How to Deliver Bad News and Get Away with It with Mahesh Guruswamy, CPTO at Kickstarter

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Mahesh Guruswamy, CPTO at Kickstarter, about how you can deliver bad news and get away with it. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:17) I was so excited to get this topic of conversation. Josh pitched it to me. He's like, "Hey, we're gonna talk with him about how to deliver bad news and get away with it." And I thought, I was like, "Yes. That is exactly what I want to talk about." Have you written a book? What's going on?

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:00:31) Oh yeah, so I wrote a book. It's called How to Deliver Bad News and Get Away with It. The quick backdrop of that is I'm an introvert by nature, and I think just like every other person, I tend to—I guess not anymore—but I tended to avoid conflict for the longest time. Conflict was not my thing. But as I climbed the ladder, as I climbed the management ladder, became an executive, those things become your daily thing, right? It's something you have to do every day or every other day, and do it really well. So one of the things I started doing for myself—I started this ten years ago—is whenever I had to have a tough conversation at work, I would go home and reflect on how I did. These are the things I did well. These are the things that I did not do well. And I started writing those things down just for myself to sort of process the moment. And over the years, those became a set of essays that I started giving out to my teams to say, "If you had to deliver tough news to a stakeholder, do it this way. If you had to deliver tough news to a CEO or your boss, keep these in mind." And last year, when I looked at the number of essays I'd written, it was like, "Oh, there's enough for a book here." So I was like, "Okay, let's make this happen." So it just came about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:51) Oh, nice. So these are essentially collections of your personal learnings and reflections over a long period of time. Yeah, that's right. That's not bad. And so, alright, what's the thing that most people get wrong when they're trying to deliver bad news?

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:02:06) So I have a few things that I want to call out. One is people feel they have to twist the bad news into good news, and that is completely the wrong thing to do because the person you're delivering the bad news to wants to understand the reality of where the situation is, the reality of what the truth is. So that's number one. And number two, when you're delivering bad news to an employee or a person about performance issues or things are not working out, people tend to hypnotize themselves into hating the other person so they can deliver the bad news. And that is also the wrong way to think about the situation. Because I've heard this from people where they say, "You know, I can't wait to get rid of this person," or "I'll be very happy when this person leaves." And if you don't feel bad when you're delivering bad news to an employee, something is wrong with you. So that's number two. And number three is giving upward feedback is not straightforward. So if you want to give feedback to your boss or to your CEO, et cetera—and we can get into it later if you want—it's not straightforward because leaders are wired a certain way, and they are hired for that reason. Think of a CEO who's been hired to do a turnaround. You can't expect this person to be infinitely pliable and malleable, open to all feedback and all understanding. It's just not the way the CEO will behave because they have been hired for a specific reason, which is to turn this thing around, and they're going to apply the techniques that have worked for them in the past. So anything that goes against what they hold true is not going to be received well. So you really think through what is your feedback and how you're positioning it. I think it works well with somebody who is just starting out. If you're an engineering manager or a product manager, you're just starting out your career in that ladder, then I think it'll work out really well if you have feedback like that. But you can't—the example that I use—you can't expect Jeff Bezos to be kind all the time, right? It's just not the way he operates. It's not the way most successful CEOs operate, or most successful executives operate, is what I would say.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:35) Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah, I'm an entrepreneur, right? And it's like you have a vision and you've got to execute, and there is a certain amount of buy-in that you need to achieve the vision. But you also have to get really good at saying no and ignoring the stuff that isn't directly connected to the vision.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:04:51) That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Yeah, that's exactly right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:56) I'm hired. But when you were talking about how people hypnotize themselves, I can look at my earlier self and be like, "Yeah, I saw how I used to do that a little bit," until I found out it didn't work. Before I might say, "I can't get rid of this person," and now I'm like, "Man, I should have done a better job hiring. I should—they're not the right fit. I'm going to have to transition them out, and it sucks, and it's difficult, and you have to do it." But it's a very different thing once you've done it ten, twenty, fifty times than it is when you're first starting. A lot of people listening to this are first starting out, you know?

