Executive Interview
From Berkeley to a $60B Data+AI company with Arsalan Tavakoli
Arsalan Tavakoli · Co-founder & SVP Field Engineering · LinkedIn
as a leader you want to be involved in figuring out how do we shape that how do we think about that how do we structure that how do we set the right set of principles and then let the team go
amount of things that are kind of coming towards you is fairly significant so you know you spend a lot of time trying to figure out how do you ruthlessly prioritize where do you focus your time
on it's hard to do something when you feel it's just a job and I know I know this will sound corny but we do it because we're passionate about the company what it what it is and what it
could become so you want to invest a lot so look after M and rold who both are the scof founder we are super happy to host today asan with us who is also one of the the Arabic cofounders so thank
you so much asan for being with us we know you're super busy so thanks a lot of course happy to be here so I feel like you have maybe a little bit less public known phase compared to like mat
and rold you know who are working on spark uh so I feel like we or you proper introduction so you have a PhD in computer science from berley uh you spend four years at mckin and then you
join Dar bricks right at the beginning um and I think I heard you were actually um managing the sales team at Dar bricks when you join is that is that is that a true thing yeah so um it was kind of funny
right uh when we were when we starting the company I I think I guess I was the quote unquote token you know business guy as well which meant that um you know look all of us were technical when we
started and you know as a as a result of that though uh we Mo all of us spent a ton of our time coding um but I remember back then you know Yan who was our CEO there was like okay arson I need you to
come join and we have all of these kind of things we need to do his what he really wanted me you know to start on at the very beginning was adding you know commenting features um you know
to the notebooks but then he's like in your spare time do the things like you know marketing and pricing and go to market and business development and all of those I mean you were at McKenzie you
should you know know some of those things um and then you know so sure why not um and then so then as we started in the very early days like it wasn't called sales it was called customer
engagement actually which was anybody who spent time dealing with customers and um way before we even hired salespeople um you know we had solution Architects uh because most of your time
back then was engaging with customers and trying to hold together with duct tape and glue what you were giving them and making it work um and then as we were getting ready to you know fully not
just come out of stealth but you know GA the product we started um you know basically hiring sales people and that would have been summer of 2015 I think we hired our first set of uh sales
people and then yes I was responsible for doing it until we fortunately found somebody who is far far better at it than I am you know which was you know Ron who's still our cro today so and and
now you're are leading the dats field engineering so maybe F would don't know what's field engineering at data bricks uh I think the best way to explain that would be like everybody was Technical
and customer facing at the same time so like not the engineering team not the sales team kind of everybody else to simplify that um so yeah like a big team of two 2,000 people so talking about that what what
well what do you think is the what do you find the most challenging like is it leading a team of 2,000 people in the era of gen with all the challenges run that or is it you know having to deal
back at home with a family of five kids and and making sure everything go movie that's a tough question um you know what how about try the challenge is trying to do both of those at the same
time um right look I think um you know I think you always get energy from you know you get energy from one to feed into the other um candidly uh yes from a from a you know family life perspective most people
think I'm nuts um you know we have uh five kids the oldest one just turned nine um and they're all exactly 23 to 26 months apart um you know so you could just imagine you know dinner time at our
house is you know quite hectic um but then against that backdrop what that means is um we didn't have any kids actually um I started at data bricks like you know we're starting uh I think
a couple of days after my wedding so it's like my wedding you know has coincided with kind of the time of data breaks and definitely didn't have any kids um you know when we started uh
which has been an interesting Journey but from a from a challenge perspective I think you take that the personal life as a backdrop the thing that's always interesting is um the speed that things
change right like I always have a simple formula um for me it's like where you know um what keeps me at some place is like am I having fun am I learning am I making an impact it sounds simp simple
but it's rules to live by and for me I have the attention span of a six-year-old so I've literally the last time I was somewhere for more than four years was elementary school and even
that's not true because I switched elementary schools in the middle um so the fact that you know now we've been at data breaks for you know over 11 years at this point the reality is you talked
about it yourself 11 something years ago we were seven people you know in a room uh somewhere trying to you know figure out how do we scale a company and then you think about all of the iterations there
of watching what's happened as Cloud accelerated what happened as the space accelerated what happens as data bricks you know continues to kind of grow from a product breath perspective and figure
out okay how do you stay on top of that what are the markets how do you go about it um how do you keep figuring out what are go to go to market dynamics right the way that you think about an
organization when we were you know zero people to 50 people to 100 to 500 to now as you mentioned I think we're almost you know 2 200 people you know in field engineering um spread out all across the
