every step of the product building process. And so we think of, "Yeah, we would like to build this," and then you hand it over to a designer and then you get their designs back. It's like magic. Like, wow.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:17:15) How did that happen? That's sort of exactly what I wanted, but I didn't know that that's what I wanted. And you're right. It's a nice craft, and working with really good designers is such a great experience.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:26) You made all of these transitions from, you know, different levels of your career through engineering, into leadership, and even farther into leadership. Right? What are some of the lessons that stand out to you, value that you can bring to the audience? Let's pretend that we have some engineering individual contributors, and they're looking to level up and become a first-time leader. What advice would you give to them?

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:51) I'm sure you have those types of people at your company. I think you have over 150 in engineering. Right?

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:17:56) That's right. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:57) Yeah. So if they sit you down, right, and they ask you for your personal advice about how to take that next step, what do you tell them?

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:18:06) That's a good question. So the first thing I'd say is, I think leadership has different forms of leadership. One thing I like to tell people is, sometimes people have a view of what leadership means, right? It's about management, managing larger teams and going down that path. But actually in tech, there's different forms of leadership, right?

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:18:31) You can lead by being really good at your craft, really, really good at engineering, and sort of have this broad influence without going down the management path, because the management path has some things that I think engineers don't realize. It's like people management is a big part of — a large part of your time as a manager is spent thinking about people and organizations and so on. Right? So first of all, I think people have to figure out how they want to develop.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:18:59) Do you want to develop by being an architect or principal engineer, or do you want to go down a manager path? Right? There's flavors of where you can combine the two — technical tech lead type of roles where you can do that. And honestly, I mean, I think one thing I like to talk about is: where do you want to be in about five years? Start to think about what opportunities you can take to do that.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:19:23) And it doesn't always work out the way you plan, but I think it still helps to think that way. For example, when I started off my career, for the first few years of my career, I was sure I would never want to be a manager. Right? I was convinced. This is not for me.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:19:38) I really enjoy building stuff, and I pushed aside any opportunities to move into management. In fact, part of the reason that I moved to Google was, at the time in Microsoft, it felt like the easiest path to grow in your career is to go down the manager path. And I didn't want to do that. And Google was famously known at the time — this was sort of 2007 Google —

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:19:57) it was a place where there were very few managers, it was super flat. You had 100 people reporting to one person and all of that. A very technical organization. And not things that we want — that model doesn't quite work at scale and so on and things that we want. But as an engineer who wanted to be technical, that felt like, "Well, this is what I want to do."

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:20:17) But at some point I found, actually this was when I was at Twitter, I took on a tech lead type of position where I realized that I can have higher impact by guiding other engineers than trying to do everything myself, right? Because there's only so many hours in the day, there's only so much that you can get done yourself. And at some point you realize: I can guide other people and it's so rewarding when that goes well, right? You see someone coming fresh out of school, a lot of potential, and then you help guide them to grow and have impact. Then I started to realize, "Well, this is super rewarding and I'd like to take this on and be good at it."

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:20:55) That's how I got into management. So that's what I would say: being open to possibilities that come up. I mean, you have a five-year plan on where you want to go, but your career tends to take you in different ways depending on what comes up. And to be open to that and be open to taking on — what I would call, this is what I tell every engineer — take on that stretch challenge, right? Especially to people who are doing really well, take on the thing which you think you cannot do.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:21:24) That's hard. I don't know if I can do that. Right? That's the type of thing you want to take on. Every so often you want to make sure that you're feeling stretched and growing. That's the best, best, best way to grow: taking on something which just seems out of reach.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:21:36) What do you and your manager — "I don't know if I'm ready for that." But, yeah, let's take it on and try it out, because more often than not, really good performers, they lean in and they grow through that process. And then you take on the next challenge and so on. And that usually leads to growth in whichever direction that works for you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:57) Now do you do, like, round tables or workshops? How do you engage with your engineers?

