Appearances vs Experiences (aka Expectations vs Reality)

Appearances vs Experiences: What Really Makes Us Happy

It’s an old adage that experiences make us happier than physical things. But knowing is not the same as doing. One area this is all too apparent is when it comes to choosing where to live. You might think that how a home looks is vital to how happy you are living in it. Wrong! The experience of a living space is far more important than its appearance.

…When we think that the way a building looks will dictate our experience living in it, we are mistaking the map for the territory. Architectural flourishes soon fade into the background. What matters is the day-to-day experience of living there, when relationships matter much more than how things look. Proximity to friends is a higher predictor of happiness than charming old brick.

I generally don’t think happiness is the right thing to optimize for, because I think it should be a key performance indicator, as opposed to the end goal itself, but regardless I appreciated the discussion around the psychology of what we gravitate towards — how we place an emphasis on how we think things should/will be vs how they actually are in practice.

I think there’s a similar analog when it comes to friendships/relationships in that we desire certain qualities in others (because we expect those qualities to result in compatibility/happiness), but don’t value enough the actual experiences of being with others. For example, you might say “I want to be with someone physically attractive and intelligent,” and then end up with someone with those qualities, but have terrible interactions with them, and stick with it because you think those interactions will change over time (not that they can’t…it’s more that people don’t change easily). The honeymoon period in a relationship only serves for you to hold on longer to the fantasy in your mind, rather than face the reality unfolding. The reality is we are optimizing for the wrong targets.

Recently, I re-entered the dating world — it’s been a long time since I’ve been on a first date. I’ve been carefully considering what matters, but I know that I fall victim to the things vs experiences disconnect, in that I prioritize certain qualities in an individual, rather than trying to objectively evaluate the experiences of being with a person — not that it’s easy to objectively evaluate something so subjective. I realize that makes me sound like a robot…

My alter ego

In reflection, this means that there were friends in the past in which we probably would have been great together in terms of dating, but either I or they were prioritizing certain qualities we wanted in a significant other, perhaps without acknowledging the close friendship / positive experiences developed.

How do we prevent this failure to handle expectations vs reality? We can attempt to be mindful and that’s a great first step, but this is where community comes into play, in my humble opinion. Trusted friends can help provide you the feedback of “you guys work really well as a team.” When I see “successful” relationships, there’s a sense of them being a team, really supporting each other, and the way they talk about each other when the other is not around — you can tell they’re filled with gratitude. In one of my past relationships, my ex admitted to me that she only complained about me to her friends — I’m pretty sure I did the same in a different relationship, though I don’t think that’s productive anymore. These were signs that something was wrong, and it’s helpful to have loving community that can speak truth into these matters (sometimes you have to ask for this feedback though — I now realize I never asked for it enough). Without community, we are operating in a void.

If you are looking for community, feel free to reach out — happy to chat!

Eliminating Imposter Syndrome

(honored to have Fuller Seminary / Centered repost this as well)

Impostor syndrome (also known as impostor phenomenon, impostorism, fraud syndrome or the impostor experience) is a psychological pattern in which an individual doubts their accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a “fraud”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome

Many folks deal with imposter syndrome on a daily basis, unsure of how to stop doubting themselves. I struggled with this for much of my life, trying to reconcile Asian/Christian culture, humility and achievement, until I was finally able to figure out how to overcome it last year. It’s not about some magical formula to stop yourself from doubting (this never works for anything — it makes you think about it more), it’s about replacing/reframing those thoughts with thoughts of how you can use these gifts to help others. The focus becomes less on self and more on others, and understanding that achievements are objective, as opposed to subjective.

Background

In Chinese culture, you’re taught to deny compliments and downplay praise. Combine that with the fact that your parents never praise you for anything and always want you to do better, you get a strong sense of never being good enough and you’re never taught healthier ways of dealing with the praise. Part of the problem of always denying compliments is that eventually you start to believe the lies due to repetition. That said, there are some benefits to downplaying praise — you’re less likely to be arrogant and full of yourself, but when it comes to being American, leaning closer to the arrogant side is an advantage generally (it’s not arrogance itself that’s effective, it’s the confidence and willingness to put yourself out there). This is part of why Asians get the reputation for being meek and mild, we’re marginalized because we have cultural values that are in opposition to the American way.

