00:00:00 · Mina Radhakrishnan, Sachin, Adam Miller
[00:00:00] S0: And I remember, like, walking into the office and, like, Travis is like, who wrote... Did this golden ticket thing? And I was like, oh, shit. I'm gonna get fired. I put my hand on. Was like, hey, Travis. That's that's Mike. He's like, I love it. [00:00:09] S1: On this episode, we talk to Mina Radhakrishnan, Uber's first head of product in 2011. She shares what it was like working with Travis Kalanick, how to ship product in the AI age, and what it took to recover, reflect, and rebuild after the shutdown of her VC backed startup, Different. [00:00:25] S2: During that kind of process of voluntary administration, how did you feel? [00:00:30] S0: It's awful. I wasn't... I mean, it's not pleasant at all. Right? You feel like you've you've you've you've let everybody down. You did all the stuff that you were supposed to do, but you still didn't make it in the end. You know? And you're gonna fail at times, and it's not about whether or you failed. It's about how you recover from failure. [00:00:45] S2: What do you think makes a brilliant product manager? [00:00:47] S0: So here's my my thinking on on product management. You need someone to understand. [00:00:52] S1: Do you have any takes on what Australia could do or Australians could do to improve startup culture here. Is there anything you think people are doing particularly wrong here? [00:01:01] S0: The number of people that are working on something stealth, something secret, something that's just like, Who cares? And I think every founder, certainly ones who are nontechnical, should do this. They should take a
00:01:01 · Mina Radhakrishnan, Adam Miller, Sachin
[00:01:01] S0: The number of people that are working on something stealth, something secret, something that's just like, Who cares? And I think every founder, certainly ones who are nontechnical, should do this. They should take a [00:01:12] S2: Really quickly, before we get back into the show today, we just want to ask you, our audience, a quick favor. [00:01:17] S1: Only 7% of our returning weekly viewers are actually subscribed to the channel. However, as part of our mission to create the best tech media in Australia, we've got the lofty goal of hitting 15,000 subs by the end of this year. [00:01:28] S2: Truly, the best way to help this channel is subscribing. It helps more than you know, and we'd really appreciate it. [00:01:34] S1: So to thank you all who support us, we're planning a special surprise at the end of the year, and we can't wait to tell you all about it. For now, enjoy the show. [00:01:42] S2: Mina, welcome to the podcast. [00:01:48] S0: Thanks for having me, [00:01:49] S2: We were... We started off the conversation talking a little bit about you doing some vibe coding lately and getting back into building. How are you feeling about all that?
00:01:56 · Mina Radhakrishnan
[00:01:56] S0: I love it. Oh my god. It's so great. You know what? My background is in software engineering, so I have distinct memories of being in the lab at, like, 3AM trying to write, like, ML. It was It's insane to think about how different that was versus like coding now. And it's actually... There's just a joy to it. Like, I think vibe coding sometimes can... Has this negative connotation. But actually, for me, what's great about it it's the flow state, right? Like, you're actually there. And Where I think people get into trouble with it is if you don't actually understand what that is producing and you're just sort of taking it at face value, yeah, you're going to get in trouble. But why sit there and develop all of the intimate details of it versus having it work with you as a partner in your process of coding and development and then going in and making sure you actually understand what it's doing, why it's doing it? And it's not perfect. It gets it wrong a lot of the time. Like, my my preferred tool of choice is is cursor. Love working with it. It's great. And I usually connect it with with with Claude and Sonnet. And it it definitely gets a lot of things wrong. There are times where I'm like, no. No. Calm down. Do not swear at the AI. It is not good for you. And, you just have to go back to it and just calm down and be very specific and detailed about what it is you wanna do. But it's just... It it makes coding fun again. It makes it makes it about building the product, not about writing the code.
00:03:12 · Sachin
[00:03:12] S1: Mhmm. And where do you think this is gonna take us into the future? I think on Twitter, there's a pretty fierce debate about what's going on, like, all software engineers are gonna be replaced. And then on the other side, saying, you know, coding is so much more than just, you know, writing a few prompts. You've gotta maintain things. You've gotta debug things, databases, like things are a lot more complicated than we think.
00:03:31 · Mina Radhakrishnan
[00:03:31] S0: Yeah. No, I definitely don't think software engineering is going go away by any... It's funny. I've actually been working on a bunch of blog posts about this coming out on LinkedIn soon. Where I think it becomes a big deal is is with anything. Was writing about, okay, does AI replace product managers? Does AI replace designers? Does AI replace engineers? Like, all of these things in a in a and product world. Because typically, these these are white collar jobs that have not been replaced. We talk about automation. We're mostly talking about kind of like blue collar jobs. And now for the first time, it's like, the AI is coming for us. And I think what is gonna be challenging is that if you are a junior in this space, it's really hard to compete with AI. Yeah. But if you don't start out as a junior, how do you become a senior? And I think that's where it becomes really tricky. And and my view on it, especially from an engineering standpoint, is that I just think we're gonna have a lot fewer juniors. So, like, if you wanna go learn software engineering, go learn it. It is a superpower. You absolutely sure it gives you the power to build, to create, to make things happen. But I think that this will bifurcate into sort of, like, two things. Like, people who really actually wanna become very good at engineering, and it's... And I... And it's not just coding. Being a software engineer is the reason that there's an engineer around it is you have to think about how it should work, why it should work, what it should do, where it should go. And you should think about AI as a partner and a tool in it. And so I think from the junior engineering standpoint, there'll be fewer of them. But that also means that if there are senior engineers that exist, they'll be able to work with them in a much more apprentice type model, really deeply teach them, bring them into stuff earlier so that those juniors can come up to a middle senior level much higher. Then there's gonna be people who... That's not really kind of what drives them. Don't necessarily wanna become a great engineer. They don't necessarily wanna level up in becoming senior, and they should go become builders and find ways to be able to do those things. I think we're gonna get a lot fewer junior engineers. Like, I don't think, for example... You know, I'm taking this as a hot take.
00:05:13 · Mina Radhakrishnan, Adam Miller
Like, I don't think boot camps are worth it anymore. I think that's a waste of time, frankly, because you don't need that kind of stuff. You don't need to pay someone to do that. You can learn it yourself. You can do it, and then you could choose what it is you wanna do. You wanna become really good at engineering or you wanna go and become a builder. [00:05:28] S2: Yeah. And maybe actually CS degrees become more valuable because you learn about the architecture. You learn about how all the systems fit together rather than the actual just writing code and writing clean code. But, Mina, when someone looks at your LinkedIn, you've had a very storied career. You've been at Goldman. You've been at Google. You've been at Uber in the early days, and you started, arguably one of the hottest startups in Australia, at a point in time. If we were to go back and, you know, talk to your parents about when you were a young kid, was there any clues that you would, you know, eventually become a founder?