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?
00:06:02 · Mina Radhakrishnan
[00:06:02] S0: It's really funny to think about, you know, like, I think, classic immigrant parents, South Asians, I was going to be a doctor. I thought that too. Went to university, took my first biology class. I was dissecting an animal. Was like, I can't do this for the rest of my life. This isn't going work. I can't even do this the next four years. And I just... I don't think I had any real idea what I was gonna do, where I was gonna go. And, you know, I mean, this is also, like, a long time ago for me now. Like, I went... Was twenty five years ago since I went to university. And I remember thinking I took, in my first year, economics, art history, psychology, and, randomly, computer science. And it's funny because, you know, my my my dad... And I I give him a ton of credit for this. Like, my dad is not one of those, like, traditional parents who thought, like, girls have to be this or girls have to be that. Like, he didn't want me in coding classes. He always supported me. Like, I just... I have so much, like, love and respect for him. And and and I did... I was... I I, like, programmed when I was young. I went to his class and it was like me and like six guys, right? And I really loved it. I actually like very naturally got in with it. And for whatever reason, I didn't continue it. Like, I did these things and then I just like didn't really do much after that. Even even from when I was very young, funnily enough, my my dad had bought me this, like, you know, the basic peer systems? Like, like, I used to code in basic. And I wrote this little, like, jumping frog game and stuff. So I think the the roots of it were always there, but I I never knew that, like, entrepreneurship was a thing. Because I think also just you grew up in an immigrant family. It's like your parents have given up so much for you to be successful and do well. All you wanted is to be successful and do well. And the examples and what you've seen of it are like, you go to a company, you go to a good company, you progress up in that company, you get, like, a higher role and a higher title, you stay at that company. And it wasn't until I really kind of went to university and then started working and started experiencing kind of what else was out there that it occurred to me that, like, you can have a completely different life path.
00:07:57 · Sachin, Adam Miller
[00:07:57] S1: Building a tech startup is hard. Trust me. We know. And it doesn't help that founders often rely on up to 10 different money management systems at any given time. You know, one app for expense management, one for financial reporting, and another one for business accounts. [00:08:11] S2: Well, we're excited to tell you that that's actually not the case anymore. [00:08:14] S1: Well, Australian fintech Zeller has now built an all in one dashboard called Zeller for Startups to help founders streamline banking, saving, spending, and expense management. [00:08:24] S2: They literally build a platform especially for tech founders. [00:08:26] S1: To help you understand this absolute game changer for founders, we brought in the Zeller founder Ben Pfister. So, Ben, we're at a seed startup level. We've raised a mill. We've got a bunch of revenue, and business banking was just a horror for us. Getting cards, we still don't have a credit card yet. There's just a laundry list of problems that sort of keep us up at night, like, literally. What could Zeller for Startups do for us?
00:08:26 · Sachin, S3, Adam Miller
[00:08:26] S1: To help you understand this absolute game changer for founders, we brought in the Zeller founder Ben Pfister. So, Ben, we're at a seed startup level. We've raised a mill. We've got a bunch of revenue, and business banking was just a horror for us. Getting cards, we still don't have a credit card yet. There's just a laundry list of problems that sort of keep us up at night, like, literally. What could Zeller for Startups do for us? [00:08:47] S3: Yeah. We had exactly the same problem when we got started. So Zeller for Startups, you could sign up once, and you get access to all the different products and services you will need. You can pick and choose what works for you. Can You spin up corporate cards, debit cards, savings accounts, transaction accounts. You can do invoicing, etcetera. So you don't have to cobble together these different providers. You get all in one as a modern take on business banking as well, which we think a lot of startup founders will love. [00:09:11] S2: So join the wait list for Zeller for Startups to be eligible for a $100 cash bonus. You can find the link with all the information in the description of this episode. [00:09:19] S1: Mhmm. And when we look at your resume, like, there's been a lot of sort of, hot or sort of, like, high status jobs that you've had. Like, mentioned, there's been the Goldman, the Googles, the Ubers of the world. Like, if I look at that, were were you chasing the cool thing at the time, or what was that sort of journey of... What was that line of inquiry going from all those different jobs?
00:09:38 · Mina Radhakrishnan
[00:09:38] S0: Yeah. And I... You have to kind of like... You don't... I I don't know if I knew this at the moment, you know, but it wasn't it wasn't about status or cool factor. I think for me, it was... Like, maybe coming out of university, I was looking... I I actually... The the reason I started working at Goldman is because at Cornell, one of the cool things they do is this kind of... It's like a... It's an it's an internship program, but it's a it's a program. So what you do is you actually end up spending, like, multiple semesters working at the company, and then you take your classes, like, over the summer. So you have, like, quite an extended work period in between. And so I I was fortunate enough to actually come to Goldman and and try that out. And investment banking away sounded cool. You know? Like, you know, as you see it in the movie stuff. You're like, oh, that that sounds cool. And then I and I love New York because I'm a city person. I was like, oh, how do I find a job in New York? What do I do? And in New York, like, you work in finance. You work in a company like that. So I was fortunate enough because, like, Goldman has a great alumni and tech program at Cornell to to get interviewed with them, come into the co op program. And so, like, that was... I I had a job, like, basically coming into my senior year of university. I was like, great. Perfect. That's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna go live in New York, and I love it. And I I learned so much from working at Goldman. It was unbelievable, like, because you have to work incredibly hard. And, like, I I know that, like, people wanna talk about, like, forty work weeks and all this sort of stuff. And I'm like, you know what? You actually wanna build a company. I'm sorry, but that's bullshit. You're not gonna be able to build a company unless you do actually work really, really hard. That doesn't mean that, like, to to to the extent of excluding everything else, to not having a life, to being completely burned out, but it takes a lot to build something from nothing. And I learned a lot about how to work hard at Goldman, how to push through, how to, like, have the resilience to make that go. And I think what I learned from Goldman is, like, I really love tech. But, like, Goldman has a lot of tech, but it's not a tech company. You know? It's not the thing that, like, pushes it forward.