In Christian culture, which was layered on top of the Chinese part of me starting around high school, you’re taught to be humble, but people rarely have the correct definition of humility — especially if you’re attending a church that’s mostly Chinese, because the culture sometimes bleeds into theology. Often times the interpretation is “think less of yourself,” but it’s actually “think of yourself less.” People mix up humility with invisibility — it’s not your state of being or outside appearance that makes you humble, it’s your mindset to consider others before yourself, not because you have no value, but because the top 2 commandments are love God and love others.

Early Attempts to Eliminate Imposter Syndrome

So as you can see, my environment growing up put me on the track for imposter syndrome from the start. Speaking of track, it was there that I started my battle against imposter syndrome. One of the lessons I learned early on in high school was that if I wanted to win in the 100m dash, I needed to be super confident, focused and relaxed, otherwise I would tighten up and lose the race. Sometimes I would try to hype myself up by listening to certain types of rap music, as many athletes do. I started to take that kind of mindset into other areas of life during college — I remember hyping myself up with music before going out to a party or to try to give myself confidence before I talked to a girl I liked.

Hyping myself up was a temporary fix at times, but it never felt quite right. Gaining more confidence on such a shaky foundation, in which I thought of myself less than others, prevented it from sticking. I would always get embarrassed/flustered when people would react if they found out about some achievement. At least I improved — I went from trying to avoid/deny things (“oh I went to college in the northeast”), to just not knowing what to say and just being awkward.

Eventually I learned that it’s less awkward to just be to the point and thank people when they compliment you, but I would still feel really uncomfortable on the inside, though at the same time it felt good to be recognized (though I also felt bad about feeling good). If you notice the pattern/problem here, it’s all about “me” and how others perceive me.

1. Bless Others

Last year, I worked with an executive coach for a bit, and I shared with her how I struggle with accepting praise and how it feels awkward when others talk about my achievements. I shared about how I was brought up, and I also shared some about my faith. She gave me two key insights over the course of our time together:

1. Let others own their own feelings
2. Use my achievements to bless others

The coach was able to take into consideration that due to my faith, my purpose in life is to love God and love others. Using my achievements to bless others was the crucial piece I was missing in order to get rid of my imposter syndrome. The reality is that I’ve been blessed with a lot, and most people who know me would say I’m far from arrogant, so it was ridiculous of me to think that delighting in someone complimenting me would suddenly make me arrogant and full of myself.

If someone brings up how I went to Yale — I could use that as an opportunity to share whatever I may have learned there or the connections I made, or perhaps mentor their kids or younger siblings who were looking to get into college. If someone wanted to bring up my old ESPN article, then I could offer up my services to teach running/sports and also perhaps inspire all those other Asian guys out there that they can break stereotypes. The point is, I now turn what used to be a source of embarrassment/awkwardness, to an opportunity to share my blessings with others.

2. Lean on Facts, Not Opinions

In the business world, you want to make decisions based on data. It’s a matter of adapting those same concepts to how you perceive yourself. You might ask yourself, “well how do I know if I’m legit?” Do you see the problem with that mode of thought? This is only looking inside at doubts, rather than outside at data. Of course, we should be careful with what data we look at and how we look at it– for example we might have parents who tell us we’re never good enough, or a boss who never gives compliments. You should test what people say and only hold on to what is true. Unless you’ve trained yourself to be more aware of your own biases, one of the best ways to get less biased thoughts are from trustworthy people who know us well.

I went to Yale. It still feels awkward to say sometimes, but I just own that fact now. Yeah I got in partially because I was recruited for track, but whatever (there was always a lingering, am I as smart as everyone else here, or am I just one of the “dumb athletes”) — I got in, broke some track records, started a company that is still running, won some awards and was written up in a number of news/magazine articles. These are facts (though the awards may be subjective themselves) — not that we should derive our value from this data, but the data exists to show us that we are not frauds. Make decisions based on data, which is objective, rather than our subjective feelings.

Conclusion

Back to my opening statement — the whole point is it’s not about you. This isn’t to say that you’re not a valuable person, but when it comes to imposter syndrome, there’s a lot of focus on self (not that self-love/self-care aren’t important). Every human has a unique value that only they hold — it’s up to you to figure out what it is, then share it with your community and the world. When the focus becomes about helping others, you don’t have time to doubt yourself. It’s like an addiction — you can’t just remove an addiction and expect it to stay away, there’s an emptiness that needs to be filled with something else.

Always happy to chat more about this — feel free to reach out to me!

