How eBay Supercharges Their Workplace Culture with Mazen Rawashdeh, Senior Vice President and CTO at eBay

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:03) Hello, my friends. Today we're talking to Mazen, senior vice president and CTO at eBay, and we discuss the many benefits of sabbaticals and maintaining a healthy work-life balance, how to supercharge workplace culture, and why competition should inform strategy, not drive it. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:32) Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast. I saw that you were on sabbatical, and I was curious about what that was like.

(Mazen at 00:00:48) Oh, you know, sabbatical is amazing. I think you don't know how good it is till you try it. And I love the culture of eBay where, actually, we provide sabbatical. It's been part of who we are and how we recognize our employees. And it is just amazing.

(Mazen at 00:01:03) You know, I'm back fresh. It looks like my day one back at eBay. And yeah, sabbatical program is just amazing. I actually been encouraging, because we have a lot of people who just delay it and delay it, and I'm encouraging people, just go and take it. You don't know how good it is till you try it. So it was amazing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:21) Was it hard adjusting to the sabbatical?

(Mazen at 00:01:24) Well, the first probably week it was difficult because, you know, your brain is still at work and you're still thinking about everything you need to do. But once you get over that, it's amazing. It's a discipline. One, you know, you need to trust your team that everything will be okay without you being at the office, which is important. And the other piece is you just need to, what I call, learn how to self-regulate. You have to have the discipline to disconnect. That's good for your health. That's good for your family. It's good for your company as well. So yeah, I mean, it takes a few days to get there. And that's why actually the way I did it, I took an extra week off, so an extra week off on the top of my sabbatical, because you need that four weeks continuous.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:12) I can't wait till people from the show write in and they say, oh, I'll take a sabbatical, but I asked for an extra week just for the adjustment period. Right? That's awesome, though. I found myself, like, personally I'm an entrepreneur, right? And starting a business, just working crazy amount of hours, unhealthy, and convincing yourself that you have to stop working in order to refresh so that the time you're spending at work is potent, right? It's useful time. That was a really hard lesson for me to learn, but it's the truth. Like, you just have to take those breaks, those forced breaks, and then you're more effective at what you do.

(Mazen at 00:02:50) Yeah, you get more effective. It's good for your mental health. It's good for your physical health. It's good for your coworkers, for the company, for your family. And it's, you know, as I said, it's a discipline. I don't think you will ever disconnect 100%, but you train your mind and you train yourself that everything will be okay without me at the office because we built a good organization, we built a good culture, and I trust my team. The trust is very important aspect of it because, you know, we always get used to taking a one-week vacation, two-week vacation. And usually you are back at the office, and that's a such a short period of time. Being out for four weeks contiguous and not checking emails and not looking at your phone for anything work-related, it's a discipline, but it has so much value when you come back to the office. Seriously, I'm back at the office excited about the company, excited about our customers, excited about my team, and you are fresh. You are energized.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:50) Where did you learn discipline in your life?

(Mazen at 00:03:53) You know, it's, I don't think it's a switch. It's your experience. You're learning and watching other people and learning from mistakes you made. So to me, it's, I think it's just part of your DNA as you grow up around the environment where you are and how you commit to certain things, you know, your ethics. People say work ethics. I say your ethics because it doesn't matter. Your work ethics is coming from your personal ethics. And you learn the discipline by really making mistakes and learning. And then you figure out, I need to get better in doing this. You know, for example, when they say self-regulate, I remember early in my career, you know, when my kids used to be pretty little, they couldn't say anything to me, but I used to be sitting at the dinner table on my phone or checking work. As they grew up a little bit, I started realizing I need to be present for them. So then you start learning by mistakes you make without realizing I made those mistakes. And then, you know, over time it becomes part of your DNA, and you start realizing I need to do these things because they are better for me in the long term.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:06) I fully agree. I had a similar realization. I've got a five-year-old daughter, a three-and-a-half-year-old son, and then another son that'll be here by the 19th. So within like the next two or three weeks.

