Aligning Goals and Action with Dave Subar, Founder and Interim CTO/CPO at Interna

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:05) Hello, my friends. Today, Joel is talking to Dave, founder and interim CTO and CPO at Interna. And they discuss how Dave helped coach Disney on launching Disney Plus, how to align your actions with long-term goals in mind, and how to roll with the punches and stay nimble to find success. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:32) This is the Modern CTO Podcast. Well, man, I am so glad to have you here. I have been aware of the LA CTO Forum for like ever. So many times I went to California, I was like, I'm gonna come stop by. And then I didn't. And so it's been like this elusive thing in my mind.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:56) Are you the founder or the president of it?

(Dave Subar at 00:00:58) No, no. I'm on the board of directors, so that's one of my hats.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:02) Yeah. When I saw you were part of that, I was like, oh, finally I'm getting to see someone from that organization. So super excited that you could come on the show and hang out with us.

(Dave Subar at 00:01:12) Awesome. Yeah, I've been following you, so got a mutual admiration society going on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:17) Nice. So tell me a little bit about what it is that you do.

(Dave Subar at 00:01:21) So aside from being on the board of the LA CTO Forum, I run a company called Interna. What we care about is product management, engineering, and how to make them successful, how to make them effective. You can think about it like the lean startup model. But actually, a lot of people don't know how to do it, don't do it well. How do you build fast, ship fast, get in the market, hear what the market really wanted, iterate? And so we've been doing this for eight years, helping companies from small startups. Have several unicorns, worked with the Walt Disney Company. But it's all about what's the right process, who are the right people, what's the right org design.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:00) What did you get to do at Disney?

(Dave Subar at 00:02:01) Disney was an interesting story. So I was coaching the Disney, the ABC Television Group. This was my project. There's several of us. This was my project. And then he left, and I was working with the EVP, Product Management, Engineering, ABC Television Group. And then I was working with the president after the EVP left. And at first it was how to make those groups more effective. But the president asked me a very important question. He said, what did you tell the CTO, and what should I know?

(Dave Subar at 00:02:34) And I said to him, well, I can tell you what I told the CTO, and he was being very effective at implementing that stuff. And I can tell you to make product management engineering here about 10% better, or we can talk about something that's gonna be a lot harder. And a lot harder thing might have a much better outcome, but I'm gonna tell you it's gonna be a lot harder. I said, what do you want to have a conversation about? He said, let's have a conversation about the second one. And I was like, great, that's awesome. I said, in the first case, 10% better means Netflix will kill you slower. A lot harder means you might win or you might lose, and I don't know, but you might win.

(Dave Subar at 00:03:18) I said, the lot harder thing is your organizational design is fundamentally broken. The guy who ran Disney Channel made a lot of revenue off of cable, but he liked his technology group because it was sexy. And the woman who ran ABC News, same thing. Over the air, lot of revenue, got most of her attention. Her digital group was sexy. The guy who ran ABC Primetime, same thing. I said, until you take those three groups and bring them together and make them one digital group, because they do the same thing, your groups will never be great. You have an org design problem. It's not your architecture, which sometimes you have problems. It's not your personnel. Sometimes we see problems. That's not your process. Your org design is fundamentally broken, which means you gotta rip these three groups away from these executives that have it, and they're gonna be really sad. And you're gonna change your bonus structure, and you're gonna fundamentally change your organization. That's what I'm telling you you gotta do in order for your group to be great.

(Dave Subar at 00:04:20) And by the way, this guy's name is Bruce. I said, Bruce, I can't report to you. The Walt Disney Company is organized by channels to marketplace. So Parks and Resorts reports to the CEO. It's Bob Iger at the time. Studios reports to the CEO. This is another channel to marketplace. So this is gonna report to the CEO. And then they did it, and it became Disney Plus. Now I don't want to say that I was the only person who told the Walt Disney Company they needed to do this. There's a lot of smart people there. But this was the conversation we had. Sometimes the problem with product management engineering is the architecture is wrong. Sometimes you're not running the right agile methodology or you're running it poorly. Sometimes you don't have the right people in the room. This was an org design problem.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:09) Well, first of all, next time I'm having problems with the Disney Plus app, I'm calling you. And the second thing is, I think it's interesting what you mentioned about teams. Because when I do talks publicly, one of the questions I get the most is, ultimately, the person's trying to justify the structure of the team or try to change it because this fancy word of the day, they use two pizzas to feed their team. And this one, they use squads, and then whatever it is. And I find myself having the experience, because I'm an engineer but I'm also equally an entrepreneur, I find myself just constantly telling them that, hey, your business line, your line of business, and what your customers need dictates the shape of your organization. Like, don't try to copy somebody else just because they wrote a book about it.