globe how do you think about the role and expectations as a company from when in the early days we were so excited um you know about like bringing in a 20K deal to now you're talking about you
know deals that are kind of eight figures or nine figures so there's a just a unique challenge um in being in all those phases and the fact that they are so compressed right the speed that
you're moving from one phase to the next doesn't give you time to kind of see it plan it digest it you're always just trying to figure out what's around the corner um and that's both challenging
but exhilarating at the same time and and I have a question like you mentioned lot you are doing a lot of things and so how do you balance work and personal time because I I imagine
you have tons of critical like requests coming from across the world like like literally nonstop so how do you do this compromise yeah look I think there's twofold I mean the real there's a couple
realities right which you know I I think people always treat it as taboo but it's not like a data bricks or any hypergrowth startup is never going to be like a you know nine to four uh you know
type place right it's G to be there is always 10x the amount of work um you know that there are people and the company will always take as much as you're willing to give and offer right
and for many of us who are here um right uh we are it's hard to do something when you feel it's just a job and I know I know this will sound corny but we do it because we're passionate about the
company what it what it is and what it could become so you want to invest a lot in it at the same time it was very clear you know to me from the beginning that it's not a Sprint it's a marathon you're
in there for a long period of time and so um you know for me family life is incredibly important and you make sure that you set those boundaries like for example for me um to the extent possible
it's not always the case there's certain things like I like to see the kids um off to school before um they go to school um I try to make it a practice if I can because you know um you know when
I'm home when my wife works from home to kind of carve out times to sit down and have lunch together um you know it's kind of important to me to you know be able to be at home in time to have
dinner with the kids and the family spend some time and put the kids to bed um you know as well but look as a result I said that there's a lot uh from a company perspective that means that you
make tradeoffs so for example example those who know me know one of the most common trade-offs I make is whenever I'm flying somewhere I'll almost always take the red eyee and not because I love red
eyes red eyes suck they're miserable who likes a red eye right but the answer is because the red eye gives me time to have dinner with the kids and tuck them into bed say you know basically good
night to my wife before heading you know to the airport um you know as an example or looking at it and being careful about there's always every night a hey have a dinner or this or that how do I get home
or after everybody's asleep getting back on to kind of work things so um you know as I said you you're putting in a bunch of time to work but you've set those boundaries of what are some of the most
critical things and I think for everybody those boundaries are different for some of them it's family for some of them it's you know I want to make sure that I work out and stay healthy for
some of them it's these are the hobbies that I need to you know invest in and I think the you know the nice part about a place like a data bricks is we I think we hire amazing people we trust them to
kind of know what they need to deliver and deliver it but then within that give them flexibility to balance their personal obligations or other things that are important to make those work
while still delivering what's necessary so talking about like family and kids and and and you are a lot on AI uh we like I'm hearing a lot of things about Ai and education around the kids
like do you think it's going to change the way you where Maybe Vision raising kids like maybe do you do you have something that you see is changing before chat GPT and after chat GPT we
hear a lot of things about you know private kind of AI to train your kids educate your kids knowing them like super well and things like that do you think it's gonna be Game Changer yeah I
think it's going to be act a game changer there's a lot of things I'm excited about one is I am hopeful with AI that I never have to get any of my kids at driver's license cuz the thought
of teaching any of them to drive is terrifying to me so if we just have self-driving cars that can be you know happy with that um the second thing is look uh kids people in general but kids are
sponges for basically like absorbing you know information um and you do your best as a parent to both help with them but one even if you put aside the time there's just stuff that they want to
know that I have no idea um you know I don't know the you know answer to it and it is kind of uh funny you know like way before chat GPT in our house we always had like Google homes that's what we use
sorry to the Alexa folks I wasn't a big Alexa fan we are Google home family um and I kid you not the majority of my kids one of their first 10 words was Google um because they learned you know
for things that you just say you know you'd ask a question of Google still to this day my son will ask one question he be like oh don't worry I'm going to go ask Google um you know those kind of
things where and the level of detail and explanation and look as you look at the tools out there we all use it as well um but for the kids of how do they gain information about the world how do you
feed their imagination when they want to understand anything and everything about it um you know being able to go ask whether it's chat GPT whether it's something like you know perplexity
whether it's kind of many of these are going to get embedded in um you know phones and the like uh the fact that they have have easy ways to get access to that information it's critical now as
you might imagine there's a whole bunch of concerns that you then have is like exactly you know if you know my kids ask this question no no no that's a question I want a chance for me and my wife to