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:22:04) Mostly through one-on-one conversation. So I mean, we are at the phase — I mean, 150-odd people — I think it still works to do a lot of things one-on-one. So I obviously spend a lot of time with people that report to me, but I also have a two or three-hour block each week when I'm just meeting people from the broader engineering team, either folks that have expressed an interest in meeting me, or I feel like, "Oh, I'd like to catch up with these folks." And so that's how we do round tables and other things.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:22:33) So we have a mentorship program at Thumbtack where anyone can sign up to be a mentor and anyone can sign up to be a mentee and then we pair them. So that works actually beyond engineering. And we have sponsorship programs that we're working on for sort of high-potential leaders, emerging leaders who are on a good path to get to an executive level, a director position. So a few different forms of this. But I like to spend a lot of time one-on-one with engineers from across the organization.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:23:02) And this is what I sort of talk about. Are you feeling engaged? Are you growing? And we do things to make sure people are growing. And sometimes it comes at a short-term cost to the company.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:23:12) For example, let's say you take a really good front-end engineer who is one of our best. Right? Doing super well and has done that for the last two years or three years. But you can sense that that person's feeling bored, or not quite feeling bored, but you see that, "Oh, this person is really good at their craft. So what more can they do?"

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:23:31) Right? And sometimes the right option for something like that is a change of pace. We had one of our front-end engineers a few months back go into iOS development. Right? That's a new area for them.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:23:42) And yes, there's a short-term cost to the team. Like, "Hey, we just — one of our best front-end engineers is now an emerging, a learning iOS engineer." But in the long run, it works out. Within a few months, that person ramps up and then so they are happy and the team's happy. And then, so sometimes we do that. People move from engineering into data science.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:24:01) So we encourage movement, and even between teams at Thumbtack, that's one way to grow. The other way to grow is in taking on different roles and new challenges.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:10) You mentioned that there was a higher-level manager program type thing that you just mentioned. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? I'm kind of interested. I'm interested in that.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:24:18) Yeah. This is something we're just starting to pilot this quarter, but it's actually focused on — it started off focused on diversity and inclusion initiatives. So, how can we sponsor underrepresented areas and women leaders and so on to get those opportunities and get mentorship to grow into leadership, so that we can continue to make our leadership team more diverse. So we have a leadership team, and then we have an extended leadership team, which is all our directors and above. And we're always looking at ways where we can build diversity into that.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:24:54) So it started off with that in mind, where the goal is to identify a few folks who are on the edge of leadership, and then have someone on the leadership team be a sponsor for them, which is more like a mentor, but also someone who's more closely associated — is aware of your work and proactively helping you grow rather than mentorship, which is more about bouncing ideas and spending time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:22) Is it a program? Do they actually do a structured thing, or is it just sort of formally informal, where I have a mentor or I have an individual, and then they sponsor my work? We engage around? Or do they have sort of a structured way that they —

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:25:37) So we are figuring some of those details out now, but this one will probably essentially work like mentorship, but also have a proactive component. And that's why we're using the word sponsor rather than mentor. The idea is that the sponsor is also proactively looking at: "Hey, here are some ways that this person can have an opportunity outside of their area of work." Right? One of our senior leaders is our director of IT.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:26:07) And one of the things I was working with her on is: here are some ways you can have an impact on the rest of the organization, right? I mean, obviously she's really good at IT and she's grown in that area. She has more knowledge than me or anyone else. And she's a great leader there. There are some ways you can have influence and work on projects across the company, which are more about culture, company building, other types of things.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:26:35) So it's really about finding those types of opportunities and presenting them to emerging leaders. And we're starting with this diversity lens, but over time, it could evolve into a much broader program.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:47) I hope you don't mind my probing. It's just you guys have the Fortune Best Places to Work in Technology, the Fortune Best Places to — you're all — all the publicity about you guys being such a great place to work. So I'm hyped whenever I — you know, not the top 1% of companies are the top 1% because they're the top 1%. So when I get someone like this, like you, right, at a company like this, I have to ask these types of questions. We find out, you know, what are these great companies doing?

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:27:14) No, absolutely. Yeah. And yeah, we spend a lot of time thinking about it. Just sort of providing different avenues for growth.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:27:21) And that's the one thing we have found about these types of development opportunities, right? There's no one-size-fits-all. Different people are in different phases of their career and have different things that work for them to grow, right? A lot of people learn from their manager, that's key. But sometimes you learn from being partnered with a mentor from a different function within the company.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:27:44) Sometimes you learn from an external mentor. And I've had myself — in my career, I've had different mentors over time and different growth opportunities over time. And sometimes there's the structured management training. We do that for new managers. We make sure that they are equipped with all the tools that you need to truly succeed as a manager. And, how do you give hard feedback?