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:05:36) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:37) So it's really important. Yeah, so buy the book, How to Deliver Bad News and Get Away with It. It's on Amazon. It's beautiful. It's yellow and red and black.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:05:47) For the audience, the "get away with it" was a suggestion from the publisher because they were like, "It'll catch people's attention." I think it did its job. It is not sneakily delivering bad news. To get away with it is to get away with keeping your sanity is the way I explain to people. What does that "get away with it" mean? Does it mean you're delivering bad news in a twisted way? No, it's not the point of the book.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:13) Yeah. And on my first glance, when they sent me the book for review and everything, I didn't get that at all. It was attention-grabbing, and it was smart. But the moment you start reading that description and that narrative of the book, you're like, "Oh, okay. That's what we want to do. We want to feel like we did the right thing and delivered the bad news correctly."

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:06:32) Yeah, that's right. That's right. That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:32) Because sometimes people feel like, and to add to the "get away with it" thing, sometimes people feel like if they're giving bad news, they're going to get in trouble.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:06:42) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:42) So that's how I took it. I was like, "How to deliver bad news without getting in trouble." That's how I interpreted it.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:06:47) That's right. Yeah, I mean, you'll get into trouble if you don't deliver bad news one way or the other, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:53) Oh, speed is essential with bad news. That's one thing that I've learned. Carrying that weight around is not good.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:07:00) It's not good. It's not good. And I sometimes annoy the crap out of my HR people because I don't sit on these situations. I think the rule of thumb is if you're delivering bad news, chances are it's already late, right? It's already too late. And no matter how hard I try, no matter how people try, you're always going to be a little bit late. So if the little voice in your head is going, "You have to act on it," then I would suggest you listen to that little voice in your head and just act on it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:32) Mm-hmm. Yeah. People will always be upset. They will always feel like it came out of the blue. And why didn't I know about this before? It's like, "Well, because we made the decision thirty seconds ago or this morning at breakfast. This is us telling you now."

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:07:45) That's right. That's right. Yeah. That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:46) Oh man, I feel right at home with you, my friend.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:07:51) I know. I wonder if it's a good thing or a bad thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:54) We'll find out later. Alright, I want to—I like this topic. Why CTOs can no longer be the nice guy. Is that covered in the book?

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:08:04) It's somewhat. But I think the general tone around R&D investment has changed dramatically since I wrote the book. So which is why I think it's a topic that every executive, every CTO should think about all the time as they are making decisions. So a few things. One is engineering teams used to be the special class of teams that are hard to find. The people are hard to find because you need extensive training to become an engineer. Same goes for product managers too. Same goes for anybody who is in the broader R&D organization—designers, product managers, engineers, infrastructure engineers, DevOps engineers, et cetera. And the barrier to entry has reduced quite a bit in the last fifteen years. And with the advent of AI tools, it is even smaller. The barriers are almost nonexistent. Again, I don't put a ton of faith in building world-class product with, like, pipe coding. I mean, this is just not true, right? I think you can use the current crop of AI tools to maybe put together a prototype or maybe extend parts of your product. But I can't imagine it'll build a world-class, lovable product without any human intervention. I just don't buy that. But the reality is it has reduced the barrier to entry. So more and more people can teach themselves programming or building an app and getting stuff out there as fast as possible. That's the backdrop of all of this. And I'm a CTO, so I manage engineering teams and product teams. I would say that—and people don't like it when I say it—but R&D teams are not special anymore. So they are special maybe if you're working for the ML team in OpenAI or if you're working on some cutting-edge biomedical tool or biomedical product or healthcare product that's going to solve for cancer or whatever. If you're building a standard SaaS application or a standard mobile app or a standard content creation application, you're not special, right? That is the reality of where we are right now. So that's one thing. The second thing is because of the market conditions in the last five to ten years, there is so much pressure on R&D teams to show ROI in timeframes that are shorter and shorter and shorter. If you think back ten years ago, I remember this famous interview that Bezos did with—I forget what the news outlet was. The guy was asking, "How come you don't show profits?" And Jeff's answer was, "Well, we're going to keep investing in the future because we're not looking for short-term profits." That is absolutely not the case anymore for engineering teams or anybody who has a big expense. And R&D teams are typically the biggest expense for any company. So your investors, your stakeholders, the executives are all looking for a return on their investment in twelve months or at the most eighteen months. And CTOs haven't had things like this in a very long time, or maybe ever. They know that they are a cost center, but it was never, "You have to show results in one year, eighteen months," et cetera. So that is a reality for most CTOs. And the last thing I'll say is executives are expected to be capital allocators. I think that everybody else—and this is just my observation—everybody outside of CTOs understood that. If you go ask a head of sales and say, "How are you measuring your effectiveness?" they'll say, "Okay, you give me $10 million, I'll make it $15 million this year." They are that accurate. Now the same is expected from R&D teams too. So CTOs, and not just engineering leaders, but product leaders, engineers have to think about the world that way. So if they've been given $20, $30, $40, $50 million, how are you going to convert it into 10% more, 20% more, 30% more? And again, some people will say, "Well, that's a purely capitalistic way of looking at the world." But I'm just saying if you want to be an executive in corporate America, that's the reality, right? So you've got to start thinking like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:41) We're on a road trip. Money is the fuel in the gas tank. And if we run out, we're screwed. So we have to—

