Second in Command: The Chief Behind the Chief with Cameron Herold
00:10:45 · Gaurav Agarwal, Cameron Herold
[00:10:45] S0: We have about a thousand, give or take. But... [00:10:47] S2: Yeah. So you're running a real company, real moving parts. You're a true COO. How did a kid from India end up in Seattle? I mean, I knew how I have a kid from Canada ended up in Seattle. How did a kid from India end up in Seattle as the COO of a thousand person company? What's your career journey?
00:11:06 · Gaurav Agarwal
[00:11:06] S0: I I think in in some ways, I I think I I got lucky, and I was very privileged. So to give you a walk through, I I graduated in engineering, did quite well in studies. I ended up my first job out of college was actually in Singapore, and I worked for Barclays Capital. And I'm so grateful for that experience because I was in a high pressure. I was on the trading floor working on structured products, trading bonds. So I learned a lot and I did that across Singapore, London, and Tokyo. But then there was a time after three, four years and I'm like, this is not what I wanna do. I wanna actually build some stuff. And for a lot of people who grow up in India, there's just so much competition out there. People are so smart. You want to get out and you want to chase that better life outside India. You wanna you wanna go to The US. You wanna go to The UK. So I was in Tokyo at that time. And in some ways, I was pretty happy. But then I was like, you know what? I wanna... I want to actually build. So I left my job, I moved back to India. And I said, I wanna build something because, in my heart, I'm an entrepreneur. I'm a builder. And then I moved there for a company called Lensbricks that came out of MIT Media Lab, and they had an office in Boston and in India. And they... We were trying to do some smart deep learning stuff on on cameras, on video. And this was, like, fifteen years ago that has not been done before. So eventually the company ran out of money, but through that company I ended up visiting The US quite a bit. So it's interesting. I packed my bags, I go to India. In two days, I don't even get to get my house there. I was shipped to The US to go work on some, I was doing product development and customer development for them, so I I came to The US for that. And then we got into a hardware accelerator. It was a hardware product. It was a smart camera product. And through that accelerator, I made friends. So when Lensbricks went under, I I had a chance to go work for this company called Molekule, which was which was commercializing a new air purification technology. And I joined them on the business side, ran growth and e commerce for them. And that's how I moved to The US.
00:13:12 · Gaurav Agarwal
So I moved I moved from banking to product management for a computer vision startup to then leading growth in a hardware e commerce company, growing that business to, 9 figures in revenue, and then jumped into fintech. And then from fintech, I got into SaaS. ClickUp has a big self serve business, so they they hired me to come run as the chief growth officer to come run the self serve business. But over time, I got promoted end of last year to run all of operations. So here I am. Interesting. The interesting thing is I actually made out, left the country, and then I decided to go back. And I I... In my mind, I had convinced myself that maybe I'll never get to go out again now because it's very hard to get out. Yeah. India is good Asian.
00:13:55 · Cameron Herold, Gaurav Agarwal
[00:13:55] S2: India is a great place. I... I've I've been to India five times, and every time I go to India, I'm glad I'm going. And every time I'm there, I wanna get the hell out. And then when I'm out, I wanna go back. It's like it's like an it's like an addiction that you know you shouldn't have, but you can't get away from it too. Yeah. You said something that I was really interested by because when you started talking about being banking over in Singapore, I started laughing to myself going, you don't have a banking personality and DNA. You have a bit more of that gregarious kind of entrepreneurial DNA, which is very unusual for COOs, by the way. And then you said you're more of an entrepreneurial leader, I think you said, or more of an entrepreneurial bent to you. I'm intrigued by that because we've had about 400 guests on the Second in Command podcast of some incredible brands similar to yours. Very few of them are entrepreneurial. Do you think that entrepreneurial is something that is critical in a high growth company or in a software comic... Company that... That's in growth mode? [00:14:52] S0: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think if I if I see what separates the the legendary businesses, like, the reason why Facebook is what it is is because they have they have preserved their entrepreneurial DNA. So because in a world that's rapidly changing around you, the product behaviors, the UX patterns, the distribution paradigms, The only way you survive and and continue to manage your edge is by being entrepreneurial.
00:14:52 · Gaurav Agarwal, Cameron Herold
[00:14:52] S0: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think if I if I see what separates the the legendary businesses, like, the reason why Facebook is what it is is because they have they have preserved their entrepreneurial DNA. So because in a world that's rapidly changing around you, the product behaviors, the UX patterns, the distribution paradigms, The only way you survive and and continue to manage your edge is by being entrepreneurial. [00:15:16] S2: So you have the engineering background, and engineering tends to be a little bit more structured, a little bit more methodical. You have a banking background, which which which is fairly entrepreneurial in many ways, it's fast paced, and it's definitely, like, quick thinking and problem solving and good analytics. But does the engineering get in the way of being entrepreneurial, or how have you found the marriage between those two? [00:15:37] S0: Actually, no. In the sense that I went to school for something called industrial and engineering and it's called management science and engineering in The US in some programs. It's also about operations engineering. [00:15:47] S2: Okay.
00:15:47 · Cameron Herold, Gaurav Agarwal
[00:15:47] S2: Okay. [00:15:47] S0: But the biggest thing I learned in that engineering curriculum was structured problem solving, number one. So how do you take a big problem and you break it down into systems? And then you identify the points of leverage. So good engineers are great at breaking down a problem or an opportunity into its subcomponents and identifying the points of leverage. And the second thing that I learned a lot is, there's always a better global optima out there. So wherever we are today, we are at a local optimum. And to assume that we will stay here is basically losing out on the fact that there's a bigger, better world out there that we can create because every engineering system has a better optimal state that you can get to. So if it bring these two things together, I think businesses are the same way where you... In order to run a business effectively, you need to understand the systems and the and the relationship between these systems, but then also identify real points of leverage. And if you can apply the pressure in these points of leverage, you will have a significant ROI versus beating your head against points that may have saturated. And then the third part, which is why I think entrepreneurial mindset is needed because businesses by default are are never at global optima. The world around you is constantly changing. So you are stuck in local optima. And if you behave like that, it keeps you humble, and it allows you to continue to push to keep that search for global optima.