(Mazen at 00:05:18) Wow. Congrats.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:18) Yeah. And when I started the business, I started it basically the same month my first child was born, so five years ago. And my wife and I, we made this agreement. We had no clue what we were agreeing to. We made this agreement that I was just going to work like crazy because I could either go and continue being a software developer and continue building, you know, enterprise systems and doing that, or I could go off on this adventure and risk savings and do all of this other stuff. And so I said, let's try that. I can always go back to software, right? So we made this agreement that I'm going to have to work incredibly hard, nights, weekends, all of this stuff. Well, little did we know what we were actually agreeing to because you can agree to something, and then in reality and practice, it ruined the relationship. For like two years we had a really rough time. And then I had this big wake-up call. I think I was listening to my daughter in the background while I was on speaker phone with somebody in the family, and somebody asked her where daddy is or something. And she said something along the lines of, oh, daddy doesn't spend time with us. He's always at work. And that was the moment. I immediately stopped working nights and weekends. I completely changed everything. We started going camping and spending time together because I'm a very productive person. So if I'm not at work doing something, I have to be with the family doing something. And so that was about two and a half years ago, maybe. And wow, has my entire family life changed. And that aspect of my life changing has even made me better at work because now I've got this great thing going on at home and this great thing going on at work.

(Mazen at 00:06:49) Yeah. No. Listen, I completely agree with you. I think being disciplined in how you use your time and how you are present, you know, most of the time people, just so much going on and they have a hard time figuring out where you draw the line. You could be extremely successful at work, very productive, but you also can be present with your family, with your loved ones. I always call it, I have a philosophy, I call it shattered moment. There are certain things you have to be disciplined to do. For example, you know, your kids, if you have kids, they're only going to graduate once from high school. They're only going to graduate once, or they go higher education multiple times, but there's always that first time or their first birthday. So to me I look at those, I call them shattered moments where you have to do everything within your power to make sure you are present. And then once you do that, actually you have more satisfaction to be more productive when you go back to work. So it's a discipline. It's a learning. We all have our different way of doing it. I encourage people always figure out what it is for you and make sure you have that discipline to draw the line.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:01) I want to talk a little about, I mean, it sounds cool that you're the CTO at eBay. I mean, that sounds cool, right? But I want to know where did you start and how did you get there?

(Mazen at 00:08:11) Yeah, you know, I came to the States back in 1988 to go to school, study computer science, and I had no intention at the time that I will continue to live in this great country, honestly, because a lot of people don't know how good it is, because once you try living somewhere else and you live here and you look at the opportunity and how you can grow. You know, I met my wife two years into my college, been happily married for 30 years now, which is something I'm very proud of. My wife has been my anchor in life and in my success. And then, you know, as I graduated, you know, I started my career with an entry-level computer operator at Sacramento Bee newspaper. And then, you know, I have a lot of ambition. I have a lot of, you know, lots of goals in my life. I wanted to learn and be better. And then from there, my early startup experience with a company called Loudcloud was founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, which is, if you think of it, it's like public cloud before its time. That's in 2000. And I was there for three years, and the company went public, became company called Opsware. And then after that I joined eBay. eBay was a rocket ship, learned tons, helped eBay grow, spent eight years at eBay. Then from there, you know, joined Twitter as one of the early employees at Twitter, ran infrastructure engineering, at Twitter for five years, helped Twitter go public. And then I took a break as, you know, I thought I'm done. My wife told me you are a workaholic. Nine months into it I got really bored and I wanted to get back in and ended up rejoining eBay, which I thought I will never come back to eBay because you think you always try different companies. I had other options to go to other places, and I'm glad that I came back to eBay. And one of the key aspects of coming back to eBay, it's the culture of eBay and the purpose of the company. So kind of in two minutes, give you what happened in my career in 30 years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:02) What's the culture like there? What do you value?

(Mazen at 00:10:07) You know, it's funny. People ask me, why back to eBay? You have opportunity. You could have gone to many other places. One of the aspects that what brought me back to eBay is the culture. I would summarize the culture of eBay in its core, it's extremely healthy, and it's centered around our customers. When you talk to anyone at eBay, the first almost you hear the purpose of the company, and that's actually drives the culture of eBay. We are proud of a culture of learning where people can join the company and learn and move around. So I would summarize this as a culture that's centered around customer value, centered around the customers, a culture around learning, culture of transparency. You know, of course, like any other company we have challenges and we have areas we have to deal with. It's a big company, but in its core it's an extremely healthy culture. And it was one of actually the reasons what tipped me between other companies I was going to join versus eBay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:05) Oh, nice.