(Dave Subar at 00:05:54) That's exactly, yep. Organizational design is like software architecture. You build it for a problem. You build processes to solve a problem. Don't just copy somebody. Like, two-pizza teams, great concept, works a lot of places, doesn't work everywhere. Great for Amazon, may or may not work for you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:16) Yeah. So what did you do with Spotify?

(Dave Subar at 00:06:19) So I didn't work with Spotify, but I knew some people there. And I was giving a presentation about different processes and ways people work together, and I was talking about the Spotify model. I said the Spotify model failed, and there was somebody in the audience. And he said, you're wrong. It didn't fail. As a matter of fact, I worked at Spotify. It worked. And he said the same thing you just said. He said, we designed the Spotify model for a particular strategy we had, a particular moment in time. When Spotify started out, it was a small business without a lot of revenue, without a lot of customers. And we knew there were gonna be competitors who had a lot more money than we had, and we needed to be able to innovate very quickly.

(Dave Subar at 00:07:04) So we did this squad model. We had a bunch of independent teams that were empowered but not aligned, because we needed to iterate very, very quickly. And so we put together what's called the Spotify model. And we did it, and it got us to the next stage, and then it failed, right? We purposely iterated on it because it got us to where we needed to get to. And then we went to another model, which was appropriate for where Spotify was at that time. And the learning there was exactly what you just said, which is pick the right model for the right problem.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:39) It's so important. So you get to do this all the time? You get to go talk with companies, look at their models, analyze them, and then provide insight?

(Dave Subar at 00:07:48) Yeah. There's four things we do. One is we'll just do the analysis and say, here's some stuff you're doing well, here's some stuff you might want to do differently. It goes out. It's a diagnosis and a prescription. Some companies will just have us do that. Some companies will say, we have a CTO or chief product officer, because those are two things we care about. Can you help coach them through that? The third thing, somebody's gonna say, we don't have somebody. We're just hitting growth, and the stuff that got us here isn't gonna get us the next part. Or we keep putting capital in here and we don't think we're gonna get to the next stage. We will be interim executives and help get to the partners for the next stage and help hire someone behind. And then we do diligence for VC firms, for VCs buying deals, and M&A transactions. Those are the four things we do. And so we help companies with those things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:36) You love your job? You love what you do?

(Dave Subar at 00:08:38) Love the job. I've been CTO. I've been chief product officer. All of us have. This is the best job I've ever had.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:46) Why do you think that is?

(Dave Subar at 00:08:48) Look, here's what drives me. I like learning. I love technology. I like meeting people, and I want to do something that has an effect on the world. Yeah. I created a job for me to help me do what I wanted to do, simultaneously creating value for somebody else. Like, that's the metric. It's gotta be like, you gotta love it, and someone's gotta go like, dude, I wish I'd see that guy more.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:13) Oh, yeah. I mean, look, this is what I did, right? It's crazy. Like, podcast host in high school was not a thing. It was not a job thing you could do. It's so fascinating what has transpired because I wanted it to be big. Like, I wanted to do something great and big and whatnot, but it was like a totally different idea. I thought I would meet some great people, have some relationships, and end up being like a CTO at a really large company or head of product at a really large company. That's what I thought the podcast would result in. I never thought that the podcast would result in being my job.

(Dave Subar at 00:09:51) Yep. And you have impact, right? For me, like, we do stuff and we have impact. That feels good, and people want to be associated with people that have impact. You do the same thing. I learned about you way before this conversation. Like, I've known about you before a long time. Like, I've listened to the podcast. I know other people who listen to it. I've had conversations with other people about the podcast. Like, it's great. Like, it's great to go, like, oh, I did something out of the impact and people care, and I've made things better. And by the way, people give me money for that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:24) Yeah. It's insane. It's so cool.