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:28:04) Some of these things. And we extend some of these programs that are traditionally only for managers to also senior engineers and technical leaders. For example, this session on: how do you give critical feedback? Right? Some of the hardest things as a manager — how do you give constructive feedback in a way that's received well? So we do a session for managers, but we also include some of our tech leads and some senior engineers because ultimately, as you grow in your engineering career, irrespective of what track you're on, a lot of it is around building relationships, working with people, leading teams, whether by influence or directly, and these are skills that are useful to you.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:28:45) That's actually one of the things I think when I was early on as an engineer, and I see this sometimes with engineers early in their career, it's not immediately obvious how much what are traditionally called soft skills are important. I don't like the term because it sounds like, "Oh, it's soft" — is that versus hard? Those are super critical, right? And in fact, we have a career ladder that emphasizes that.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:29:06) I mean, there's technical expertise, but there's collaboration, there's people leadership, and all of these collectively drive your impact. Right? The more senior you are in your career and along this ladder, the more some of these things play a role. And that's important, I think, to even early on recognize, because ultimately, collaboration—we are a team and you work most effectively when you're thinking of that versus this individual technical excellence.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:36) It's incredibly important because relationships are everything in life. And the only way you can move yourself—you could be the greatest technical person in the world, and you're not going to move forward if nobody likes you, if you can't work with other people. Right?

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:29:50) It ends up holding you back in many cases in your career at some point. And so that's why we have this structured approach through these pillars in our ladder. And we talk to people like, hey, you're doing great on this area, but here's some areas where you can continue to grow and develop.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:08) We—it's become so much of a topic of conversation on the show that we ended up creating a company from it. So the way we power our show is we have a leadership company. So here was the interesting part. So I didn't necessarily want to do it. People kept asking about it. They'd say, hey, we hear you on our commute talking to these technology leaders about all of these things, you know, soft skills, communication, leadership. All of this stuff is so important. How do we get our people to learn that? And I said, I don't know. And then people kept asking, and so we ended up making a company, and now we've grown into about 10 people. So I was very excited for life to take me in that direction. Right?

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:30:49) Yeah. You're exactly right. Like, there's this famous quote, and I don't know if it's true or not, but I've heard it second and third hand. This guy called Bill Coughran, who was a senior vice president at Google—like, he was at some point my boss on paper, but I would hardly meet him. Like, this is the days of Google where you'd have a person with hundreds of reports and so on. But he's now in Sequoia, and he had this quote, which is like, technology is easy, people are hard. Right? And I think one thing you realize in the role of CTO, as you grow into engineering leadership, a lot of the things, a lot of your time and a lot of your mental bandwidth is spent around organizations, people, because ultimately this is how you get things done. Technology problems—I mean, once you hire a great engineering team, the technology problems will get solved. You have really good people. It's all about making sure communication and all of this stuff works really well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:47) I love that quote. Who is that? Technology is easy. People are hard.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:31:51) Yeah. So, I mean, this was again secondhand or thirdhand. But yeah, it was this guy called Bill Coughran. He's in Sequoia.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:00) Sequoia Capital? Yeah. That's a good company. They're everywhere.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:32:05) Yes. They're one of our investors too, by the way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:08) Oh, they are? Yeah. Oh, fantastic. Yeah. The people and the leadership skills, it's just it ended up being so incredibly important. You mentioned workshop. Have you ever attended that critical feedback workshop?

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:32:24) Yeah. I actually was one of the people who presented there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:29) Bring the value, my friend. Tell me. Give me some tips on giving critical feedback.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:32:35) Critical feedback. Yeah. So there's a few different things that I think matter. I'll tell you one dimension. Right? One dimension to it is when you give it. Right? There's this example of, like, let's say someone did something and then brought down the site and we're debugging and trying to get the site back up. That's not a great moment to, like, hey, let me give you some feedback. Right? That's just the wrong time. And this is an extreme example that drives the point home, but there's—you need to figure out when is the right time. The other extreme of that is, like, six months later in some kind of a performance review you're talking about, hey, remember six months back on that month, in July, this happened. That's too late. So you have to figure out when is the right time to give feedback. Usually it might be a one-on-one type of setting next week or something like that. So one dimension to think about is time. When is the right time to give feedback? The other common issue that happens with critical feedback is what's called the feedback sandwich, where you're sandwiching critical feedback between good feedback. Right? Like, they're saying, oh, you're doing great. Everything's awesome, but something. And that sometimes can not work in a couple of different ways. One is you might dilute the impact of that feedback. The other one, it might not come across as authentic. And so I try to approach a feedback conversation very directly and upfront. By the way, praise and recognition is super important. That's one of the things that sometimes people forget. And I think relevant, specific praise and recognition, we should do all the time. But when you want to deliver critical feedback, I think it's good to set the stage and get into it. And then be very specific about what you observed and the impact that that's had, and then what do you want to do about it? And these are subtle things, but it should not come across as judgmental or about that person, but more about the behavior and the impact that that's had. And also good to leave that conversation with specific action items. Okay? What do we change and how do we do that? One thing I like to do is think of this as a conversation where you're partnering with them to solve the issue. You are coming at it as helping them do it. And ideally, you've built a relationship of trust over a long period of time that helps you do this well. But the way of thinking about it—and I generally think about it going into that conversation—is like, hey, I want to partner with this person to make them successful and going at it with that angle where you're problem solving together rather than you being here and them being there and you're giving feedback and so on. Does that make sense?