(Mazen at 00:11:05) Yeah. Culture is something extremely important for me personally, and it's the foundation. It's the foundation of anything you do. Many CTOs I talk to and many technical folks I talk to, sometimes they're tackling technical challenges through technology. My philosophy is you build the right culture, a lot of good things will follow. And to answer your question, there's four areas I always pay a lot of attention to. One, customer. Customer is the center of gravity of everything we do. And as a CTO, my customer could be internal customers or external customers. So to me, make the customer your center of gravity. It will help you make all the right decisions for the company. So you always optimize for the customer. That's one thing. The other one is transparency. If you create a culture of transparency, as a byproduct of that, there will be a lot of trust across teams and organization and leadership. And it will eradicate a lot of bad behavior or politics across the organization. The third one, ownership. Ownership and pride of what you do. It doesn't matter if you are a software engineer, if you are a network engineer, if you are a security engineer, have a pride and be the best at what you do. And then the fourth one, it's execution and outcome. I think it's important to be able to deliver the right outcome for whatever organization you are in. So usually I look at these four areas. To me these are the four areas I look at as we look at the culture we are building. Transparency is one of the most important one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:50) Have you written at all about this?

(Mazen at 00:12:52) Not necessarily, but I talk about it all the time. And here's the important thing about those areas. They are not things you put on the wall. They are not things you just talk about. You have to practice that. So I think your team is going to emulate your behavior, and your team is going to take those and try to play them in their own way deeper in the organization. And that's how you build the culture. I always say, you know you build the right culture when people do the right thing when you are not watching them. And, no, I actually, one day, probably when I have free time, I will write about that. But unfortunately I haven't got a chance to do it yet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:31) Well, when the Mazen book comes out, let us know. I really like that. I mean, I get to do a lot of these interviews, right? And so one of the things we look at is we actually will track different advice people give for different things in spreadsheets, and that will help us determine from a macro level, like, what are some of the habits and patterns across all of these, you know, 500-plus interviews. And you named basically all of them, like the most common ones that come up. And the reason that's important is because those are the things that really move the needle, right? Those are the things that really matter.

(Mazen at 00:14:07) Yeah, Joel. And usually I talk about those in different, every time I have an opportunity with my broader organization, if it's an ask-me-anything, if it's a roundtable, or if it's an all-hands, I always like to inject that with examples because it's, again, it's not what do you say, it's what do you do. And then that will trickle down in the behavior within the org. So it's, you know, sometimes I hear, you know, you walk to people's offices and they have things hanging on the wall, but actually that's not what they do. So that to me is, you have to practice what you do, and that's how your team believes in what you say and then they replay it again themselves. Then it becomes DNA over time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:52) Yes. You know who you are. I can tell. The way you speak and everything, like, you have a lot of self-awareness.

(Mazen at 00:14:59) Well, thank you. It's important.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:02) I know. That's the only, you have to be able to confront yourself and see, you know, I listened to this one guy, Jordan Peterson, and he talks about this one exercise you can do where you can sit on the corner of your bed and you can ask yourself, what's the one thing I'm doing that's absolutely keeping me from success? What's the one thing I'm doing that's really hurting me? And then stop doing it. And I thought that was actually a really interesting exercise because it forces you to confront yourself and the decisions that you make. And when it's just you versus you, you can't get mad at you for asking.

(Mazen at 00:15:32) Yeah. Yeah. No, I like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, you know, I think all of us, we have our own way of reflecting. And I actually usually reflect throughout the day in my drive back home, which lately with COVID, you know, has changed the whole dynamic. But reflecting back on your day, being able to be a good critic of yourself, it's extremely important.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:55) I want to talk about technology, the future of eBay, things of that nature. When I was growing up, eBay just came onto the market and it was huge. It was a household name, and it became—people, there were news stories about people selling stuff. It was a really huge part of society when it sort of exploded and became something everybody knew about. And then now, when eBay results come up, they tend to be generic results or it doesn't seem to actually be auctions.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:21) And whatever position I'm in as a user, it doesn't seem like something I would use to buy stuff. When that goes through my head, right, and you guys have 20,000 employees and you generate revenue, I'm like, where—what's the business model that I don't see? Or where is it really, really useful that I'm not seeing? And so I was hoping you could tell me where that is or what your largest area of business is or maybe what country you're most popular in.

(Mazin at 00:16:46) Yeah. One of the things—let me speak for me personally, but also it's a common thing you hear from our employees—why are you at eBay? Why did you come back to eBay? And very often you hear it's the purpose of the company and what we do. And our purpose is pretty simple. The purpose of eBay is we are connecting communities to create economic opportunities for all.