(Dave Subar at 00:10:26) Yeah. It's great. Your job in some ways is like mine.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:30) Exactly. And so for about a decade, I did something very similar as just an independent consultant with a small team, as you're talking about, mostly companies getting injections of capital and me helping, like, rewrite their systems or build their teams and then sort of leaving. One of the things I loved about that was getting to jump into an industry, learn all about it, do something useful there, and then go into another industry. And so when I realized this pattern, I thought of a couple things. The first off, early on in the podcast, I had interviewed some consultants or something from Deloitte or one of those larger consulting companies, and I found out that that's what that job is called, right? You don't have to have your own business. That's like what that job is. So I thought that was really interesting. But then I realized that I'm satisfying that need because one day I'm talking to people who make, you know, brain implants, the next day, molecular beverage printers, then people, you know, that do all these different interesting things. And because I get to do it so often, it's like I could never go back to only getting one new one every, you know, year.

(Dave Subar at 00:11:34) No. That's absolutely right. Like, we've worked with a company that does SaaS service for clinical trials that helped work clinical trials on COVID, right? We worked with Eli Lilly and Merck and Sanofi and helped make that process fair. That's awesome. Worked with lynda.com, right? We had online learning, got sold to LinkedIn. Lots and lots of different companies, interesting stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:57) What was lynda.com like?

(Dave Subar at 00:11:59) So fascinating. I'll tell you a Lynda story. So there's actually a Lynda.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:04) Oh, really?

(Dave Subar at 00:12:05) Yeah. Lynda and Bruce. She's a lot like the logo, but she has three dimensions. She's actually RGB as well. But I got there and they were having trouble scaling. And I was there about two weeks, and I get this flame mail from Lynda. And she said, this woman tried to unsubscribe from our marketing list, and she's still getting marketing from us, WTF, except there was no abbreviation. And it was in all caps. And I was like, lady, I just got here. Like, figure this out. Like, of all the things you need me to work on, your marketing list doesn't seem like it's a real high priority, but like, whatever. Your name's on the logo. I'll do it. So it turned out there were two marketing lists, and you unsubscribe from one, you unsubscribe from another. Still feeling very trivial to me. And so I went to Lynda. I said, there's two marketing lists. They weren't integrated. We weren't integrated. Let's build real product that people care about. But we'll get this fixed. Don't worry. And she said, great. Get it fixed today. And I was like, fine. We'll get it fixed today. I'm like, really? Like, I got other things that you really need me to work on. They were doing $75 million a year revenue. They're going 50% year over year. They were like, had things to do.

(Dave Subar at 00:13:13) And I said, we'll get it done. I said, Lynda, by the way, tell me, like, why do you care so much about this? Like, what is the deal? She said, I read every email from everybody that emails us. I want to make sure we're building a great product. She was no longer CEO. She had appointed a CEO. She wanted to make sure she understood her ecosystem. The users, the course creators, the people that bought it. And they were also selling to the corporation. She read every email. She was so concerned about value creation. She wanted to get the raw data. They built a great product. I said, I got the WTF message. Like, I get why this matters to you.

(Dave Subar at 00:13:58) And guess what? We got that fixed same day, and we kept, and they sold for $1.4 billion, $1.2 billion. It was a, you know, a big number. I won't tell you what part Lynda got, but Lynda did quite well herself and the group. But it was because they cared so much about all the constituencies. And the employees, like, one Christmas, everybody got a new laptop. Everyone got that new Mac once. That's what Lynda was about. Lynda was about how do we create value for everybody that we touch.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:29) It's a good recipe, right?

(Dave Subar at 00:14:31) Like, I have such respect for it. I went from like, I can't believe why you care about this this much to like, okay, I completely get it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:40) Now are you the founder of the consulting company?

(Dave Subar at 00:14:42) Interna, yes. I'm the founder.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:44) Okay. So you've got that perspective of things as well.

(Dave Subar at 00:14:48) That's exactly right. It's all about, like, what are we here to do? We are here to help companies figure out how to create value for their customers. Our engagements are only successful for coaching someone. Did we help them become a better CTO or chief product officer? Yes or no? If it's no, like, what are we gonna do about, like, it's the whole agile process in retro. Like, we have processes against everything. We run the processes, and then we retro everything. Like, how can we be better? Did we or did we not create value?