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:12:49) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:49) You can't just be like, "We're hoping." It's like, "Yeah, no. That's a horrible strategy." You have to actually know. Now where I think it comes to be difficult—and tell me how you guys have figured this out, or not, or if it's still an open question—but if I go to sales, 10 to 15, that's super clear.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:13:06) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:06) It's very tangible. It's tangible because it's gross receipts from customers, right? Yep, yep. But and it's direct expense. However, a lot of this valuation of technology is somewhat intangible.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:13:19) That's exactly right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:20) So who's dealing with that? Is it the CPTO or the CTO and the CFO getting together to figure out how to do this? How do you—

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:13:28) That's right. So Amazon popularized this way of measuring impact. They call it input goals and output goals. So input goals are goals you can control through your teams. So for example, for my team, I can control how often they ship software. I can control how many bugs will be in every release. I can control the cost of my organization. So I can control those things. I can build these features. I can get them out faster. I can optimize the cost structure of my organization. I can do all of those. And then the output goals will be adoption of these features and revenue impact because of the work you did. And the way I like to do it is I give the input goals to my teams. So say your job is to release these features and release these things quickly or release these innovative product features. And then the executives will take goals on adoption and revenue because it is a collective job, right? You need marketing to do their jobs. You need sales to do their job. You need customer support to do their jobs. So we kind of center the revenue goals at the executive level and the controllable goals at the R&D level. And not just R&D, but every team. But you're right, though. It's hard to measure engineering productivity. So what are you going to measure? You can look at lines of code written, but that doesn't equate to success. You can do the old-fashioned measure time, which is also a poor metric. So for me, I like to look at number of releases we can do to production. So if we can ship a feature every week, it shows how quickly we are able to move. And that, to me, is the simplest metric that you can track.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:15:25) How often do you ship software and the time it takes for you to get from idea to execution. But the thing that has really worked well for me is if you release something, then have adoption goals for it in the next six, twelve, eighteen months. So oftentimes, CTOs tend to not take adoption goals because they're like, well, my team did their job, so it's up to marketing or sales or somebody else to do their jobs too. So I'm hesitant to take on adoption goals. But I think that those days are over.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:16:02) Right? So every CTO, every CPO is expected to take these goals on because you're expected to feel the heat like everybody else is feeling at the exec level.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:14) Well, you were talking about shipping features. How do you make sure that the backlog that you're working on, the features that you're shipping are connected to revenue? Or is that not something you guys currently—