Uncertainty

I’m on an email list with folks from my church back in college (U-C-What??) and one of the undergrads wrote about uncertainty in life, finding meaning in work — in particular: “how do I remain diligent in discerning and carrying out God’s intended work for me in the face of uncertainty?” 

Here was my response:

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Thanks for sharing, ****! Oldish man here (’08) — wanted to share some thoughts as I’ve thought a lot about meaninglessness/uncertainty/God’s will/etc (and sometimes I just overthink it ;)).

Some first principles:

1. We have been blessed immensely by God.
   1. Some of us are aware of what talents He has given us, others aren’t.
2. We are called to love God and love others
   1. If we know our talents, then we should bless others with them (lest we bury them in the ground…)
   2. If we don’t know our talents, then we need to explore / have community that can challenge us and speak truth/life into us

It’s true there’s more uncertainty after you graduate and that life will get more complex, but in theory you will be more mature to handle it as well. Besides, without stepping outside our comfort zones, there is little opportunity for growth — I grew a lot in the few years after graduating, though it did require a lot of intentional introspection and some good friends to challenge me.

I highly recommend this book: To Be Told by Dan Allender

A lesser recommendation (which the above book may already cover — been awhile since I read this), but I found it helpful as well at one point: The Will of God as a Way of Life by Jerry Sittser — the title of this one probably seems like exactly what you want, but I felt that the book could be summed up in the first principles above and think the first book would be really valuable because it speaks to how we are part of God’s story but that we have our own stories to shape and tell given our history/context.

One important point both of these books will mention is that it’s important not to confuse calling with career — again we are ultimately called to love God and love others wherever we are with whatever we have and that’s more about our everyday little choices rather than large life ones like “where should I live” or “what job should I take?” (not that these are unimportant but they matter less ultimately). We will feel most fulfilled when we are loving God and others with our talents.

Anyway, hope that’s helpful! If anyone wants to chat about college/post college please feel free to reach out.

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Executive Coaching (part 1): Let Others Own Their Feelings

Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of working with an exec coach for the first time, Adrienne Kortas (thanks to Thunder for paying for it!).  I learned a few core concepts from her that I wanted to share as a way to exercise spaced retrieval. From a meta standpoint, I also learned how to coach self and others in the process. For this first post, I wanted to highlight one concept that has been huge for me.

Let others own their feelings

Related: You can’t make everyone happy. Or more succinctly for myself: Be bold, care less[1].

The desire to please people (or specific sets of people) is universal. We all do things that are “suboptimal” simply because we want others to be happy.

One of the things I wanted to work on with Adrienne was reducing my stress levels at work. I joked with her that sometimes I wish I could be more of a sociopath — I wanted to care less about what people think when effecting change in the company’s best interest. She had interviewed a number of folks in the company to ask what they thought of me, and one of the strengths that was repeated was about my level of empathy and how I listened/cared about/understood people. Taken to an extreme, this strength was causing issues for me, because anytime change happened, I always felt like I had to have all the answers and that everyone needed to be happy with the decisions we were making as founders. This was tiring/stressful because of my desire for the company to be a place where people feel like their opinions are valued and I wanted to be there to listen/acknowledge/address every complaint.

Real talk, though, while it’s good to listen to your employees, you’re in leadership for reason. There’s a spectrum between not listening/caring for your employees entirely and spending too much time/energy trying to make sure everyone’s happy. Consider that in leadership, people are expecting you to make decisions that are best for the group. Let them own their feelings, don’t try to anticipate their feelings and come up with answers so that they don’t feel upset. Listen to their feedback/concerns as a fellow human being, but stop short at second guessing/compromising your decisions (well, unless you realize you’ve made a really dumb decision, in which case don’t be too stubborn ;). Furthermore, sometimes it’s not good to let people dwell in their frustrations for too long — I know this all too well in my years of depression and the vicious cycle that was LiveJournal/Xanga and emo music (don’t feed the trolls, especially when you are the troll).

Obviously, this concept can be taken to an extreme. There are some folks that already disregard the thoughts/feelings of others (aka sociopaths) — going this far is unhealthy. You SHOULD care what people think up to a certain point, but not in order to anticipate their feelings and try to change them. It’s okay for others to be upset, it’s okay to not have all the answers, and it’s okay for you to make mistakes (just not too many ;).

[1] I also like to think of IDGAF as a joke — a little extreme, but it’s more of a reminder of myself to not be too extreme in caring too much. That said, this post is more for those who might agonize over changes they know to be good in the long run, but may make some people unhappy in the short term. Obviously, on the other side there are people who could use help caring/understanding how their actions impact others — this post is not for them.