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:26) Yeah. You want to be consultative versus authoritative. Right? And I like what you're—first of all, I approve of the session. I love the points you hit with the consultation versus authoritative. I like that advice, and I like how you also address this build trust with them because the great leaders and a lot of the advice is predicated on the fact that you are an influential leader in the sense that people follow you because they believe in you, not because of your title. Right? That's a way different conversation to have. But yeah. So I really like that aspect of it. I like leaving the specific action items because then it's less of we just sat down to talk about how I was doing poorly and more about we sat down to talk about how I can improve. And now I've shifted my focus to the exact items that'll get me where I want to be. And I would think the last part that I enjoyed was, like you said, setting the initial focus. If I say, hey, come over here. I want to praise you. I want to give you candy, and then you come over here, and I give you a handful of broccoli and point out your flaws, you're not going to want to come back to my store anymore. Right? You're going to actually dilute the trust with the individual by doing that. But by saying, hey, there's this area I want to talk to you about. I have some ideas. I might see a different perspective that you don't see. Let's discuss this. That sets the tone for, I'm going to grow. I'm going to learn. I'm going to go into this thing, and it's like performance review. Right?

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:37:09) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:10) I have to watch videos of myself speaking after I speak on stage when I go around giving my talk so I can get better at public speaking. Right? I don't want to, but I do it. But no one's luring me in there to see a brand new hit movie and then showing me my speaker reel. Right? It's like I'm sitting down to do this speaker reel. Yeah.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:37:30) Yeah. And then we have this twice a year performance review process. I usually like nothing there to be a surprise. Right? I tell my managers, don't wait for performance review. Feedback should be continuous all the time and regular, both praise and constructive feedback. Right? The thing that you get out of the performance reviews—because we have this 360 review process, which I think a lot of companies have these days, but you get feedback from your peers, from cross-functional peers, other engineers that you work with, and that gives you a much more complete—and we share all of that feedback directly with everyone. And that gives you a more complete picture than what your manager can give you. But, yeah, nothing in a performance review should, I think, in an ideal world, come as a surprise to anyone. You've been hearing this feedback all the time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:26) Are most of your engineers local, like on-site in San Francisco, or are they mostly distributed?

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:38:33) No. It's mostly local. So we have—Thumbtack has a Salt Lake office, which is mainly ops oriented. We have a customer support team and other teams there. We have started to build a small engineering team there as a pilot. We have a few engineers there. Traditionally, we have been 100% local in San Francisco.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:56) Oh, very cool. Yeah. And so you have, like, over 150 of them there in San Francisco?

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:39:03) That's right. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:03) I'm there, like, four or five times a year. What part are you in?

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:39:07) So we are in the same building as Twitter. So it's on Market Street. Yeah. Yeah. This is—it's interesting that this is this huge building. It's—we are on one floor. But the floor has something like, I think, capacity for a thousand people. Right? It's massive. It's like one block long. So we kind of get to sit together and have the whole team.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:33) That's pretty exciting, man.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:39:35) And we have a good cafeteria and culinary team, so everyone is well fed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:40) You got some food there?

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:39:41) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:42) I'm on my way.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:39:43) You should come and visit. Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:46) Yeah. I've visited probably four times a year. Right now I'm working on—it's first of all, the podcast exploded. Right? And so now I get to travel all over the world, like Sweden, Germany, Amsterdam, the United States, all over. And so I'm giving this talk this year. I took the advice—some of the best pieces of advice—from CTO of NASA, Microsoft, Verizon, all these great engineering leaders that have been in the game for a long time. And I condensed it down into a 27-minute talk that I'm going around to conferences and sharing. So I'm right now—I'm talking with Yazir from Williams-Sonoma. Do you know Williams-Sonoma, the kitchen company?