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:19) I have an unrelated question to this conversation. It came up today. So I have a friend who's a political consultant, and he works on campaigns, and he does things in the advertising space for campaigns through digital marketing. And he was telling me, like, his company is doing well. It's mostly him, and he's got a couple administrative assistants. But he was saying he's had a really tough time finding another him to also provide strategy and things of that nature to the customer so he doesn't have to do every single customer, right, to scale his business beyond himself. And you've done that with your consultancy. So I'm curious. How did you find those people?

(Dave Subar at 00:15:58) So it's slow and hard. Now, so I'm on the board of the LA CTO Forum, so we have 350 CTOs. So I know a lot of people, and people that were like, hey, I'm trying to figure out what to do next, or maybe they just jumped out of a job who I respect, and had some conversations with.

(Dave Subar at 00:16:14) Now we've got a guy in London. We've got one in Toronto, and there's one in Seattle. And we got folks in LA. And then it was just word of mouth, but it is a very rigorous process for us to interview you. Very rigorous.

(Dave Subar at 00:16:28) And then the first project, I will work on with you directly. I need to understand, like, there's a value thing. Right? The Linda thing, it's like we create value for people, and you've gotta be down with that. If you're just like, hey, I just wanna do this and make some money and be out. So it's really hard, but it's like everything else. It's 90% of your problems are recruit well, retain well, fire well. Because we have methodologies, you can learn what we do, but you can't learn, I want to help people create interesting stuff. That's gotta be a bit you got set.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:08) Yeah. You can't train personality or hunger.

(Dave Subar at 00:17:10) You can't. You can't.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:11) I lost a lot of money thinking you could.

(Dave Subar at 00:17:14) That's right. Me too. But it's like you have to start with you're a certain kind of person. Like, a person who starts Modern CTO, that's not an average person who does that. You've got to be a particular kind of person.

(Dave Subar at 00:17:26) There's a saying. I don't remember who said it. It was something like a reasonable person conforms to the world around them. An unreasonable person expects the world to conform to them. Therefore, all significant gains are made by unreasonable people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:44) 100%. I heard something similar like that from Grant Cardone a long time ago. He was just talking about people would tell him he's unreasonable, and he's like, absolutely. And for me, I don't know. I'll put it like this. At my mom's funeral, they played the song I Did It My Way. So it kinda runs in the family. Right? Like, I'm just extremely independent. Like, hey, I wish I could have a job and work for somebody. That would be great. But I just can't. Like, I have to be doing what I want to do. And, you know, I wasn't great at it for a long time. I made ends meet, and there was ups and downs financially, but you do it long enough. It's been like twenty years. Right? You do it long enough, and you finally get it. Everyone says, you know, the overnight success, ten years. I'm like, I mean, it took me twenty, but yeah, I still did it. You know?

(Dave Subar at 00:18:35) That's also right. And you've gotta be cut for that role. And it's great. A lot of people aren't, and that's fine. Everyone doesn't have to do this. You know, the world needs lots and lots of different people. It's just this kind of person you are, this kind of person I am. My wife said the same thing to me that you just said, you couldn't work for somebody else. I'm like, yeah. I'm much better doing this. I'm much better for the world doing this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:00) No. That's a good point because some of the Tony Robbins type motivational people, I had heard them talking about this several years ago. They said, I'm gonna butcher it. But it was something about it's not about the money. Like, the money is awesome when you get to that point where you have more than enough of it. He goes, but the actual thing that's rewarding or the actual thing that you'll realize is more valuable is the person you have to become to get that money. Because all money is is us transacting by being valuable to one another. So the people with the most money are arguably the most valuable people by that measure in a capitalistic society. So I went from seeing somebody with a Lamborghini and being like, I hate them or a high end Tesla, I mean, like, what? To my brain now goes to, I wonder what they're doing for the world. Like, I wonder how have they been so useful that they can afford to spend $150,000 on a car. Like, I'm curious now. And so when I started to get curious versus being sort of frustrated that I wasn't there yet or that when I had a new understanding of how the economy works and how people work within each other, that really helped me figure out that you just have to become a better person. Like, I don't super care about, like, it's cool, the podcast and everything. I don't care about the popularity aspect. In fact, I spent a lot of time trying to not think about how many people listen. But the person I had to become through the progress of doing this business, when I started it, I was ignoring my wife and my first born. And I did that for the first two years, and then I saw a Christmas movie with this guy who was alone on Christmas Eve, and I decided I didn't wanna be that guy, so I adjusted how I ran my business and hiring people, firing people, being bold enough to fire people. You definitely get good at that when your choice is either you're not gonna eat or you're gonna eat. And depending on you having the right people in the right positions on your team depends if you have food or not. All these really, really, really hard things, they're fun for me. Like, I like them, and I don't think—somebody used to use this phrase. They said you're a glutton for punishment. You like punishment. I do not like punishment. I'm not a fan of punishment at all. What I like is solving hard problems, and the only way that you can really solve a hard problem is if you dive head first into it. Because if you tip toe, if you dip your toe in it a little bit and try to solve it, it's just not gonna get done. You know?