Thinking, Fast and Slow (#2): Repetition

This post has been sitting in my drafts for so long so I decided to complete it. Here’s part 2 (only took 8 months to get to it!) in my series going over passages from Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. You can find part 1 here.

A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.

It pains me a lot that repetition works so well. You beat people over the head with information from a preponderance of “sources” and eventually they’ll start believing it. This is why marketing is such a powerful tool for influence — we saw this occur with the presidential election in 2016. People are easily manipulated by fake news — you see enough outlets distributing the same information, and it seems believable, at least until you dig into the credibility of most of the “outlets”. But who actually spends the time to dig into this information? See enough memes, and you’ll probably forget that the people these memes are often based on are totally different from the reality these memes create[1].  Memes seem so harmless, but are really a powerful vehicle for marketing[2].

Marketing is top of mind for me, as you might imagine, having co-founded a startup that provides marketing tech. Like many other tools, it can be used for good as well as evil — and I’m sure you know, there are plenty of terrible ads out there. Our company vision is an Internet without bad ads, but as we continue to execute on that vision, hopefully we can push out the advertisers/advertising based on lies, and replace it with ads that people actually care about while allowing publishers/websites to pay the bills.

This ability to perpetuate falsehoods through repetition especially bothers me because I realize lately just how much I value the truth. I’ve been seeing an executive coach and she had me fill out a form with many questions about myself — along the way I was realizing just how important it is to me that people are real, and that I hate false representations of people/situations because it can be so damaging when people operate on half truths. I know people who have been through severe emotional abuse, whether through their family or other sources, and they actually start to believe the lies they are told — hear it enough and you start to believe it.

We are created so uniquely, we shouldn’t be pretending to be anyone else other than ourselves and we sure as hell shouldn’t be taking other people’s summations of ourselves (or others) as gospel.

[1] Example: How an Ad Photo Turned Into an Internet Meme That Ruined a Model’s Career
[2] Here’s some longer reading about it if you’re interested: TRUTH IS A VIRUS: Meme Warfare and the Billionaires for Bush (or Gore)

IKEA Effect

The experiments by Norton and his colleagues demonstrated that self-assembly affects the evaluation of a product by its consumers. The results suggest that when people construct a particular product themselves, even if they do a poor job of it, they value the end result more than if they had not put any effort into its creation.

Participants, wrote Norton and his colleagues, “saw their amateurish creations as similar in value to experts’ creations, and expected others to share their opinions.”

— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect

Perhaps there exists some tenuous connection between this and what we construct mentally/emotionally, and an unwillingness/laziness to question our own beliefs and explore alternatives. Once we’ve put time into something, we potentially overvalue it. Related to this is how strongly we can stick to our habits: Why Trying New Things is So Hard

Been reading When Helping Hurts (book on alleviating poverty in more helpful ways), and it mentions that when people get beyond the relief stage (think immediate needs post disaster/life-changing event) and into rehabilitation/development, it’s important to involve those who were formerly the recipients of relief, otherwise those programs will fail (because 1. it’s not going to scale and 2. people will depend on someone else taking care of their problems rather than doing it themselves — similar to overprotective parenting). In some ways, the book is encouraging you to make sure the IKEA effect is present so that as people participate in the development of their own lives, they’ll take more ownership.

This is exactly what coaches/counselors/therapists do, they help ask questions so that you can come to your own conclusions on what needs to happen, though of course they provide you an IKEA manual so that you can put the pieces together yourself since you’re more likely to follow through if you feel like you came up with the solution yourself.

Thinking, Fast and Slow (part 1)

I recently finished reading Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman and highlighted around 30 different passages. One of the benefits of taking a bus to work is having time set aside to read everyday! I’d like to write a number of shorter posts on different highlights, but we’ll see if it ends up happening. I’m a huge fan of the book and everything it exposes about human psychology. The central thesis of the book as described by Wikipedia:

The central thesis is a dichotomy between two modes of thought: “System 1” is fast, instinctive and emotional; “System 2” is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The book delineates cognitive biases associated with each type of thinking, starting with Kahneman’s own research on loss aversion. From framing choices to people’s tendency to replace a difficult question with one which is easy to answer, the book highlights several decades of academic research to suggest that people place too much confidence in human judgement.