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:40:31) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:31) Yeah. They're in San Francisco. So I was talking to him about coming out there and giving a talk to some of their engineers. And so if I'm out there, I'll hit you up and let you know.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:40:41) That'd be awesome. That'd be great. Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:43) And you seem like you have that culture because you have the new manager programs. You have the programs to lift up—you really care about growing your people and sharing this is the information that's useful to move yourself forward. I like that style. You're in my tribe.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:41:01) Yeah. No. I look forward to looking at—is it on YouTube or something? I'd love to look at your 27-minute—yeah. That's awesome. That's great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:08) We have—we have—Alex is our videographer. So we have this—we just kicked it off a couple times in January. We're still in January. Right? So I've given it at a couple of conferences in January so far, and so he took the footage from me doing that and turned it into a reel for the rest of the locations.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:41:27) No. That's great because, I mean, I think—yeah, people like—I think Kevin Scott, you had on your show before, he's my previous boss's boss. And I've heard so many good things. But these people are so busy and you don't have access to them. Right? And it's great that you're able to get them—get that thing out and then also condense what you heard from a lot of these leaders into something that any engineer can access and benefit from.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:58) Yeah. You'd love to see the data too. We've got these deep spreadsheets. I know we love them. They work great. And we tag our conversations. We have this thing called the Empire Clip Library where we take all the advice, and we've collected all of this information. I did last year—I did 230 interviews. Right? And we started cross-referencing them and talking with them and refining it. And then we took—ultimately, we did this data project, and we took the habits of the people that get to the top that are most common between all of them. And then I put those into the talk so that—and it's like you get a little story, and then you get a piece of tactical advice. So everything's, like, interesting story, steps you can actually execute because I don't know. You go to a lot of conferences or no?

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:42:48) I used to. Not recently. Yeah. I used to go to a lot of technical conferences. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:52) So I go here and there. But the thing that frustrates me about the talks is, just me personally—I don't know if it resonates with you—the stories are great, but I always want that tactical advice. I want to hear here's a story, here's steps to replicate. And it's usually just a bunch of story or a bunch of steps. And so I like it when they're merged. So I structured the talk like that, and I think that's why people have been liking it.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:43:19) No. That's awesome. Because, I think, what you said resonated a lot. Everyone has a story and a path they took that's different. Right?

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:43:29) And for one thing, that's where I think everyone should take away is I should craft my own path. But then it's great that you can sort of look across a lot of leaders with very different styles, very different paths and, hey, get a few sort of attributes that stand out. And that's super helpful because an individual sort of tactical advice may not work for someone because, yeah, it depends on the company, the stage and culture and all of this stuff. But when you're looking at a large cross section of people and something stands out, those are likely to be very broadly applicable then.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:03) Yes. And it's very helpful to know too because doing that work now, I know how to get to the next level. I know how to do that. I just copy the people who did it. I think it's good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:19) At one of the talks in the Q&A, someone raised their hand and said, are you concerned about survivorship bias? And I was like, in your data? And that was actually the first time I had heard that word, but I did my best to reverse engineer what it meant. And I asked for clarity, and they said, yeah, the fact that you're looking at only the great people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:38) And I said, well, I'm not too concerned for two reasons. The first one is that we looked at all types of leaders. So and then I just took what was common between the ones that got the farthest. I didn't only look at the ones that got the farthest, which would be the survivorship. Secondly, as just hearing about survivorship bias for the first time, I tend to still think it's a valid thing to do. If I have any options, my option's going to be to look at the most successful group of people and copy them. I don't think you can go wrong with that.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:45:10) Yeah, no, absolutely. And what I've learned is, yeah, I love biographies. I love just sort of reading about previous people. And, yeah, I mean, I think it's important to realize I have to find my own path. It may not be the exact same path as this other person because people have different backgrounds and so on, but what is that one or two things, tactics and things that they did at that right time that I can replicate in my career.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:37) So any advice that you'd give real quick to CTOs that are growing their company? Right now, Thumbtack is growing pretty well. Correct?

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:45:45) Yeah, yeah, that's right. So in the time I've been here, two and a half to three years, approaching three years in April, we nearly tripled the team. So we were around 50, and now we are at 150 to 160 with another team.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:57) Yeah. That qualifies for hypergrowth. 20 to 30% is what's considered, or 20 to 40% is hypergrowth. So advice to any CTOs going through that right now?

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:46:10) Yeah. I mean, I think the biggest thing is, and this is a challenge that people face, but more than a solution...