(Mazin at 00:17:09) And when we meet some of our sellers and some of our buyers and you hear their story and how eBay changed their life, it hits home because that purpose is amazing. Now to answer your question, I think when I think of eBay, the scale of eBay—at any given time, you have 1.6 billion live listings on sale at any given day. And we are in almost 190 markets. And then we have massive volume and amount of data, rich data from seasonality, the depth of data. And we try to bring all that to help our customer.

(Mazin at 00:17:47) For example, collectibles, trading cards. Now we have a lot of enthusiasts who come to eBay to find the things, not just the things they love, but the things they can't find anywhere else. So I think, you know, when I look at the activity on the site and I look at buyers and sellers and what they do, sometimes I'm amazed because you'll see numbers that are just staggering in terms of activity on the site. So to answer your question, think of refurbished items, collectibles, trading cards, sneakers, handbags, and some of the really—watches, some of the high-end, high-value—you'll find them on eBay.

(Mazin at 00:18:28) But also, what do you find on eBay? A lot of things that people can't find anywhere else. So, you know, I think you find a lot of enthusiasts who would come to eBay because they love what they find and they connect with it, but also they find the things that they can't find anywhere else. I don't know if I answered your question, but—

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:47) Yeah. You know, you did. It's—you reminded me that there's so many other things other than the things I would be looking for when I ran into the issue. But, yeah, the whole antiques, trading cards, collectibles, all of those things. So that's a large area of your business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:59) And then what country are you most popular in? Do you know?

(Mazin at 00:19:02) Well, yeah. I mean, you think in Europe, you know, Germany, UK, also in Australia, Japan. So I think, you know, we are in, as I said, 190 markets around the world. But I think the other—I feel misconception about eBay—eBay, when I talk to many people and when we talk about eBay, they think it's all the auction stuff, it's all the used stuff. Actually, more than 90% of items sold on eBay are brand new items.

(Mazin at 00:19:29) We have businesses that run on eBay. So I think that's another misconception where, yeah, you get the collectibles, you get a lot of refurbished, which is a massive business. But also, there's a lot of businesses who actually sell brand new items on eBay. And it's not just what we call C2C. There's a lot of B2C happening on eBay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:50) One of the things that I've started to learn over the past couple years is we have—when I say we, Americans—we have our imagination of the brand. And by default, if we don't think deeply about it, we just imagine that that's how it works across the world. But often, it doesn't. I found this out specifically with some countries, like Sweden and such, that they'll use, like, Facebook at work. It'll be a common thing that they're on while they're at work, and they'll use these tools that are within Facebook as a Slack, like a workplace type deal.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:21) So I got to start to pay attention to how different cultures and different countries will actually use different tools. And so that's why I was curious. I was like, man, I wonder what countries are really into eBay.

(Mazin at 00:20:32) Yeah. And, you know, culture comes to play a lot in different behavior of different countries. Like, everybody knows, you know, the way Germans use credit cards and checks and bank accounts is different than how we use it in the US. So, yeah, I mean, different countries. And it's also, trading cards—it's more popular in the US than in Europe.

(Mazin at 00:20:55) It's because the culture is different. So, absolutely. I mean, there's different interests, different behavior, how they interact with the site based on their location in the world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:06) Let's talk about AI. What type of cool stuff are you guys doing over there with modern technology?

(Mazin at 00:21:11) Yeah. There's, you know, I always—I always think of AI—it's not a product. It's an ecosystem. And I try always to correct my team when we talk about it and others because it's interwoven into everything we do internally and externally. What I love about what we do in AI, we have an amazing chief AI officer, and we have an outstanding team.

(Mazin at 00:21:33) What we're doing in the computer vision, it's exciting. You know, what we're doing also in all the modeling and basically, taking this massive volume of data we have and being able to train it within a short window and being able to make value and activate that data for our customers. But when I think of—I don't know if you've seen, we've done the True 3D where you actually—you can look at the sneakers and you do a 360, a 3D, but also you can zoom in and zoom out and look at the blemishes and look at the stitches of the shoes, which I don't think anybody's doing it at that point, which is exciting because now you don't just rotate the sneakers. You rotate it and you flip it upside down.