Here’s my first highlight:

Why is it so difficult for us to think statistically? We easily think associatively, we think metaphorically, we think causally, but statistics requires thinking about many things at once, which is something that System 1 is not designed to do. The difficulties of statistical thinking contribute to the main theme of Part 3, which describes a puzzling limitation of our mind: our excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in. We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events. Overconfidence is fed by the illusory certainty of hindsight.

This book changed the way I view events — I think a lot more about statistics now. The hard part about this is that it’s really unpopular because people prefer what they know and don’t want to engage their System 2 to even consider alternative viewpoints to their own. Also the backfire effect is real, so generally it’s not even worth the time trying to convince anyone to try to look at the statistics. Separately, I get self-conscious anytime I do the “well, actually” because people’s eyes generally roll over — I learned a long time ago this doesn’t make you many friends, though truth is so important. The reality is that you can’t speak truth into people’s lives if you can’t develop a relationship with them first, so you have to pick and choose your battles in your want to spread the truth.

This is where the name of the blog (Stichomythia) comes from — I’ve learned mostly when to keep thoughts to myself vs when to share/convince, but it’s hard to stop the thoughts that go back and forth in my head.

Get Out of Your Comfort Zone

Last night felt especially random as I sat inside of this private social club next to @jasonchumusic and @chaumeleon and we were just talking about life. @chaumeleon had shared this article earlier in the week on open vs closed networks as a predictor of success and it made me reflect about my past and my path to the present, where I was sitting next to a touring rapper and a grade A balls businessman who have fast become friends and somehow I was the connector! If you had only known teenage me, you would be surprised. Maintaining open networks and going out of my comfort zone (often times unintentionally) have been major factors in my life.

You’d be surprised because in some ways I grew up the stereotypical Chinese American male — focused on academics (math was a strong subject, of course), played violin, quiet, socially awkward (but my AIM game was on point, say hello to asianexpress713!) — I’ve never been a fan of stereotypes, but I knew I played into many of them. Connecting people when younger me could barely connect myself to people? Crazy talk. That said, I love breaking stereotypes — partially because I’m a purist in some sense when it comes to facts (stereotypical engineer?), where folks are way more than stereotypes would have you believe (you don’t have all the facts). This is part of why in high school I dropped private violin lessons to go all-in on track and field (and soccer to a lesser extent). Don’t worry, I still played in orchestra, though my violin teacher told me I would regret the decision for the rest of my life (ouch) because she said that when I’m old I’d still be able to play music, but I can’t run track. To my mom, track was just exercise. To me, well, my way of breaking stereotypes was breaking 6 school records and winning the crown jewel race for a sprinter — the 100m dash at the state championship. One of my teammates overheard one of my black rivals (from O’Dea) talking to his teammate say “Victor deserves to be black” — as a nerdy Asian kid, this was the ultimate compliment. With regards to busting stereotypes and struggling to overcome the negative ones (keeping you on the sidelines), this J. Cole song comes to mind, check the lyrics:

Cause can’t nobody tell me what I ain’t gonna be no more
You thinking I’mma fall, don’t be so sure
I wish somebody made guidelines
On how to get up off the sidelines

[Verse 2:]
Up in 1st class, laugh even though it’s not funny
See a white man wonder how the fuck I got money
While he sit at coach, hate to see me walk past ‘im
Young black pants sag, headphones blastin’
Know what he askin’, “how did he manage?”
“With all the cards against him, he used them to his advantage!”
Slang we be speakin’ probably soundin’ like Spanish
Then I fuck they heads up when a n**** show manners

Funny thing is, I started listening to a lot more rap because of my friends in high school track — I gained a whole new appreciation for hip hop, wordplay and poetry in general whereas before I didn’t really get it. People in my honors classes weren’t into it at all so I was never exposed.

Track/soccer was transformative for me — I was in the same honors classes with mostly the same people from middle school until the end of high school. It could have been a closed network (as the article describes) where I was only friends with the same people all in the same context, but I was fortunate enough to be involved with folks in different contexts through sports, church and music/orchestra. Not by my own doing of course as it was unintentional, but like the article mentions, I never felt like I had a place where I belonged because I was interested in all these different groups, but never felt like I fully fit in in any of them. It was lonely and I didn’t really have close friends in high school.

People in open networks have unique challenges and opportunities. Because they’re part of multiple groups, they have unique relationships, experiences, and knowledge that other people in their groups don’t.