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:18) That's okay.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:46:19) The thing to keep in mind is, what are, as you're growing, things have to change. Right? What worked at a certain size obviously doesn't work for the latest size, but you have to, I think one of the biggest challenges I've seen is how do I keep the best aspects of the culture that really work well for the company through this phase and how do I evolve everything else? Right? And then the right steps and moments in time to do that.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:46:46) For example, Thumbtack for a long time did not have a career ladder. We didn't have this sort of, hey, here's sort of these levels and this is how you grow in a structured way in your career. And the reason for that, one, was somewhat simple. We said, just focus on impact. Just grow your impact. There's so much to do that you can take on more scope. There's no dearth of problems to solve. But what we found is as people get more tenured in the company, especially when you're very early in your career, you want a more structured sort of framework, right, to just observe your growth and then also understand all the dimensions of growth and so on. And so at some point last year, we rolled out this career ladder that was helpful. And so it's various times and as the organization grows, there are different needs that emerge and then how you build the leadership team and so on. And I think just it's important to keep that in mind.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:47:35) And there are some aspects of the culture that we want to retain as long as we can. Right? We have a very collaborative culture. Right? We have this sort of value called "make each other better." How do we retain that and continue to find ways to make that happen even as the team grows? Just foster a culture of close collaboration between the various teams and parts of the product. So that's the biggest thing that comes to mind, just being aware of change and raising change in a positive way as your organization grows, your technical stack grows. Growth's fun, but it's something you have to keep on top of all the time and try to think ahead in some ways. Not like it sort of creeps up on you. Right? Just like with distributed systems, you want to plan for what's our traffic a year out, not not next week, and not five years out because that's sort of getting ahead of yourself. So that's the balance that I think is the biggest challenge.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:35) I enjoyed that value, make each other better. Do you have a quick 15-second talk on that?

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:48:43) Yeah. No, it's really about, I think, recognizing that you growing and you helping other people grow and other people do better is just fundamental to how a company grows and gets through these phases of growth. When the company is growing, you're adding on more users. It's just becoming larger and larger. You're adding more people, but you also want to grow all of your people along with that. Right? And that's the best way that sort of your company can evolve well. And it's just fundamental to our culture. Right? And part of that is, I think, sharing constructive feedback. And that's why we do this sort of session and so on, because we actually encourage everyone to share. A lot of the things I love is we do these 360 reviews and you have people spend a lot of time. Somebody just told me yesterday that they were writing peer reviews and they spent one hour for each peer review. Right? That's great. Somebody felt like, yeah, I'll dedicate a large chunk of my time to give feedback to others, both positive and sort of constructive. And that's something I really love about the Thumbtack culture.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:49:51) And I think everyone here loves that people are willing to spend that time helping everyone grow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:58) I love it. That's a successful culture. Man, I've learned so much from you today. I love it. You've got the cool name, RVP. Right?

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:50:09) Yeah. No, yeah. It's been great chatting with you, and I'm gonna look up some of your past podcasts. And I think it looks like just absorbing information and I love getting into one podcast and then spending the next few weeks on that. So I'll probably do that with your podcast, look up your talks too. It's been great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:31) Yeah. You gotta make that train ride useful. Right?

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:50:34) Absolutely. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:36) I'd start with Microsoft because you know Kevin Scott.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:50:39) Yes, yes. He's great. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:40) CTO of NASA. Yeah. You know, it says on LinkedIn that you know Prashant at Asana.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:50:47) Yes. I think, yeah, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:49) He's the CTO of Asana. Yep.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:50:50) I see. You have him too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:51) Cool. Awesome. Probably just for, at an event or...

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:50:55) Probably. Yeah. That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:56) He's in San Francisco. He's in your city. Yeah. So yeah. Yeah. He was a great one. So Asana, Kevin Scott, NASA. That's more than enough to get you started. See if you like it, want to binge a few more.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:51:10) Absolutely. Binge watching the podcast. Yeah. I'll do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:12) And then, of course, the best one on the planet, RVP's episode.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:51:17) Great. Yeah. Awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:20) Thank you so much. If I'm out in San, or next time I'm out in San Francisco, I'll put you on my travel alert spreadsheet. So ping you. If you come by, say hello, try out some of that food you said you have over there.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:51:30) Yeah. No, that'll be great. It'll be great to have you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:33) Thank you so much. You have a fantastic afternoon, my friend.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:51:36) Yeah. You too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:37) Talk soon.

(RVP (Raghavindra) at 00:51:38) Talk to you soon. Bye.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:45) 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], 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. We're trying to get listed on the top 100 for iTunes, and I need your help in order to do this.