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:16:24) No, absolutely we should think about it. And sometimes I could get myopic too, and I'll explain that in a second why. So in every company that I work for, including Kickstarter where I'm currently at, you have to understand how your company makes money.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:16:42) Right? So CTOs sometimes don't understand that fully, and I encourage every exec, not just CTO, to deeply understand how your company makes money, specifically what your company's growth levers are. Like, which channel gives you creators or customers and revenue. So for Kickstarter, the equation is we have a sales team or an outreach team that goes and talks to creators. That's one channel for acquisition.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:17:08) The website is another channel for acquisition, and the brand awareness is another channel for acquisition of creators who come to the platform. So that's how we get creators. And our revenue is somewhat skewed towards the high revenue creators. So creators who tend to raise the most money on the platform are the ones who affect our revenue profile.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:17:30) So when we build features, we have to keep them in mind. Because I know for a fact that if you build a feature that helps the high revenue creators' lives, then it'll affect revenue for us in the next six months to twelve months. However, this is, you know, Kickstarter, but other companies too. If you double down on one segment, which gives you money, sometimes it'll become a problem too. So your revenue mix is skewed.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:18:04) Right? So a big population of revenue comes from one segment of customers, and that's a problem. So you have to consciously make those decisions. So for example, Google is a good example. A lot of the revenue comes from search, which is a problem for them, which is why they're trying to diversify their revenue sources.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:18:20) Microsoft, for the longest time, was Office, but now it has split between cloud, and it's become pretty diverse. So I think it's understanding where your revenue is coming from and optimizing your roadmap for that. But you can't keep going into the same well for revenue. At some point, you have to start diversifying and saying, okay, I'm going to go find these new pockets of growth because this channel is plateaued or saturated.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:48) It was very common early on in the show because we've been doing it for almost ten years now that I would run into a lot of CTOs who were head in the sand when it came to understanding the business model and the company. I find it less at the higher levels, like if I'm doing a Palo Alto Networks episode or Kickstarter or Google or something like that, they get it. But there's a lot of it in the mid-market too, you know, 10 to a thousand employees type deal where they'll just think, okay, I'm hired to do this job. And it's like, that's true.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:17) You're hired to do a job. You have an outcome when you're brought on. But I don't believe that that's an excuse for not deeply understanding how the revenue is generated. If you put me in any company, if I'm going to work for anybody, I need to understand how the revenue is generated so I can then see where I sit in the stack and decide if this is the highest and best use of my time. Because you might hire me in for—yeah, you might hire me in for A, but I learn how revenue is going, I'm like, look, B is 10 times more important. You guys agree, we find someone to replace me for A, and I go do B.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:19:48) That's exactly right. That's exactly right. One of the best books that I've read about this is a book called Outliers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:06) Oh, yeah.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:20:06) So Outliers is a book that talks about outlier CEOs who had outsized returns during their tenure. And the big name people are not there. Like, Jack Welch is not there. You know, Elon and all these other big CEOs are not there because if you benchmark their success as a function of S&P, the people in the book are orders of magnitude better from that viewpoint, like showing results and showing revenue. And one of the things that the best, the top thing that these CEOs, outlier CEOs do really well is capital allocation. So they really, really understand how to allocate their capital.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:20:42) They keep their costs low. They buy back shares from the market so that they have control over the company and keep share prices high. And they do all these kind of interesting things. And none of it is about innovation per se. Right?

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:20:58) It's about understanding how businesses work and optimizing for what gives them the most revenue.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:08) Yeah. That was the Malcolm Gladwell book. Right?

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:21:12) I don't—

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:13) A different one?

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:21:14) I don't think so.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:16) I want to read this.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:21:17) Oh, okay. Sorry. I said the name of the book wrong. Sorry. You're right. Outliers is a Malcolm Gladwell book. The book I was referring to is called The Outsiders.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:27) The Outsiders.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:21:28) The Outsiders by William Thorndike Jr. The Outsiders, Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:37) Yes. Not the film.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:21:38) Not the film. Not—

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:40) Not the coming of age drama.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:21:41) No. No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:41) Alright. Cool. Josh has got that on screenshot. I'm going to check this book out because as you were talking, I was like, I read Outliers. I was like, I remember—

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:21:51) No. Sorry.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:51) Athletes, and I remember all these people and their habits and how they were outliers and what made them different. I don't remember them doing CEOs, though.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:21:59) Yeah. I got the books mixed up in my head. Yeah. But I'm glad that we got the right book because that's a great book, and not many people have heard about it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:08) No. I haven't. Yeah.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:22:08) Yeah. When people think about how to be a CEO, they pick up your standard Peter Drucker book or Peter Thiel's Zero to One or Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. They pick up these books. But if you really, really do the five whys and really dig into what does the CEO do or any executive does, it's about capital allocation and financial prudence. Like, that's what their goal is. And oftentimes they get lost. That gets lost.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:39) You said you were a little bit of an introvert when you started. I obviously connect with that. One of the reasons why I started the podcast was because I had very little connections. I was good at engineering, and I could see people doing better than me. And I could look at their GitHub profiles, and I'm like, how are you doing better than me when I'm a better engineer than you are?

