The hard power of management and the soft power of senior ICs | Josh Wills

Josh has worked on and led data teams at Slack, Cloudera, WeaveGrid and Google.

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As a self-described “gainfully unemployed data person”, Josh Wills is an angel investor and has worked on and led data teams at Slack, Cloudera, WeaveGrid and Google. We discuss:

• How to get started with angel investing without a ton of $$

• Attributes that define great engineering managers

• What’s it like transitioning from management back to IC

• Challenges in Climate Tech from a software perspective

• And more

Segments:

[0:01:35] Transitioning from management to individual contributor (IC).

[0:10:19] Emotional intelligence and its role in engineering management.

[0:25:21] Contrasting the hard power of management with the soft power of senior individual contributors.

[0:37:18] Addressing challenges in climate technology.

[0:51:34] The importance of practicality and how to assess it in interviews.

[0:56:01] Josh's journey into angel investing.

[1:12:59] Criteria used by Josh to evaluate whether to invest in a startup.

Show Notes:

• Josh on Twitter: https://twitter.com/josh_wills

• The “Touchy Feely” course at Stanford: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/experience/learning/leadership/interpersonal-dynamics

• Jason Calacanis’s book on angel investing: https://www.amazon.com/Angel-Invest-Technology-Startups-Timeless-Investor/dp/0062560700

Stay in touch:

👋 Make Ronak’s day by leaving us a review and let us know who we should talk to next! hello@softwaremisadventures.com

Transcript:

**Josh:** [00:00:00] So the hard power of management is the hiring. It is the promotion process. It's literally money, more or less like money and status and title and stuff. That is the hard power that is bestowed upon you by the powers that be that you kind of get by virtue of organizational, positioning.

**Josh:** That's the hard power of management. The soft power. Of being an IC is general, especially in engineering. I C is knowledge is, you know, where the bodies are buried. You have the context on the system. You know why things are the way they are. You kind of know what needs to be done.

**Josh:** I think to the extent that I had like a superpower I have the ability, and this is not just unique to me, a lot of senior ICs do this, you can see around corners kind of what's coming and what's going to happen as a result of things.

Welcome to the Software Misadventures podcast. We are your hosts, Ronak and Guan. As engineers, we are interested in [00:01:00] not just the technologies, but the people and the stories behind them. So on this show, we try to scratch our own edge by sitting down with engineers, founders, and investors to chat about their path, lessons they've learned, and of course, the misadventures along the way.

Hi everyone. It's Guan here. We're super excited to chat with Josh Wills. He's been doing data science and engineering before it was cool, and has amazing wineliners on Twitter. In this conversation, we explore Josh's journey into management and back to IC, comparing the pros and cons of the hard power of management versus the soft power of a senior IC, his time working in climate tech, and how he got started with Android investing without a ton of cash.

Without further ado, let's get into the conversation.

**Guang:** Thanks so much for coming on the show, Josh.

**Josh:** Thanks so much for having me, guys.

**Guang:** Okay.

## Transition from Management to Individual Contributor

**Guang:** So getting started you have a lot of amazing quotes. One of my favorite is your,

**Josh:** Thank

**Guang:** is your commentary on [00:02:00] management. You said engineering management is a pie eating contest where first price is more pie. So, at Slack, you made the transition from director of data engineering back to IC do you remember the exact moment when you were like, yo, this is way too much pie for me.

**Josh:** Uh, I think I was sitting in a sprint review, I think. I was sitting in a, like a, sprint planning meeting, kind of organizing the next couple of weeks of work and stuff like that, and I was just like, I hate this with every fiber of my being, and I, I don't want to do this anymore. I think, you know, backing up a little bit Slack had a Pretty regular practice of people going into management and then going back out again.

**Josh:** I think it was something that was like totally okay. Lots of people did it. My, like my manager was a guy named Richard Crowley who like ran the ops team for a while. And he was managing me for like when I first, not when I first started, but like pretty soon after in the first kind of major reorg. And I [00:03:00] remember being on a one on one with him and he told me he was leaving.

**Josh:** Management to go do I see work again. I was like, wait, you can do that. Like, that's an option. Oh, that's interesting. And I think that, kind of like open Pandora's box for me, I think it was like, Oh, I don't have to do this anymore. If I really like, don't like it or would be happier doing other things.

**Josh:** So that was clue one. Clue two was we used to do, you know, engineer, I'm sure they still do like quarterly engineering all hands. And Cal Henderson, who's the CTO, had this really great habit of gathering up all kinds of random statistics of like things people did over the quarter and things we launched and other like funny stuff too, right?