answer because we want to you know kind of color like how we answer it because there's not absolute answer there's a lot in that digital world that you're you know trying to figure out but you
look at the pace where they can tailor learning from themselves and bring all of of that information at their fingertips I think that's undoubtedly going to change how they're able um to
go through things and go through life and now you will have to trust like the company behind this model to kind of give the education that matches your you know your way of lives and everything
that's that's interesting exactly and since you're talking about education as as Quinton mentioned the you have a PhD so do you still believe that PhD is something valuable in this
world as all the information are now being available like to everyone you can literally do anything you want yeah um I think it is um you know valuable look I know that everybody has
their different thoughts of whether you should go to college whether you should get a grad degree like I don't view um you know a PhD candidly being about oh you know it gave me an opportunity to
read these research papers all the papers that you read you know and PhD or the textbooks are available you can read it um otherwise I think the PHD was really really valuable on a couple of
Dimensions right one you just look at the connections that you build with likeminded people as well which is incredibly valuable but I thought uh that whole process of a PhD which is dedicated focused time where
you have autonomy but to teach you how do you go through analytical and critical things thinking right how do you go into a world where it's not some very very nice well structured problem
right that's what you know in a large parts of you know schooling is there is a problem everybody knows the answer to it and now it's just about you know you kind of memorizing it or understanding
that mechanism and repeating it out it's not how the real world works though right the real world is driven by can you enter into an area where it's unclear what even the design spaces it's
unclear what the answer is but you need to find a path forward and I think the incredible thing about a PhD is it lets you struggle it lets you discover what are the different problems it lets you
figure out what is the one that's interesting for you to tackle and figure out how do you you know structure okay how do I Define the problem how do I constrain the problem how do I approach
it how do I understand what good enough is how do I deal with failure how do I deal with things that I got there but you know the results weren't what I thought about but it's and use that to
move things forward in a way that you Pioneer um you know canine your new approaches that then other people build upon just like you built upon their work it's an incredibly valuable toolkit
right even even if you think about the um hey I have ai ai is really good about giving you access to a bunch of information and maybe synthesizing it and but and maybe for the simplest
problems it'll help structure it but that way of still knowing what to ask for how to structure it and how to basically pull that together to create novel new things and Pull It Forward in
a world of ambiguity I don't think it replaces that and I think like that that SK like I remember that much more than I remember what esoteric networking or just you know database paper that I read
on some novel new sharding technique um you know in grad school so I think in that realm it was incredibly helpful um you know for me uh at least I loved it had to do it over again would you know
absolutely go down the the same path so what how did you like what made you switch M and go to Da bricks did you knew the da bricks team before like from bleay from your PhD how did it work how
did you know okay I'm GNA give up on mck say um which seems like you know like a nice world to be in and and start something new within bricks yeah um you know the short answer is you know if you've ever met our CEO
Ali he's a he's a really persistent guy um look I think um I knew uh you know obviously many of the of the founders from Berkeley so you know uh Yan was a professor there who I worked with a ton while I was there um
you know my PhD advisor Scott Shanker was you know kind of um one of the core early you know both um investors and you know um board members as well you know Ali and I were um good friends and it's
remained good friends um you know uh after leaving Berkeley um you know kind of and then you know two of the other Founders they came in a year after me so I knew them there we were all part of
the rad lab amp lab you know the like and then you know two of them so actually like Patrick and Reynold would enter after I so I did not know them um at the time and look I think there was
two things I was not explicitly um you know looking to uh for example to leave McKenzie McKenzie you know was also you know a great experience turned a lot and at the time period that I was leaving McKenzie
everybody would tell me I'm nuts right because you know in McKenzie or many of the Consulting places you are there's this place where you go from being a junior partner which is what I was to
like a full partner and you never know for sure but they were like hey you're you know a couple of months away from that and that period when you become a full partner that that beginning there's
a lot like it's almost like a reset to figure out what you want to do you're well compensated so you be it's like the worst time in the world considered to leave it's like the equivalent of a you
know a professor like leaving school like three months before they get tenure just makes no sense um but I also knew that that wasn't what I wanted to do long term right you look at the people
who are way ahead of you and you have respect for them but you look at and say that's not the path um and I knew I didn't want to go join a big company right because at McKenzie you advise
many of those large companies and they're doing some incredible things but you tend to get job offers from them often and just the pace with which they moved it was just not really um for me