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:58) And then I realized relationships are very important. So I said, I need a vehicle for relationships. And then that started the podcast. It was a huge stretch for me because I wasn't much of a talker and all of that. And this changed my entire life.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:14) Now for you, tell me about your journey going from introvert to the clear, articulate leader you are today.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:23:23) I think one of the things that I tried to do when I was early on in my career is to act like I was an extrovert. And I would go out to these parties, and I would talk to everybody. I would do drive-by management. I would just walk around, talk to everybody. And I still do that to a certain extent when I'm in a physical location.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:23:45) But what I realized is it's not so much about becoming an extrovert or acting like one. It is more about being able to turn it on when you need to. And I know for a fact that it's going to drain me emotionally. So I kind of structure my activities like that. So for example, if I have to go on stage and talk to a thousand people, I know that that day is going to be draining. So I clear my mornings, clear my afternoons.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:24:16) So I have nothing to do before and after that event. So it's more knowing that you have to artificially turn it on and be ready to recover shortly after. And I think a lot of it is practice too. And you can—you know, if you want to be an exec who can connect with your entire team, can have relationships with your CEO, with your board members, sometimes you have to be able to turn it on quickly, and that comes with practice. So I have read a bunch of books about public speaking, about how to articulate your point of view clearly, and how to have these small moments with your teams which could end up becoming really important moments in your relationship.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:25:12) And interestingly enough, the one thing that helps me quite a bit is pop culture. So I watch a lot of trash TV. Maybe not trash, but I watch a lot of TV.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:23) Real Housewives?

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:25:24) Yeah. No. I don't see that. But I'm up to date with the Kardashians.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:31) Vibe of the world. I'm going to keep finishing your sentence. I tried watching that once on a plane. It was terrible. It was horrible.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:25:38) It's terrible. It's horrible.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:39) It's horrible. I can't imagine people watching that stuff. But I watched Stranger Things. I'm a big fan of that show. I watch all these kind of famous Netflix shows or HBO shows, etcetera.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:25:53) So, you know, it's not so much about being able to relax because that's certainly one part of it, but being able to have a common conversation when someone brings it up. So if someone mentions something in a conversation, I can use my pop culture trash references to diffuse the tension between me and that person. Because oftentimes, when I have my first conversation with an employee, it's like, oh, you are talking to the CTO. Like, I'm already worried about this conversation. The minute they say, oh, you know, I watched this show.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:26:26) Then I'm like, oh, yeah. I watched this show too. You know, this is—these are my interesting bits in this show. These are interesting characters. And it kind of helps have those kind of initial conversations that could end up becoming real. But it's my long way of saying it comes with practice, but understand that you cannot become an extrovert ever. If you're an introvert, you're always an introvert. You just need to understand that you need to be able to turn it on, and you have to be able to understand how long it's going to take you to recover from it, basically.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:57) Yeah. That's why at events, I'm either—I still don't socialize at conferences and things like that. If I'm at a conference because I'm speaking, because I can do that. I can go there, do a talk, talk to people after, and then go have dinner or something. But I'm not one to hang around the conference for eight hours. I just—it sucks me completely dry of energy. You know?

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:27:23) Weirdly, interestingly enough, so when I do conferences, I do my bit, and I just go back and work. That kind of reenergizes me because I'm talking to my people. We're talking problems that I'm familiar with. Unless there are other executives in the post-conference, whatever, I tend to not hang out after. I just go back to my room and just work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:47) Yeah. Do you have family?

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:27:49) I have—so, my wife. I have a wife and an 11-year-old who's into Rubik's cubes, video games, friends, jiu jitsu. You know? That's what he does.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:03) Well-adjusted kid.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:28:05) I know. He asked me, am I a nerd or a jock? And I'm like, I think, dude, you're somewhere in the middle. You have your foot in both lands, which I think is a cool skill to have.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:17) We can play Xbox. I can also kill you. You know?

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:28:23) Oh, it was fascinating. So he—we enrolled him in jiu jitsu to build up his self-confidence because he went to—he was at a new school. He wasn't having issues adjusting per se, but we wanted to give him something that helps build his confidence when it comes to talking to new people, you know, just walking up to them, making friendships, etcetera. And it worked out really well for him. He's really into the sport. I mean, at jiu jitsu, every two weeks, there'll be a new white belt that you have to spar with, and you have to teach this other person.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:28:58) And it teaches him these kind of everyday skills, which has been great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:03) Well, doing difficult things is how you develop character. So you have to find a way that's appropriate for their age to introduce them to that. Right?

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:29:11) That's right. Yeah. You put it more eloquently than I did. Yeah. That's exactly right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:14) Oh, thank you for the kind words. Yeah. I have a wife and I have three kids. So my daughter is seven. My one son is six, and my other son is about three.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:29:27) Okay. Three. Is it true when they say, you know, when you have two, it's hard. When it's three, it's basically easier?