**Josh:** All kinds of really interesting stuff. And on one of them, he was showing who had sort of written the most code and who had done the most code reviews and GitHub over the past, quarter or so. And I was number three on the largest number of code reviews done. And I was the.

**Guang:** when you were still the

**Josh:** When I was still the director, when I was still the director, I was number three [00:04:00] on this list and it was kind of like, I think you couldn't actually see like where the next director was like they were so, you know, so much further down the list compared to, you know, at the time when like Slack had, a few hundred engineers and like I was number three and it was like, well, that's, that's probably not great.

**Josh:** Like probably I'm not doing something correctly here. So yeah, it was, I guess we'll say there was a lot of signs and a lot of opportunities, but really it was that it was that sprint review where I was like, I just can't. I just can't do this anymore. That, that kind of put the nail in the coffin for me.

**Josh:** Yeah. Yeah.

**Guang:** Do you know, are there people that have transitioned to IC and then was like, Oh, actually, you know what? Like, let me go back to management. Like going from management to IC and then maybe after a year they realize, Hey, actually maybe management is

**Josh:** Oh, that, that they want to go back. That's interesting. I'm trying to think of anyone I know who's done that. I don't know anyone personally who has done that.

**Guang:** So that means everyone that decides to go back is like, you know what? Actually management was maybe the side route that I see is where they should [00:05:00] have

**Josh:** Yeah, I mean, I think that's, there's a bunch of different things with that. I mean, I think, we, you know, when we talk about this kind of stuff, we have to talk a lot about, psychology. And everyone is like the hero of their own story. You know what I mean? Everyone has a narrative they are trying to live up to from somewhere, right?

**Josh:** And for a lot of people being VP of engineering or CTO or whatever is a big part of that narrative. It's kind of part of their own personal hero's arc. I used to work for a guy named Jeff Hammerbacher and he was great about sort of talking about everyone has a hero's arc and kind of understanding their hero's arc and figuring out where does what you need them to do fit into their overall hero narrative.

**Josh:** And if it's not a fit, then great. You need to find somebody else who, where it is a fit, right? Every role, every job, every opportunity is the right. Next thing for someone and a lot of it is just finding who that person is and sort of aligning their story with what you need and all that kind of stuff.

**Josh:** Right? So I guess what I commonly see, I mean, I don't know, I guess I see a few different patterns here. For a lot of people like going into management is like the thing it is what they, [00:06:00] it is the ladder. They have been climbing ladders their whole lives from like. Grade school to honors programs to good college to graduate school, blah, blah, blah.

**Josh:** It's a ladder and they climb ladders. That's like what they do. And when I say this, this hypothetical person, I'm basically talking about myself here, right? Just to be honest with you, right? And then once they get up that ladder, they are determined to do whatever it takes to make it to the next rung of that ladder.

**Josh:** Just because it's a ladder and again, climbing ladders is what they do. And it can be very difficult, I think, to do. Get out of that mentality and be like, I don't like where this ladder is taking me. The quote about pie eating contests where first prize is more pie. That's actually a description for law school.

**Josh:** That's I, that's where I first heard that quote. People go to law school and the first prize at law school is the pie eating contest where there's more pie. Right. And it really, it really is. And I think that's another sort of. It's another one of these ladders people climb of like, I'm going to be a lawyer, I've wanted to be a lawyer since I was a little kid, I'm good at arguing, I'm going to be a lawyer no matter what, I'm going to do whatever it takes, and then they [00:07:00] discover, , 10, 20 years later that they hate their lives and that like everything sucks and they have all these problems as a result of it, right?

**Josh:** So for all of these reasons Being fortunate, I think, to have the self-awareness, to have friends, to have family, to have mentors, to have people who can be honest with you and say like, why are you doing this thing that you hate? Is this really something that is so core to your identity as a person that you have to do it anyway?

**Josh:** Is truly like a gift. And it's something that yeah, I was very fortunate to have,

**Guang:** So like for you, I guess understanding or hearing that story from your manager being like, oh, hey, this is a Possibility, right?

**Guang:** I imagine that was pretty big, but was there anything else that Like, what was going through your head when you were like, Deciding, it's hey, maybe part of my identity as being this like, Director is maybe not the best fit for me, like, What was that like?

**Josh:** I really, it felt like uncomfortable, you know, it felt it was a strange thing to feel. I think to kind of not really answer the question directly, but maybe give sort of more context on what about me [00:08:00] made me easy that made this easier for me.

