Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL)
00:22:06 · Carina Hong
[00:22:06] S2: Yeah. So Shubo is a he's a former formerly at Facebook AI Research. He's an IC director there. He's this visionary thinker that I always enjoy just hearing him talk about anything. And I think at the beginning it was a time where also Facebook was kind of crumbling. So it was sort of, I think, opportunistic timing. But to align each person to fit into this team that we have cultivated here at Axiom, sometimes I had to be like understanding of what motivates them, especially it's probably the ideal case if what motivates them is the technical problem that you're working on. And in that case, he has worked on testing AI generated unit tests. He believes in scaling, he believes in like just infinite data and big scale. He was one of the authors, Deep Speech and Deep Voice in 2014. So it's very aligned. And that made, I think, a really good foundation. Of course, we have our like ups and downs during like, the normal course of startup when stress is high, but very proactive, very sort of real communication too. I think later, like when you talk about retention, that is I think what I learned. I think the most difficult thing honestly, as a founder is that there are a lot of days where you just kind of are like, everything is going down. You're like, you wanna take care of yourself, but you also have the team out there and you really want to make sure that people are doing well. And I think to the ability to feel empathy and balance that is something that not necessarily in my academia training was like the emphasis, right? It's always about higher, faster, stronger. Like how can you get that higher score in this like Olympia? Necessarily about like just connecting with people, heart to heart. And I think that's very important in the entrepreneurship journey. So that's one of the unique challenges of I think a new lab. The other aspect of a new lab is you're basically dealing with, I mean technical management, not just people management. So there are a lot of priorities that might be conflicting. A constant dynamic I'm dealing with is you can ambitiously set goals, but you cannot afford to also overlook the risk. So it turns out that the people who set up like very ambitious goals and the people who are best at like catching the risk in execution, very, very few times there's like overlap.
00:24:30 · Carina Hong, Ravi Belani
Mean, if you define someone as one or the other, it's very much a disjoint set. Now, of course, the people in the company who are setting ambitious goals are very solid technically. But that kind of comes as like an afterthought, right? Like the risk flagging people, right? Their whole like focus is on this might not work, this might not work. So it sounds like naysayers, but when they are naysayers, they're actually not naysayers. They're just flagging like actual things you need to hear. So sometimes I'll be like, well, I can tell him to talk about it more politely, but I don't... But he's right. And so I think sort of like juggling between these actual technical priorities, doing more versus doing less, sometimes less is more. I talked about the full stack solution, the focus when we are like focused on things like classification finance and both groups, we're just focused on it. And it's like everyone focused on it. [00:25:28] S1: And are there any unintuitive hacks or that you act... Or tactics that you really treasure when it comes to managing people or attracting people? I heard just as context from from the... Some of the venture capitalists that funded you. They said you had the superpower around attracting amazing talent. And I know that all the things that you said are part of that, but I'm wondering if there's any specific tactics that the future founders should adopt. [00:25:51] S2: There are three very, very important things I didn't realize before. I mean, and by the way, each of these, like, you know, behind this tip, are, like, a lot of days of...
00:25:51 · Carina Hong, Ravi Belani
[00:25:51] S2: There are three very, very important things I didn't realize before. I mean, and by the way, each of these, like, you know, behind this tip, are, like, a lot of days of... [00:26:02] S1: Yeah.
00:26:02 · Ravi Belani, Carina Hong
[00:26:02] S1: Yeah. [00:26:02] S2: Like like like, it's really... I have been ruminating through, like, pain and then, like, sort of, like, abstracted these out. So the first one is it comes from self and then to others. So so when I am doing not well, like when I feel like I'm burned out, like the team does feel the energy and like everyone feels miserable. So like do take breaks at times and like focus on making your energy like calm and collected. I think that is that is one thing. I didn't... I was like always looking at like solving like this problem, that problem or this person's problem in the sector, but I didn't realize that a lot of the sort of most high impact moments are about either sort of adjusting my sort of situation, and then also like intellectual unlock in my brain, like clarity. So that's one. Two, I was really bad at, I think, just describing, feelings. I think before I was a founder, like, it's like, of course, I have feelings, but I don't describe them. I'm now better at naming because I am naming also others' feelings. And so it's actually took me like a very long self discovery journey to get to a place where I can put words to my feelings because there's this like actually natural wall of like always using the rational part of the brain. And the reason I say this is important hack is because, like, when you don't talk about feelings, sometimes I think gratefulness is not established as frequently as as I would like it to. And I'm also bad at putting people at ease because I don't name feelings.
00:27:39 · Ravi Belani, Carina Hong
[00:27:39] S1: Can you give an example of that just so that people really get the lesson? [00:27:42] S2: Yeah. So I feel a lot of gratefulness to every member of my team. [00:27:48] S1: Okay. [00:27:49] S2: Not every day I say it. And there are like big, big times where we were just grinding. The night before the classification finance info groups, the entire office was just... I mean, at least half of them were there over like all nighter. The reason it's actually quite interesting is because our internal infrastructure tooling is very good. So we run everything very fast. And then what we realized is now is release time. And, like, ideally, you want others to independently validate your stuff. Right? But, like, their infrastructure tool is not very good. So, okay, now we have this choice. Like, that's like last minute choice. Like, it's like 8PM. Like, we're like 7AM. We're we're like posting that like, it might take them a long, long, long time to like run this thing and like cross check it. And they might think it's false, like, because it starts failing. And so, like, because of this issue, like, you're just, doing all nighter. I... Like, I realized that I will express my gratefulness by, like, buying people, like, this massive sushi party boat rather than saying it. I just can't... I... It's very hard sometimes. [00:28:49] S1: It's your love language. Your love language [00:28:51] S2: is not... [00:28:52] S1: It's not... It's it's service instead of...
00:28:52 · Ravi Belani, Carina Hong
[00:28:52] S1: It's not... It's it's service instead of... [00:28:53] S2: But but let's say you're away from the team. Right? Let's let's say it's over Slack, it's after. It's very, very important to just make everyone feel seen [00:29:01] S1: Yeah. [00:29:01] S2: And that you remember them. I think this is something that I later learned. Because there's all these tension being built up just from, like, the daily stress. Yeah. And then the third thing I think about sort of... It's it's kind of an interesting one is to to... I later learned that I I should always make sure to... [00:29:20] S1: Oh, you can ignore that. Whoever's... Yep. [00:29:22] S2: Is is to... I'm just scared that's mine. Oh. Yeah. I don't think it's mine. Okay. But... Yeah. The third thing I think most interesting is people sometimes are very... People sometimes are very different. So I have the belief that because I'm very single threaded initially that I would want people to focus on this one thing. Some people are very, like, thriving when they're octopus ish. Like, they put, like, their claws on, like, eight things. And, like, I literally learned to, like, let that happen, and that's actually the beautiful part of that. So we're now a very, like, bottoms up and benevolent dictator kind of model Mhmm. Compared to before where we would be a little bit more... Like I was emphasizing like top down or like channel command when the company reached large scale. [00:30:08] S1: Okay. That's great. And just so people can understand, how many employees did you have at the beginning of the year, like in