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:36) Yeah. I'd say one is easy. Two is extremely difficult.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:29:40) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:41) Three is—it's not that bad.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:29:43) It's like—

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:43) Once you're at three, you can go to six really easily.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:29:47) Oh, so is it—okay. It's like you've hit that plateau of uncomfortability now. You can just keep going.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:53) Yeah. And while I only have three and that's our current limit for medical reasons, we would have more if we could. But we have several friends that have, you know, four, five, six kids. And what we see the trend is through them is once you're—if you're having your sixth kid, your oldest kid's like 10. You know?

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:30:15) Oh, yeah. That person, that kid can help.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:17) And they do. And it's not something where—I, across small sample size, five groups of friends, we have similar cultural beliefs, but none of them have to convince the kids to help. All the kids want to help.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:30:31) So I mean, on topic of kids, and maybe I'll get screwed for saying this. I think the kind of discipline that I see in the current generation of kids is way more than I see in some pockets of the workforce. The cohort that my son is with, they're very much—they only have goals. My son is 11, and he has goals now. He is like, I want to go do this, and I want to get into this class, and I want to do this and this and this.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:31:11) And I remember, like, at 11, I didn't have any of that. I was like, yeah, we're just going to go wherever the wind takes me. But it's not just him. Like, all the kids in his class have deep goals, and they are motivated and driven.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:31:26) And it's, you know, I remember when there was quiet quitting during the COVID times. And I don't get that sense at all from this generation. So I think the youngest generation right now who's in the workforce, I think they're all about finding their own thing. Right? They want to do their own thing. They want to be influencers and creators and own small businesses. I think that's what their vibe is. So they're not super into corporate America. They're like, yeah, we want to do our own thing.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:32:07) And I have a feeling that the generation that your kids and my kids are in, or my son is in, I think they'll end up building these next big corporations because they seem to be wired that way. Like, they're not thinking about, oh, I just need enough money to survive without having to work for the man. I think these people will be the man, I feel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:30) Well, history repeats itself.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:32:32) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:33) Yeah. I don't think you're far off base there. And I actually heard the other day, to your point—so my businesses have always been grown to about 30 people and then sold. And so I don't have mega team experience. But you do, and a lot of other people I talk to do. And I've heard that a couple times where there's this pocket of, let's say, age range 20 to 27 or whatever, where they're actually—there was an article on LinkedIn this past week where they're actually hiring people to come in and teach them office etiquette because a lot of them grew up in the job market during COVID. And so they're not making eye contact at home on screens, and then they're back in the office, and they have to learn—they're teaching them how to dress, how to behave, how to have interactions correctly. And I was blown away.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:33:20) Yeah. Same. Like, so I was listening to this podcast that the founders of Stripe were on, the Collison brothers. And I forget which brother said this, but they did a broad study across their workforce, and their workforce is huge. Like, Stripe is huge. And what they found was that—and the focus of the study was, is remote work effective? So that was the focus of their study because they're hybrid now, just like most companies. And they found that experienced professionals are the most productive in remote environment. The young people who had just graduated out of college, they are left behind in a remote world. They benefit from being in the office with other experienced professionals, teaching them, to your point, work etiquette.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:34:08) Like, how do you show up to meetings, and how do you build relationships with your coworkers? How do you resolve conflicts? You know, you can't text away your conflict at work. You just you have to address it directly head on and have conversations. And so it was a fascinating insight for me. And if the Collison brothers are saying that, then I tend to believe them because they are very spot on on most of the things they talk about, which is interesting. Like, now I wonder what the tech world will do with that information. So we—when we say all new graduates end up going to a physical location, and everybody else can go—I don't know. We'll have to see how it evolves.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:50) It's an imperfect situation. Yeah. But I'm certain of one thing, everybody's going to do it a little bit differently. And in ten years, we'll know the answer.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:34:58) That's right. That's right. That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:58) Yeah. You know, earlier, you made a comment about the vibe coding and it just not being there. And I agree. Today, it is not there.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:35:10) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:11) But question for you, if you look at a time scale of a hundred years, do you think we get there?