**Josh:** I think it was a few different things. I mean, one, I think I've always been going The quote I am most famous for is the data scientist thing, right? Someone who's better at statistics than any software engineer and blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. And I have always kind of leaned into that in the sense of like, I don't really think of myself as a particularly good software engineer.

**Josh:** And I'm definitely not like a very good statistician. All I really was the guy in the room who was better at statistics than any of the software engineers and better at software engineering than any of the statisticians. And so I've always had this very kind of like, I'm sort of okay being a mediocre software engineer, I guess, or like just being, I'm, I'm okay at this.

**Josh:** I'm not like. I've worked with people who are world class at it, and I can kind of admire how good they are at it, but I'm not one of them, right? And I think that kind of mentality or sort of sense of identity that was not rooted in, what my title is, or how many people work for me, or any of these other kind of ladder centric external status [00:09:00] validation things that make your, make your parents happy, or blah, blah, blah.

**Josh:** Kind of, again, put me in a position to not really sweat this stuff so much, just to be honest with you, not really have to worry about these things as much as someone else so much so that I really was in a position to just kind of focus, very directly on waking up every day. Am I happy doing this?

**Josh:** Am I enjoying my life or do I, am I super unhappy? Am I gaining weight? Am I drinking too much? Am I like kind of miserable all the time? Gee, what could this be? Like what could be going on here, right? And yeah, that's sort of part of why, you know? It's hard, man, it's hard.

**Josh:** I think, you know, you see this letting go, this is not easy to do. Like, and the only like, really like So the thing I can recommend is to say, which a bunch of other people have said before, it's a cliche, and it's a cliche because it's true, it's like when you get the thing that you thought you wanted, it isn't going to make you happy, it really isn't, like not even close, it doesn't work that way.

**Josh:** Whatever the thing [00:10:00] is, it's not, Jim Carrey has that great quote, I hope everyone becomes rich and famous and gets all the things they want so they find out that it's not the thing. Becoming VP of Engineering isn't the thing, becoming CEO isn't the thing. Becoming uber wealthy isn't the thing.

**Josh:** There's no thing. It doesn't exist. Be happy with what you do every day. At the very least, the extent to which you can just be happy every day. I think that's a very worthwhile goal. Be happy and be free. Absolutely. That's the best thing I've come up with in my 45 ish years.

**Ronak:** I think that's on point. Like any person I know so far, I've seen a various, I've seen various transitions from IC to management like people who were never a manager before, but wanna become a manager. It's like, I wanna be a manager. Some of them switch back to an IC role. I've not seen any of them go back to being a manager.

**Ronak:** And I spoke with some of them about this too. Hey. You had this fancy title. Why go back? And the response was similar to yours. And in [00:11:00] some cases, at least I came away with some of the answers was someone has to be comfortable with making the decision, not just being self aware is important, knowing that they want happiness is important.

**Ronak:** But the other part is They have to get that title once to know it's not the thing that they want. Like you have to do that once. And yeah, it's like, you have to self experience it no matter what the other person's going to tell you. It's like, unless it's your own experience, you're not going to feel it.

**Josh:** I mean, that's, that's so true. And again with my son, who's eight, I, confront this problem literally every day of the, like, how do I convince this person to not make this terrible decision that they're about to make without actually having the experience of, you know, eating too much candy or, you know, like, like playing too many video games, like all these kinds of things.

**Josh:** How do I like get this across? And yeah, you're exactly right, man. There's no substitute for painful experience to learn these lessons that there just isn't. And I think, since this is where I want to talk a little bit, I don't want to, like, just hate on management the entire time.

**Josh:** You know, we're here. Um, [00:12:00] that's not like, it's not my goal.

## The Role of Management and Hiring

**Josh:** Managers are great. And just I would say good engineering management done well is absolutely invaluable. And like it is something I have a tremendous appreciation for having done the work and know kind of how hard it is. I think about, you know, it's funny.

**Josh:** I think Paul Graham wrote an essay, you know, many years ago describing like the impact of different places on your mentality. And he was talking about how in New York, the kind of the sort of hidden question behind everything is why aren't you wealthier? Why don't you have more money? Right? And in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Harvard is, it was like, why aren't you smarter?

**Josh:** Why aren't you doing something more intellectually challenging? And he said that the question at the heart of San Francisco and Silicon Valley is, It's actually power. Why aren't you more powerful? That's actually what we care about out here. What we care about is power. And there's, there's clowns in DC also care about power, but they're just like, kind of not as good at it as we are.