and so you know I mentioned I joined you know data bricks uh right when I got married so at my bachelor party South Beach Miami you know uh Ali shows up and he's like hey we're starting a company I
was like you got to be fing kidding me like I don't want to talk about it right now I'm at my bachelor part leave me alone you know come find me when we're done um and sure enough you know as soon
as uh I land I have a voicemail from him say hey okay your bachelor party is over can we talk about this we're stting the company and you know uh I met with the guys I talked with them a bunch and I
remember it was you know the week before the wedding I went um you know met with all of them obviously many of them I knew well you know some of the new ones in there heard about the vision heard about
you know what they wanted to do and for me it was kind of simple right look most startups are destined to fail that's just the reality of it that's how it always works but when I looked at it I
was like okay um first the people are incredible right um when when you look at that normally and I know this is going to sound bad you normally have you know maybe an NBA and a token engineer
you know some form but you had like six other people were very well accomplished like incredibly smart you know but High e EQ you know looked at it as um they had an idea of what they wanted to drive
second uh you already had you know a solid technology again many of them will be and I'm going to sound dismissive that's not fair but it'll be like oh we have we have the like brand new iPhone
app we working on they had kind of in the like a bunch of Technology like spark widely adopted kind of um at that pace third from a investor perspective you already had interest from you know
somebody like a Ben Horwitz himself that wanted to go in there and then lastly you looked at that space that you were in right which was called Big Data back then that if nothing else even if it
failed getting a chance to be on the front lines of watching that Journey um you know is pretty uh is pretty incredible so I told my wife I was like well actually she told me as she'll
remind me um if you don't do this you might as well admit to yourself you're never going to join a startup because you're not going to get a better even if the likelihood of uh success is not high
you're not going to get a better opportunity than this um and so I remember as I said I talked to them the week before the wedding and you know couple of days after on a honeymoon I
remember I was in a ROK and Kyoto and I facetimed them I'm like all right I'm in um let's do this and so uh I once said that was the best decision I ever made and then my wife gave me a dirty look
and I said it's the second best decision I ever made um you know but uh 11 years ago and changing Still Loving It wow that's amazing story yeah and and I have a sorry um I think this is one of
the questions that a lot of people has been asking me to ask you and was like how does someone became a leader and like what's the process I mean like is it something you got learn we GNA you
GNA learn by by Leading since for example for your case you joined the company it was a very small team and now you're leading almost 2,000 people yeah look I think um I think there's absolutely a lot of training to
become an amazing leader but what I find is um you've got to look for uh a couple of things if I'm honest a you have to have people who are passionate about being a leader right so what I find is
that there are still a lot of people who think that they need to go into leadership because that's the way that you you know make money or you get influence um you know I lik in this is
you know I come from a you know um you know born in Iran come from an immigrant family and the joke is an Iranian family amilies you can be anything you want to be as long as it's an engineer or doctor
and maybe a lawyer on some days right um so there's many people who go into that and I'm like I don't want my doctor to be somebody that their parents force them to be a doctor I want it to be
somebody who cares about basically helping people right so you know as an example at data breaks from the early days we set it up that compensation is similar between the bands and influence
is similar between you know individual contributors and managers so you get people who really want to do it I think that the second thing is um there are people who you have even though that
there's a bunch of training on the job you intrinsically see those people who have it one of the big mistakes we oftentimes make is assume just because somebody's an amazing individual
contributor and they understand the individual contributor role they'll be phenomenal leaders and it's absolutely not the case right I've seen plenty of places where you know incredible
individual contributors are terrible leaders and then we have people who were good average individual can TR be amazing leaders right so there's an intrinsic set of quality that you look
at right um you know that leaders you expect to have happen um do they have empathy do they have kind of that ability to understand what makes people tick and you know read them and how to
interact with them you know do they naturally have a way of putting forward a vision and a strategy that galvanizes people and gets them around so there there's a set of intrinsics on there
right um you know and then ultimately if you have the intrinsics after that it's just people who are also one of the biggest traits I find of good leaders is not having a problem admitting when they
don't know something when they're not good at something and looking for ways whether that's learning from people or surrounding themselves by people who know it of learning like look I came to
data bricks I had never been you know I'd never been a manager before for in my life um right like in Consulting you kind of lead teams but it's weird Matrix functions like direct management role um
and so not only I never I didn't even know what solution architecture was or field engineering was much less I built the team right and you know as I will say as both of you will attest to um
I've made a million mistakes along the way and I'll probably make a million more until they finally get smart and fire me um you know in the role but the key piece was um that Curiosity of