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:35:16) A time scale of a hundred years. Like, if I can predict what happens in the next year, like, I'll be a millionaire. I just don't. I think this is kind of my problem with anybody who's predicting the future is most of the time, they're wrong. I don't know if you remember, but on the—I think it's Founders Fund, Peter Thiel's fund. Right? Like, they had a tag on their website that for the longest time said, we wanted flying cars. We got 140 characters, which is very accurate in what happens in the tech world. Right?

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:35:55) So people in the 1960s, you look at the space movies that came out, and everybody is like, oh, we have flying cars. We'll build spaceships that go to Mars, et cetera, but we have social media. Right? So we don't—I don't know what's going to come out of this GPT arc we're on. What I can say is we cannot not embrace it. Right? So we have to embrace it. We have to start using it. We have to push this technology to the limits to find out where it will take us. So right now, I can say that just going by what results I've been seeing personally and what my teams have been seeing personally is it is good at acting as a helper. Right? So but it cannot even do what a pair programmer would do. Right? So, for example, if you know pair programming, you would spot issues that this thing cannot. Right?

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:36:52) They're—and because you would ask questions like, hey. Is this requirement the right requirement? Or is this what the customer actually wants? Because I don't think this is what they want. So things like that, I don't think the tooling is there. Like, it's not going to ask you those questions. I do think it'll become better and better over time. I think it'll make people more effective. My personal prediction is that the next breakthrough with this technology will come in something which is not in tech. It'll be health care or it'll be space travel or it could be, you know, general politics or administration or something like that. I think that's where I think the next killer application is. In terms of it replacing engineers, I don't think it's close. I think maybe in the next five to ten years, it might change my mind. But here's a good example. So you were probably around when the cloud revolution came about. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:58) Yeah.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:37:58) So before then, you had physical data centers. You have racks, and you had network engineers. You have system engineers. And when these things came about, everybody was like, well, this is going to just destroy one's population of the tech worker group. Right? So sysadmins, network engineers, all those will—like, those jobs will disappear. The jobs did disappear to a certain extent, but the people didn't. Right?

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:38:26) So we still employ the same number of people who manage this infrastructure. And the—it has centralized to a few large companies, for sure. Meta, AWS, Google, et cetera, employ a large number of these professionals who keep the data centers running, keep the cloud infrastructure running. But it didn't cause any sort of large calamity in the population, in the tech world population. So I do think the AI shift is much bigger than the cloud revolution. So we'll see what happens in the future. But in the short term, my recommendation would be to embrace this tech and not try to cause fear or just be a Luddite, because it's not going to be good for you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:15) That's what I'm always trying to do. I'm trying to understand, okay, can't be the Luddite. Yeah. You can't be overoptimistic. You have to figure out where things are going. I do like that Peter Thiel thing. Although when I did hear it, I was like, well, the people who were dreaming of flying cars didn't understand air displacement. So it's very funny.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:39:35) That's right. Hey, we did get the—we did get the iPad, though. That was in—we got the iPad. It was in 2001 Space Odyssey. So I was like, yeah. We did we got one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:44) We've got a lot of stuff. We've got—our lives are so amazing. And I do agree with you. I think the next huge breakthroughs are going to be humans assisted by AIs making discoveries and things like medicine and all because it can see if you put the AI with super talented people, you can just amplify it.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:40:03) That's exactly right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:03) AI with regular people, you can get them up to speed, but there seems to be no substitute for legitimate experience in an industry. Like—

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:40:12) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:13) You can't substitute ten years releasing product.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:40:16) That's right. That's right. That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:17) Yeah. I think of the current AI tools as an autocomplete for the world. So usually in IDEs, you have autocomplete for the function name or for method lookups or signature lookups, et cetera. But the current AI tools are autocomplete for all the information in the world. So if you have that at your tips, you know, again, you can imagine that you'll become so much more effective and productive and to your point, discovering new things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:46) Are you using Grok or ChatGPT in your personal life outside of work stuff? Are you using any LLMs?