(Mazin at 00:22:18) You actually look at it from every angle, but certain areas, you want to figure out, is that a scratch? And then you can zoom in and see that. We're doing that. We leverage AI in many areas around fraud and, you know, also within our infrastructure in the back end, we leverage AI in many other capabilities. But computer vision, NLP, and what we're doing in that space is pretty exciting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:43) What are your thoughts on Facebook Marketplace? And there's sneaker-specific marketplaces and these other sort of emergent marketplaces. When you see one come about, do you use it, explore it, figure out what they're doing? How do you see those other marketplaces?

(Mazin at 00:23:00) Yeah. Listen. It'll be naive for anybody not to use the product of their competition. I mean, you have to use the product of your competition. You have to see what you can learn from it.

(Mazin at 00:23:12) And, you know, otherwise, you are complacent, and you cannot do that. Listen, competition is good. Competition actually ignites a lot of good creative thinking and innovation. But in the end, I always focus on our strategy and who we are.

(Mazin at 00:23:31) And I will never, from a technology side, I will never allow our strategy to be driven by what our competition is doing. So we stay true to who we are and our strategy, our values, and what we try to deliver for our customers. And that's where the focus is. I've done that throughout my career. I look to see what the competition is doing, but that is not what will drive our strategy, and we stay focused on who we are.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:00) Nice. I like it. I wanted to ask you if there were any really big differences from the first time you held a position at eBay to the second time that you held a position there.

(Mazin at 00:24:12) Yeah. You know, absolutely. I think the company evolved and changed. In my first stint at eBay, first of all, different time and different challenges. I think the second stint is—the world has changed and both technical challenges and business challenges are different.

(Mazin at 00:24:31) It's also—the one thing that did not change is the culture, the purpose of the company, the culture, and that did not change much. But everything around it, you know, from a technology perspective, it's—I would say it's a 180-degree shift and change in terms of focus and challenges.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:50) What type of technology do you use the most, whether it's a piece of hardware or software? It can't be your cell phone or computer. Other type of technology.

(Mazin at 00:24:59) Yeah. You know, I think open source. So one of the things I pushed for when I rejoined eBay back in 2016 is moving more and more to open source at different layers of our technology stack. And that's why when I look right now, actually, open source is dominating our entire stack from the bottom up, either from software and hardware and infrastructure components. So to me, that's important because, as I said, the world changed over time where in the past, eBay used a lot of enterprise products.

(Mazin at 00:25:35) And we moved more into open source. And it's a way to actually attract and retain top talent engineers because going back to the earlier point, you have a lot of pride in what you build, but you are part of the solution. And it also creates this—I would call it really—unlimited creative mind to how to solve problems. And you are not limited to a product you license from an enterprise company. So open source is definitely—it's dominating our entire stack from what I call the foundation from data center and network all the way to our UI software.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:15) And are you guys contributing to help maintain those projects?

(Mazin at 00:26:19) So we leverage the open source, and we contribute to it. But we have not opened some of our products to the outside yet. We are debating that internally to decide which one we want to put out in the market and get thousands of developers to build on top of it to make it a better product.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:39) I want to wrap up with a question. We get questions from the audience. We ask people. We send out emails saying, hey, we're talking to the CTO of eBay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:46) What type of questions do you have? One question here is, what advice do you have for tech leaders going through uncertain times?

(Mazin at 00:26:58) Yeah. One, I would say, don't try to be a perfectionist. There's a lot of uncertainty, a lot of dynamic environment. I would say, get the right people around you. Make sure you bounce your ideas off others and ask for help when you need it.

(Mazin at 00:27:18) This is very—it's a very dynamic time, and a lot—most of us, we are seeing things we never seen before, but we can relate to it in other areas. So I find the more you step away from being a perfectionist or get the right people around you, make sure you have a good sounding board around you, and don't try to solve the problem by yourself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:38) 100% the case. Especially, I learned that pretty rapidly as an entrepreneur when you have your life savings on the line and you don't have the right people around you and it's not working. You get really bold really fast and you get good at pulling people on and off your team, and then you figure out it's not necessarily the specific project as much as it is the people that are intelligent, talented, autonomous, and you can sort of bring them together and all achieve a shared goal. But, yeah, you definitely learn that in an accelerated way when all your money's on the line.

(Mazin at 00:28:09) Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:11) Well, thank you so much, man. This has been fantastic. We made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Mazin at 00:28:16) Oh, I love it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:18) 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.