**Josh:** Real power is the ability to reshape how things are done and [00:13:00] like change the way people live and the way people work and stuff like that. That's real power. And that is the power of technology. Engineering management. comes with sort of a set of institutionally derived sources of power.

**Josh:** And the most important of those by far is hiring. Hiring is everything. Hiring is the most important job. Again, I'm going to quote Jeff Hammerbacher again. I could just do that. Sort of throughout the interview, um, Jeff told me when I started managing people at Cloudera. That management comes down to if you hire the right people and you motivate them properly, like you align again, their heroes narrative with what you need done you can do everything else wrong and you will still be a successful manager.

**Josh:** And I, I like to think that I was sort of the living embodiment of that principle. I did those two things right and literally everything else wrong. And that, and yet I was still kind of okay, basically in managing, right? The impact you can have on the culture. On, people's lives, people's careers, like all this kind of stuff is just so, so huge.

**Josh:** Because of hiring, hiring is just everything. It's the most important [00:14:00] thing by far. And that's, and I loved, I loved hiring. I did like hiring was by far the, my favorite part of the job. I loved meeting people. I loved learning about their stories. I loved. Figuring out how those stories intersected with like where we were at and what we needed and stuff.

**Josh:** I found that tremendously satisfying. Just tremendous source of joy for me. And I still feel a, sense of responsibility and care. I like literally was talking to like a woman yesterday who worked for me at slack. I was talking to there like literally yesterday about some problems she's having at her new job in her new places a much, much more senior engineer.

**Josh:** Um, then she was when I first started working with her and we're like talking through, okay, this is the situation. Like what do we need to do here? What are the questions to ask? All that kind of stuff. And I, I love that stuff. I love those relationships, relationships are everything around this stuff too.

**Josh:** It's really, it's like the workforce is a very tiny village and you run into the same people all the time and like all it's all this kind of stuff, right? The relationships are everything. It's again, a cliche thing to say, but it, there's a, it's a phenomenal [00:15:00] opportunity to, create and forge great relationships with people that you love and care for, for much, much longer than even the, even the few years you work together.

**Josh:** Yeah. That it's fantastic. I'm grateful for that experience.

**Ronak:** So engineering management definitely has this human aspect to it where you need to match your needs to their heroes arc, for example you mentioned some managers are really amazing apart from being good at hiring What are some of the other qualities do you think that make some managers great versus others?

**Josh:** I mean, emotional intelligence without a doubt. Like one of the reasons I think Stanford has been so successful at producing so many. Phenomenal entrepreneurs and technologists and, and leaders and stuff has been, they have a course there that I think is it's got a proper name, but everyone just calls it touchy-feely. it's a, it's sort of a course on emotional intelligence. It's, I it's like the slang term for it is touchy-feely.

**Ronak:** Uh, there's a course for that, that grad students go through or undergrad students

**Josh:** it's a course for the, i, I believe it is. Graduate students go through, graduate students go

**Ronak:** Yeah. We would look

**Josh:** least it's, it's it [00:16:00] look it up actually. It is an option. It is the secret.

**Josh:** Um, and then I think the other thing that you saw, I think of a lot of different folks who have, who you've seen being very successful. Who've come from Stanford graduate programs is yeah. It's touchy feely. It's like focusing on that emotional intelligence aspect, just the ability to read people, the ability to like think through, how the things you say impact them emotionally.

**Josh:** And stuff like that, be able to deliver bad news in a kind and caring way, all of these kinds of skills. I joke that every sufficiently high paid position in any organization is a therapist, basically, like for, for kind of all, like the CEO is a therapist VP of engineering. These are all fundamentally therapy jobs.

**Josh:** Right? And I think the VP of engineering at Slack when I was there was Michael Lopp who writes under the What is it? Would we say pseudonym or nom de plume or whatever we would call it? Like repose is his blog and stuff. And he is just, by far one of the most emotionally intelligent human beings I've ever come across in my life.

**Josh:** And I think one thing, I guess another sort of thing I commonly [00:17:00] see rands came up through engineering management, um, through QA, though managing quality assurance teams. Like that was, he was came up through Q. A, stuff and you say, Wow. It's actually not surprising at all. To me that the most successful engineering managers and leaders come up managing one of the hardest teams in a, in a company to manage and sort of grow and understand there is a relatively low status profession, at least it was for a long time in a lot of fields, right?