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:40:53) For—so I use Claude for suggestions to articles that I write. So I just put it in there and say, what do you think of it? How do you strengthen it, et cetera? But I don't take the way it rewords it because my voice gets lost when whenever it touches my copy. But some of the pieces of feedback are valid.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:41:22) Some of them are just parroted because everybody else will say the same thing in the world. So I take some of it as, this is great. But I just still reword it in my own way. And sometimes I have replaced search with ChatGPT. So if I want to look up statistics, for example, I'll use Claude or ChatGPT because I want to say, how many CTOs are in the world? Right? If I go to Google search, I have to do my own research to sift through this and this and this. But if I just ask—

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:59) Like a caveman.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:42:01) Yeah. Exactly. Who chooses Google search anymore? But it is good for research is what I would say. But you still need the critical human eye to look at it and go, yeah, this is valid. This is not valid because the source was invalid. But I've—yeah. But for research, I think it's a great tool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:20) One little side note here. One of the things that I have found to be pretty successful with keeping tone is in Claude or some of the other ones, they'll call it a workspace, like a work area. And then I upload it, like, my book and transcripts from my podcast, and then I tell it to analyze my tone and then give it a specific label so that I can reference it in the future, and it will. And so whenever I want to do, I say, do this in Joel's tone. Yeah. Because I just had to call it Joel's tone, and then it doesn't get it 100%. Okay. There's still, like, editing and changes and stuff, but it prevents it from, like, talking like a surfer or something. You know, they're going, like, you know, or like a country boy. Like, going really out there, it will at least get it, like, much closer to a finished product.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:43:05) Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a good tip. I'll try it out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:10) Yeah. It's worked. I've also—the other thing, so eight months ago, didn't use it at all. Mhmm. Today, I use Grok or GPT or Claude. I go to them for different reasons. Probably multiple times a day. But the other—the second thing and third things that I have found to be very useful are both relationships with my family. When I want to approach my wife about something that I think might be difficult or she might not respond to well, or if I want to share an idea with her, I'll actually ask Grok, and it has enough information about my past interactions—how to, like, what to focus on or what types of words to use. Oh my God. It's so good. It is so good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:48) Or if I've seen—I got my kids. I'll be like, my seven year old. I want to explain this concept to him. Like, how should I do it? It's like, well, sit down and play with them and then bring it up like this. And I was like, okay. Now I'm the filter. I'm making the choices of what I'm going to do. But it's like being surrounded by some really knowledgeable people and then asking their advice and then taking the pieces you think are good and trying it out.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:44:13) I think that's the piece that people forget sometimes is ChatGPT or any of these AI tools is looking at things written by people in the end. Maybe your advice on how to talk to your seven year old probably is like a clinician wrote it in one of their articles that it's picking up from because it was popular and well received. And, um, but in the end, it's still people creating the content. It'll be a little bit interesting to see if there's an explosion in AI written content and whether how that's going to affect all of this. But, I don't know if we're close to that, though.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:48) Oh, oh, we are. So my buddies over at QTS data—I don't know if this can make it, and Josh will have to talk about it after. Uh, my buddies over at QTS data centers, they are the largest per square foot data center in—okay—in North America. Mhmm. So when Meta needs a new center, they call them up or something like that.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:45:05) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:06) And I've gotten close to them over the years because they have a podcast. We go back and forth. Great guy, by the way, if you want me to introduce you. But Dave, I was visiting them in Atlanta, and he showed me this graph of the compute that they're doing across all their data centers and everything. And it's like a hockey stick until this weird point, and then it's, like, almost a straight line up. And he goes, that's Gen AI. And I was like, no way.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:45:36) But I guess the question we have to ask ourselves is are we putting all that compute to good use or not?

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:42) Oh, well, yeah. It's Kim Kardashian episodes—of course, clearly, this is going very well.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:45:48) It's like the—have you ever seen South Park at all? Have you seen South Park?

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:52) Oh, yeah. South Park's hilarious.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:45:53) So South Park made this episode about Family Guy, but how these manatees choose random thought bubbles. Yes. And they put that together as episodes. So I sometimes I wonder if, you know, the people using all these computers just putting together crappy reality TV or TV shows with that stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:20) It's—I'm sure it's a mix of everything. Yeah. People are reprogramming T cells to solve cancer at the same time. Some Instagram influencers, bikini pictures going by. It's all happening at the same time.

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:46:32) That's right. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:32) That's right. That's right. Oh, man. Well, Mahesh, we made a podcast, man. How do you feel?

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:46:37) Yeah, that's great. It's a really good conversation. I loved it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:40) Yeah. Go buy the book. What's the name of the book?

(Mahesh Guruswamy at 00:46:42) How to Deliver Bad News and Get Away with It.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:44) It's on Amazon. You all have Amazon on your phone. Don't tell me you don't. Go on there. Buy that yellow, red, and black book.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:51) It's beautiful. 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 would like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email: [email protected].

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:10) Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.