always you know staying and trying to find amazing people that you respect and learn from them and pick their brain and knowing that being okay to admit that you don't know things and asking people
for help and questions those were those were great Hallmarks right I think as we grow larger one of the things we try to do is um make it easier because the hard part of the startup is you basically are
left on your own to figure all of those things out and you probably progress slower um to get there so it's why as you get um bigger one of the most important things you can do is invest
for your leaders in things like training and mentorship and feedback programs to help getting there but the best leaders I know have those intrinsics and they're always looking to figure out how do they
get better and you know gain that Insight from anywhere that they can yeah and like mentorship and coaching for sure so so as a leader what's your like what are you actually doing uh what's
you know your daily job do you are you taking key decisions uh maybe just a few decisions per day do you like do you oversee everything do you just focus on stategic ches like what's what is it
like um start with easier questions that's a hard question um look I think at a at a given day if your job as a leader is to figure out how to move things over uh forward and be a uh Force multiplier of some
form right so um you know I think your job is to figure out not like hey how can I do X Y and Z individually you know as ARS Salon but how do I help mobilize kind of 2500 people to do things um
going forward what that means in practice right is a um you know everybody has this you know this Vision that it's going to be great if you have a large organization you just have a
bunch of people doing the work and you can coast and do nothing unfortunately it doesn't work that way right um if anything the sheer amount of things that are kind of coming towards you is fairly
significant so you know you spend a lot of time trying to figure out how do you ruthlessly prioritize where do you focus your time on um that you have a finite amount of time that gives the highest
amount of Roi right is one I think second you tend to spend a lot of time handly in meetings and emails um that are either you know in my world like a lot of time with customers I probably
spend somewhere between you know like 30 to 40% of time with you know customers or kind of customer oriented activities I think then the other thing you're trying to do is figure out how do you
make the team productive which is how do you find places where you need to provide Clarity whether it's a decision or whether it's a debate or whether it's problem solving or framing the problem
to then unblock people from being able to go out and execute right so there's a significant amount of time spending there whether that's through an escalation or a strategy meeting or
anything of that like right and then you're also spending a significant amount of time with your your team like I am a big believer in one-on ones with the direct team and skip levels because
one it gives me a bunch of information about how the organization's going but a large part of my responsibility is to also invest in those people to kind of develop them to grow them um to learn
from them you know as well so that that mix which is you know a combination of customer time which is kind of you know internal with the team time and then which is like unblocking strategy
getting decisions driving it forward you know I think that I would say that that's the that's the bulk of it um there are days that you get to the end which one of the things that I missed
from you know uh being in ic was this especially in the early days um I spent um you know basically I was focused on front end pieces of the development uh right which was all sorts of fun you
know basically late at night trying to understand JavaScript and jQuery and backbonejs but so as a result it meant I knew at the end of the day and we had demos every Friday and it was cool
because I could get to show up and I be like look at all of these things I built you very clearly in a tangible way knew what you drove forward there are admitt times as a leader that you kind of ask
at the end of the day you're like I know I was in a lot of meetings and I know I sent a lot of emails I hope I move things forward maybe yes maybe no so I think figuring out how do you view you
know measure the impact and making sure you're working on the right things um is another big thing that you're you're constantly trying to make sure that you understand and refined yeah and I I I mean I can see
how it can be a big challenge because I think if it's a very small team uh then you can easily see you know who is doing what what's the friction how you can improve and help everybody if the team
starts being you know really big and especially I've seen like in previous companies you have so many layers and yeah like it's really hard for the top management to know what's actually going
on uh at the IC level because you have like a big bias in the reporting process like everybody would you know kind of sell you what they want to they what they want to sell to the level below and
then at the end like you think it's going well maybe it's not going well or the other way around um so I think it's really like I would be really yeah I wouldn't know how to solve that to be
honest well look the the key part is um it is a hard problem right because at some point you realize that no matter what you do you get people who've come you know later on time if you haven't done a good
job of explaining to them the culture of the company they start trying to manage upwards right and so if you really want well well there's two things you can all say to me um you know to piss me off one
is if I'm going to the meeting if you ask me arson do you need somebody technical to help you in the meeting that's number one you can really piss me off by asking me that and insinuating
that I don't know the product uh the second uh the second piece is when you hear oh we didn't want to escalate this to you we didn't think this was worthy of your time I was like I don't know