(Dave Subar at 00:21:22) The world has had a lot of people trying to solve these problems, so all the easy ways are done. All that's left are the hard things. And by the way, you can get a Lamborghini by screwing people, by eking value out of someone else and not creating value, or you can make a lot of money by creating value for someone and having that money be a side effect. That's what you were talking about. Do the second.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:45) Yeah. You can either steal it or you can make it. Like, I'm not down with the leeching or the stealing. Like, that's not my style. But you're exactly right. I was thinking to myself, I was like, man, this is a lot like maybe Bitcoin and the blockchain. Like, life gets harder to solve these things. Like, yes, there's new tools and stuff, but, man, the amount of opportunity, it was huge back in the day. I feel like I would have done really well in the 1950s.

(Dave Subar at 00:22:14) Yeah. Like, I'm like you. Like, I was a foster kid. Right? I learned a lot from being a foster kid. I was lucky to be in a foster home with my birth brother. That was a lovely, lovely foster home. Those people are my siblings and my parents now. Right? But also, like, taught me to be independent.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:36) Yep.

(Dave Subar at 00:22:36) And once again, world needs lots of people. You don't have to do this. But if you do it, you should do it. Right? You should just do it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:44) 100%. I found that a lot of people, actually, it's almost become a rule in my anecdotal sort of evidence where people that are interesting or that have done great things typically have an enormous amount of adversity in their past. Like, once you get comfortable with doing something hard—like, for me, you know, I got—when I was a kid, I got hit by a car and I was in a wheelchair for a year, and I had to go through the process of walking again. And so in my mind, even at ages 14 and 15 when I was better, my mind would just say, oh, I can do that. It's not as hard as learning how to walk. Right. Like, I can—that's super easy. And then when things go bad, I'm like, yeah. That sucked. But, you know, I held my mom's hand as she passed away, and this is not that bad. You know?