This is challenging in that it can lead to feeling like an outsider as a result of being misunderstood and under-appreciated because few people understand why you think the way you do. It is also challenging, because it requires assimilating different and conflicting perspectives into one worldview.

That was me in a nutshell. I had groups of friends (acquaintances?) in track, soccer, classes, orchestra, church and even within my own neighborhood. As an example in college, when it came to being an athlete/teammate, I was Christian and didn’t know how to reconcile my faith and all the partying. Being young in my faith, I didn’t know how to reconcile that with all the partying in general. I ended up being super legalistic/judgmental/unloving — which was totally the wrong way to go about it.

I’ve been blessed by connections in these various groups. It was through a friend in college track (thanks Matt!) that I was given my first taste of startup life as an intern for Justin Kan and Emmett Shear (of Justin/Twitch.tv fame) at their startup at the time, Kiko. In fact I was there before it was even named Kiko and we had a pretty funny night of us all trying to come up with company names in one of the residential college butteries (late night eateries). I was a freshman hanging out with seniors. I didn’t contribute much at all, still being socially awkward and inexperienced with programming, but it was a good learning experience.

It was through my brother’s friend I was able to intern at yet another startup, where I would meet PaperG/Thunder’s future VP Engineering (my boss at that startup). And it was through church I met one of my cofounders of PaperG/Thunder.

Networking being good seems obvious to most people, but the important part is that you network outside of your clique/comfort zone. When I accepted the Gospel of Christ towards the end of high school, it was something that the pastor had talked about at a retreat — the need to get out of your comfort zone in order to know God better. To take that leap of faith if you really want to know what it’s all about. It’s all related — if you want to be a better friend, significant other, manager, co-worker, whatever, you have to get out of your comfort zone and start hearing (being open to) new perspectives. You can only learn so much from introspection and one group of people. I live in a Silicon Valley echo chamber — and I’ve found balance through folks I’ve met in church, SF natives, homeless folks I’ve met on the street. They all help keep me grounded and give me fresh perspective with which I can cross-pollinate other groups. I’m comfortable with who I am now, even if I never feel like I fully fit in to any one group, because I’m better at reconciling the dissonance with being in groups of differing perspectives.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.

It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences.

So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

That’s Steve Jobs telling you to get out of your comfort zone.

If you have trouble relating to folks outside your comfort zone, then have no fear, because I used to have tons of problems with that too. The trick is remembering that every human is unique and has their own story, their own context for why they are the way they are. Sure some stories are more interesting than others, but to find out what really makes a person tick and what drives them, that’s the buried treasure. There’s something to learn from everybody and while what you learn may not come into use immediately, you can file it away subconsciously. And this works both ways — this is why it’s also important to be your authentic self, rather than just another clone. You have a story to tell and lessons to teach whether you believe it or not. Sometimes it just takes getting out of your comfort zone to draw it out.

 

Thunderous Praise

Every month I take a trip to Seattle to visit my company’s Bellevue office since most of the engineering and product team is there and tonight I felt particularly encouraged by the past few days in the office. I’m proud of the team we’ve built over the years and just how far Thunder has come. When I’m in town, I usually hold office hours so that any employee can stop by and ask questions 1-1. Multiple coworkers told me about how excited they are about what they’re working on and how much they enjoy working here (mostly unsolicited). One person told me that they have full faith in the executive team and that we’ve been making some great decisions this past year in terms of fostering an excellent work environment. (!!)

An email I received today from a new employee (fresh perspective is super helpful) really stuck with me:

…I must say that Thunder has continued to blow me away and vastly exceed my expectations. I am very impressed at the culture here in Bellevue. Everyone is very friendly and eager to help, but more so I’ve noticed an extremely collaborative environment…more so than I’ve ever experienced before.

There is something incredibly satisfying in knowing that others find joy in something you helped build. The more I think about it, the more thankful I am for everything I’ve learned in running this company and the amazing coworkers who make the company what it is today.

I don’t take the time to think about accomplishments very often, nor am I very good at taking praise, but it’s something I’m learning to do as I realize that it’s important to recognize others and these two things go hand in hand sometimes. It can be hard to recognize others for their accomplishments if you don’t spend any time recognizing accomplishments in general. Part of it is just the way I was raised (almost never praised for accomplishments), and another part is just usually focusing on what’s next in terms of goals and what needs to improve (very self-critical), rather than dwelling on the past or present. But everyone can change, and I plan on doing that.