like people start worrying about bad news filtering up or you know they want to basically get it to you really late and the only way you do that is you basically make it clear that that's what
you're seeking out but I will literally arbitrarily start you know um pinging random people in the organization to ask them what's going on what about x what about Y and I'll often
times do those meetings on purpose without any of the people in the chain in between not to circumvent those people but because I know that it'll be easier for me to get kind of very very
transparent clear information um you know that way so you know that notion of continuing to be paranoid and Truth seeking to figure out what's going on good or bad and validated is a never
ending um you know piece but I think it's really important even more so as the organization grows yeah and as as you did mention like the team is growing and you have you have to you have to accept
let's say as a leader to lose Sometimes some control or you're in like a way where we still want to go deep into some topics and be like in a Founder mode you know I don't know why founder
mode you know has become the most popular thing after what was it I think Paul Graham posted the you know the blog on it um look I think that there are different ways of doing it I think on the one hand
you want uh and different people have different styles and I'm not saying one is more effective than the other everybody seems to think everything is like in absolute terms um in general one
you hire incredible people because you expect them you know to be be able to be autonomous right and to be able to drive things forward if you're literally in every single decision that's made
there's no way that you will you know you'll scale that said I sit on the side of um often times driven more by curiosity um for good or for bad if you ask people kind of report like I love to
be in the details I love to be in the details I like to debate the details I like to figure it out because I also think again it's not out of some lack of trust or perspective but I think that
there's two things I think that the core element of you know founder mode if you want to call it is uh you know those leaders have very very strong visions and perspective of what's going on and it's
they are eager to make sure that that Vision can be executed upon right and you can't do that if you just fly at a 10,000 foot level the second thing is many of the decisions we make are not
easy they're not trivial they're not like to that point that you asked me earli on about the PHD they're not like hey does 2 plus two equal four or five it's not at that level right I think
that the big abstract pieces and a large part is as a leader you want to be involved in figuring out how do we shape that how do we think about that how do we structure that how do we set the
right set of principles and then let the team go you know basically Implement uh implement it but that comes back to that point I talked about um you know where it comes to uh ruthless prioritization
because you can't be involved in everything um I once had a leader told me there may be a hundred things uh all hundred of them if you do them you will do them differently than other people
but if you try to do all hundred of them differently you won't have enough time you'll make everybody go crazy and you yourself will go crazy so pick the five or 10 that are really really important
and drive those ruthlessly because those are what determine the outcome so that figuring out what are the big ones you want to lean in on is where you spend a lot of time as a leader and I just want to add something
it's like a tribute I've been with you in some meetings and I can truly say that you can move rocks much easier and faster than a lot of people I've met so it's okay you don't have to say the
nice things I already came on you know this interview it yeah go ahead that that's that's that's so true like I've seen like how you move rocks and how like you can talk with any customer in any topic and this
is something I heard from Isis many many IIs I'm not throwing flowers that's this is the the reality so this just wanted to to say it to you and what one more thing do you have a word before we we
close the uh the meeting yeah look um know for my side one I appreciate you guys having me on here uh I think it's awesome the things that you guys are doing here and look many of the questions you asked was
about what is the trajectory what is the road to get there you know what's the right answer I think the big thing I often times uh Define to people like at least I share is because we heard this a lot at the early
days of data bricks which is like oh you guys are just some young academics it's cute you're building something great but you can look at X Y or z um you know because that's how they did and you have
to emulate it and you spend a lot of time with impostor syndrome trying to figure out how do I do what other people did and I think one of the most important things to realize um you know
at least for me um and I still realize it on a daily basis is as a be confident in what you're doing and the DNA and Paving your own path right don't be so arrogant that you think you
know everything that it's perfect Don't Close Your Eyes to what everybody else um you know is doing learn as much as you can from others the good things to do things not to do things that are kind
of don't make sense in your world um but if you do that and kind of keep a little bit of that humility knowing that you're not perfect you can always do better but be confident in making your own way
around things I think those are the those are the big things and you know what I found is you know because I think about some of the mentors that I gravitate towards people who kind of
have that authenticity that transparency that kind of like genuine humility were the ones that I was the most eager to follow right and figure out how to gets there and so you know as you think about
that whether you are a people manager or whether you're as an IC leader in set in the pace just kind of remembering those principles I've always found have at least for me served me
well amazing thank you thank you so much for this uh this session and sharing those all those crunchy details uh thank you so much of course thanks for having me guys thank you