(Dave Subar at 00:23:25) Yeah. That's exactly right. It's like—sorry. I'm going back to business, but all the easy stuff has been done in the world. Everything. So if you're gonna be working at a technology company where you're making a change, you should just expect it's going to be hard. But, you know, you have an opportunity to be innovative. The world is changing. Technology changes the world like the Marc Andreessen stuff. Software is eating the world. It's absolutely true. And we have opportunities to create companies and systems and applications that do something different that people can go like, hey, Mom. I created this, and Mom knows what that is. This is the opportunity that we have. It's hard, and there's a lot of ways to screw it up. Like you said, like I said, everything I've done has not been successful. I met Evan Spiegel once, right before Snapchat went public. And I said, dude, you are crushing it. Like, everything you're doing is successful. He said, no. It's not. We just don't market the stuff we screwed up. And I was like, you know, we should have thought of that. That was brilliant. So it's all hard. It's all hard. But there's opportunity. That's great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:33) We screwed up a lot here at the podcast, so we figured first, we tried to be leadership training. That didn't work. Mostly because of the pandemic, like, leadership training was not required for companies. I mean, they were needed to cut everything down, right, 100%. So we lost 90% of our revenue within seventy two hours of COVID happening. Then we said, alright, well, did some sponsorships. And then that sort of caps out because there's only so many sponsored episodes you can do. And then we tried about five different things over the course of two years to generate additional revenue to grow the company farther than just what the sponsorships could provide. And, yeah, we failed at four of them. One of them worked. And it ended up being, like, it makes sense in hindsight. Everyone would be like, oh, that's so obvious. Like, we make podcasts for other companies now. Right? So we figured it out basically the back half of last year, and now we have nine other podcasts that we make. So that for us was like, everyone's like, oh, it makes so much sense. It's so logical. You made a podcast, and now you make a podcast for other people, and all of this stuff, and it looks like smooth transition and process. But I'm like, no. We tried four other things, and we saved our money. We used the little extra cash we had. We used the sponsorship money to pay the bills, and then everything over and above that, we ran experiments and tried. And every single one of those five times, we went 100% into it. Like, it was gonna work. This was gonna be the thing. We put all of our energy and all of our effort into it, and then it failed. And then I rallied everybody, and we did it again. But it also helped because I had talked to some smart people, like your level smart, which is what I consider super smart, like, technology business people. And they had said something that stood out to me, and it was along the lines of setting the context and conversation was incredibly important. So when I took the team into this and said, we're gonna try our first time to generate recurring revenue that will be scalable beyond, you know, me being involved as a host or something. I said, it's probably gonna fail. Like, this is probably going to fail. But it'll definitely fail if we don't go into it with 100% belief that it's going to succeed. And what's going to happen is, eventually, we'll figure it out. Like, we maybe failed five times. We might fail 10 times. Whatever it is. But, eventually, we're gonna get there. And when we do get there, it's gonna be awesome. Right? And, you know, some of those people stuck around, and now they end up leading the departments. Right.

(Dave Subar at 00:27:04) Well, before I did this podcast, right, I was like, what's Joel's actual business? Right? So I did research on you. I talked to your folks, and I did have the same thing. I was like, oh, that's obvious. That makes so much sense, but it's never obvious when you start. If it was obvious, it would have already been done by somebody else. Right? And so you have to discover. And it takes a certain amount of intestinal fortitude and capital, by the way. Right? And using your capital wisely and organizing your teams wisely and motivating. Like, it's a lot of stuff. It's not just push, push, push. You gotta be smart. You gotta be thoughtful. But, you know, congratulations to you. Congratulations to you. You should feel proud, and your team should feel proud.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:47) It's getting to be a lot of fun too. I mean, we're at the point where we have an open job post 24/7, you know, because we figured out, you know, we hire these producers and take on these shows, and it works super well, and then it works for the customers, and it's just—I mean, you have a podcast, you know, it helps with your business. It allows your potential customers that maybe haven't done business with you yet to connect with you. There's a lot of benefits to doing it.

(Dave Subar at 00:28:12) Right. It's a big, big world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:14) And it's also small. Do you know Etienne de Bruin. Right?

(Dave Subar at 00:28:17) Yes. Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:19) So I met him the first month I started the podcast and all of that. But I was curious between Etienne and somebody named Eric Weiss. I don't know. Do you know Eric?

(Dave Subar at 00:28:30) I don't know Eric. No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:32) Okay. So Eric does coaching, but it's just him. He's a good coach, but he does coaching. The interesting thing that I'm trying to help delineate here is it seems your coaching is more you create the plan and then you coach the people through the plan, and it has some sort of serious business impact. And it seems like maybe some of the Etienne customers at Seven CTOs sort of help people work through things in general. How do you see the differences between groups like Etienne's, the Seven CTOs thing, individuals like Eric Weiss that will coach people in transition from $10,000,000 to $20,000,000, and it's just maybe cofounder conflict or whatever it is. And then what you do, how do you see those three things? Because it's easy to lump them all together and say you guys are CTO coaches or you're consultants or something like that. But how do you see the difference between those?