I’m really proud of Thunder and just how far we’ve come. Pride comes before the fall? Hopefully not in this case, unless we’re talking about the season 😉

 

CTO vs VP Engineering

Someone asked a question awhile ago on a CTO mailing list I’m a part of and I wrote a longish reply — finally got around to posting it here:

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a) Did you go through a similar growth path (10 to 20 to 40 people on your team) as a CTO over the last few years and would have some wise advice for me?

b) Thoughts on what the division of labor between a CTO & a VPE is?

I’m coming somewhat fresh off of this the last few years. With PaperG, we went from 5 to 25 in the first 6 years and then to 60 people in about 12 months — so very similar to your situation. We have about 35 engineers/PMs/designers now. Asking for advice earlier was something I wish I had done. It’s important to connect with other CTOs/VPEs who have been through this (part of the how I ended up on this list in the first place) — definitely tap your network for this, whether personal or via your board/advisors. One of our advisors set me up with some meetings that were incredibly helpful with other CTO/VP types.

I’ve read a lot of the VP vs CTO articles (such as the Mark Suster one linked earlier[1]), but have concluded, as with many things, it just really depends on your company’s needs. So first step is figuring out company needs out and then your own personal strengths/weaknesses. Finding someone to complement you is probably most important. For example, I wasn’t even a college grad 9 years ago, whereas our VPE already had over a decade of MSFT/startup experience. I had no experience with management and he was able to help me grow a lot in that area (fun fact: we met because I was an intern at his startup — funny how that works). On the flip side, me being young/naive and uninfluenced by any corp/company culture allowed me to think outside the box a lot more and challenge him.

I feel really fortunate to have had our VPE since around the time we hit 25. He originally started as a lead (with much more experience than anyone else) when we were about 10–15 and eventually promoted him as we grew. Couldn’t have scaled up without him. You need someone mentoring people properly — I’m a big fan of weekly 1–1s, but you can only have so many. So you need to start raising leaders and you don’t have to time to do that on top of everything else.

Just as there’s often a focus on scaling infrastructure/technology, you have to develop scalable processes for the team, especially if you know you’re growing a lot in the near future. One thing (of many!) we encountered as we grew was engineers starting to wonder how could they progress in their career. What does a promotion look like? Are there promotions? Is management the only way up? Only you know what sort of culture your company has and what would work best with it. With our VPE handling the day to day management of engineers, it allowed me to research and think about these sorts of problems and in the end I decided a ladder system with internal/external titles (different but equal titles/levels for ICs) would be the best fit. Levels so that people could see their progress more often internally, and title changes at certain levels so that they could have something external to be proud of and share with others. Some will argue that I was doing the job of the VPE in thinking about this, but when it comes to a startup/small company — what do titles really mean? There are certain problems you’ll encounter, and certain people will be more fit to solve them — it’s my job as CTO to delegate within the engineering org since I have the most complete picture of the company as a whole. Really important to tackle these things now, because you won’t see the fruit of your efforts for awhile (our eng culture has transformed in a really good way since we spent more time on the processes, but took awhile to see it — you need to set it before you do your hiring so that new people can help usher in the new age)

Again, this is just how it happens to work out within my company. While people on this list can give you their advice/opinions, it’s up to you to synthesize and figure out your own solution for your unique position.

That said, with regards to what Scott said about not hiring a VPE quite yet, I’d have to agree for the most part, at least in the way he seems to have defined what a VPE does. A VPE at a smaller startup is really just a lead. When you double in size, they become a lead of leads, perhaps. Our company is now at a point where I feel like the VPE role is necessary (or at least, something beyond just a lead — you can call it a director or senior lead or whatever you want). I met with Airbnb’s VPE (thanks @mikecurtis!) and he told me that when he came in, he helped established a lot of processes — everything from establishing a career ladder, more focus in their language/tool choices, to recruiting process that helped them go from 30 to 80 engineers in 6 months (!). This is what Airbnb needed at the time.

Last comment for now is that keep in mind that if you hire a VPE now, it’s harder to hire someone above that — there aren’t too many more titles above it. So if this person isn’t VPE material, either you’ll hire someone into an SVP position (doesn’t seem as common in eng orgs), or you demote this person, or you replace them altogether. In this way, titles matter in the long run.

Hopefully some of that was helpful — there’s definitely more I could talk about if you’re interested.

[1] http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/want-to-know-difference-between-a-cto-and-a-vp-of-engineering/