(Dave Subar at 00:29:27) So I don't know, Eric, so it's hard for me to compare with him. Etienne's thing are groups, which are valuable. Right? On the LA CTO Forum, we have similar kind of groups. LA CTO Forum is a not for profit. But the one on one coaching we do, we definitely start with where do you want to go? Like, where do you wanna go for your department? Where do you wanna go as a CTO or chief product officer? Where do you wanna go in your life? Now we're not life coaches. Right? But we start with grounding of what do you—what's your goals? Like, where do you want to go on different levels of business, and where do you wanna go next? We have some more functions. And I eventually wanna start my own company, and I need tools to get there. And then we go, like, why are those your goals? Like, why do you wanna start your own company? Like, there's annoying things going well. Like, why that? And so we spend time digging into, are these really your goals? Should these be your goals? And then we do a three sixty, and we ask people in their environment questions to say, where is this person? Where do you think they should go? And then we come back, and we go and say, here's what you said your goals are. Here's what we heard. Should we modify any of them? And then we do go to what you're saying, like, okay. In order for you to go there, what steps do you have to take? Let's lay them on the road map. Let's meet regularly and talk about how you're doing on each of them.

(Dave Subar at 00:30:49) And by the way, if something ad hoc comes up, like you're presenting to the board and they need you to help think about how to do it, let's throw that in the mix. But it's how do you get to where you want to go for your business, for your department, for yourself? How do you do that? Let's not just spend time where we're going to talk every other week or once a week and just talk about whatever comes up.

(Dave Subar at 00:31:11) Let's be goal-directed. And so maybe Eric does that too. That's awesome if he does. The seven CTOs thing, which I know something about, it's a peer group where people are giving each other advice, and that has value. Now all of us have been CTOs and chief product officers, so our clients will come to us, the ones that we're coaching, and say, how have you faced this before?

(Dave Subar at 00:31:31) And we're glad to tell them about that. But they're a different kind of thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:37) Okay. And I love how everybody is super friendly between each other that do similar things. Because you would think from the outside that it would be not that way because they're competitive, right, to some degree. They're slightly different ways to solve the same problem, and there's pros and cons to all of them. But I love how friendly everybody is because the CTO leadership world is pretty tight, and there's a lot of opportunity there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:10) And everybody that's putting in the effort seems to be getting a good result.

(Dave Subar at 00:32:13) Look, and if you believe that it's a fixed-size pie, then money that Etienne gets means we don't get it. If you believe that you can expand the pie, then I love that Etienne exists in the world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:27) Yeah. The pie is expandable, man.

(Dave Subar at 00:32:29) And technology helps us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:32) Yeah. Just go to the hospital. Look at all the babies coming out. The pie is expanding.

(Dave Subar at 00:32:36) Yeah. Right. Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:38) Well, what I wanted to do before we wrap up here is I wanted to learn what's your website, what's your domain so people can go and learn more about your services or contact you if they have interest in that. And do you have some specific call to action?

(Dave Subar at 00:32:54) Yeah. So there's the contact us on the website. It's www.interna.com. So it's like internal without the L, interna.com. You can hit me up everywhere on the internet, D Subar, D-S-U-B-A-R.

(Dave Subar at 00:33:09) It's like Subaru without the U. You can see I've done this once or twice before. Yeah. So you can hit me up there anywhere on the web and just hit me up. I'm glad to talk. I'm just glad to spend time with people. Like, hey, just can you give me five minutes of advice and stuff? I'm just glad to do that too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:25) Yeah. No. I love it, and I super love what you're doing. You're out there helping people who need it, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:32) And I've been in those positions. There were times, and that's one of the reasons why I like having people in your line of work on the show, is because for a long time, I wish I would have known that that was the solution to my problem. I was doing everything by myself. Right? I wasn't part of a group.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:50) I didn't know that you could go to coaches like that. I didn't understand it was a thing. You know coaches exist, but you don't necessarily connect it to like, they can help me solve this problem. I didn't think that. I had one view of life coaches. I didn't understand that there are CTO-specific coaches that know exactly the organizational structure issues you're facing and the growth issues and all of that. And if I would've done that, that would've saved me a lot of pain.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:17) So whenever I can, and I don't do that at all. My business doesn't do that at all. So if I can amplify that and let people know, like a public service announcement, if you're having problems, go get involved with a coach or a group or something, but just don't fight it all by yourself because that's super lonely. And the position, as you know, is lonely enough as it is.

(Dave Subar at 00:34:39) Yeah. Right. And if people want to learn about the LA CTO forum, hit me up, and I'll tell them about that too and how to apply and how to get accepted to that too. So, look, once again, here to provide value. You don't provide value or they shouldn't be done.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:55) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.