**Josh:** So being able to be successful and thrive in that context and like help humans flourish and stuff and grow in the way they want to in that context is like a forge that makes you into a great engineering leader that takes kind of the raw material of your emotional intelligence, all these kinds of things, and really like lets you demonstrate like what you are truly capable of in a way that I think other people who know this stuff and know what to look for.

**Josh:** So whenever I see people kind of in these career situations where they have to choose between managing like a low status [00:18:00] team or a high status team. I generally recommend if I think they have the capability to do it, going for the low status team, because it will challenge you and make you grow that much more than, it's every engineering team has its set of problems.

**Josh:** If you talk to any engineering team at Slack, they would tell you why their team had the hardest problems at Slack. Either, executive leadership isn't paying any attention to you, or executive leadership is paying way too

**Ronak:** much attention.

**Josh:** Way too much attention to you, right?

**Josh:** There's no happy place, like there really isn't. Everyone has their own set of problems. Everyone thinks their problems are the worst. Of course all of them are wrong. Obviously data engineering is the hardest by far. We all know that. Um, but, but it, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Biased, biased sample size here.

**Josh:** In a way that I appreciate. But nonetheless, yeah. That's just the name of the game, yeah.

**Guang:** So for EQ, right, that's something that I think for a lot of us engineers kind of struggle a bit with. So other than the

**Josh:** super hard, yeah.

**Guang:** how do you, do you think it's something that [00:19:00] you can get better over time? And like, how do you get better at it?

**Josh:** I do think some people are naturally good at it. I'll just be perfectly honest with you. Like I think of my own therapist, like a guy I worked with for like, on the order of 13 years. He was just literally just the most empathetic person I like ever encountered in my life and he sort of oozed empathy.

**Josh:** I don't really know how else to describe it. They do studies like I don't know if they're, like where studies were basically asked people to look at someone's, look at a picture of just someone's eyes, like just their eyes and figure out how they're feeling. And there are people who score kind of off the charts on this kind of stuff.

**Josh:** They can just look at someone's eyes and tell you if they're happy or they're scared or they're upset or they're trying to hide something. Like all this kind of stuff, like these micro expressions,

**Guang:** yeah, I think I tried that and it did not, I did not

**Josh:** It didn't, it didn't go. Okay. Got it. Exactly. So I do think there is a certain like innate ability or something or whatever some aspect of your experience that kind of leads you this way.

**Josh:** I do think courses like touchy feely are designed to bring [00:20:00] out. This capacity, just in the same way. You can teach someone to be better at public speaking. Some people are, again, just naturally for any number of reasons, better at public speaking, but anyone can improve it. These things and. Especially like kind of in that middle curve.

**Josh:** Right, when you're like hanging out in the middle, there's a lot of like really low hanging fruit, a lot of easy slope. You can just go up pretty quickly by like making a conscious effort to get better at the stuff. Even if you don't have the inborn knack for reading people and stuff like that.

**Josh:** Yeah. .

**Guang:** And then going a little bit back on the hiring. So, I'm a bit surprised to hear that it's your favorite cause. Like the managers I've had, right? Usually they kind of dread just looking at the calendars of all the screens that they have to do. So I love that you mentioned, so the relationships, right?

**Guang:** Which is super true. And that's sort of you carry throughout your career, not just at that job. So maybe more specifically on the technical stuff, like, how do you actually go about doing interviews? Um, I remember for me, one of my favorite interview formats that we're like experimenting with with this, like mock code review interview [00:21:00] where we, instead of, right, like just doing the standard lead code, we actually have them sort of look at a piece of code that like we sort of like while isolated such that there's not like a whole lot of import that you have to like explain to them, but then you have them go through, maybe you like implement some like very simple like mistakes, right?

**Guang:** And then just kind of be like, just go through it and then tell me like, right, like, Do it as if you were just doing the normal Puerto Rico uh,

**Josh:** review or something. Yeah,

**Guang:** write your comments and tell me, yeah.

**Josh:** Yeah. I have done this sort of style of interviews and stuff before and I, I like them a lot. I find them like very effective. I think, I've talked about this at least, I feel like I've talked about this at least somewhere before, although I haven't done it publicly.

**Josh:** We did, at Slack, we did coding exercises, like we did like a take home kind of thing, which was the Which was the style of the time. I think it's, I don't actually know how people interview anymore. I haven't like worked in a while. So I, and I've not done a proper job interview on like even longer than that.

**Josh:** At the time it was something that I felt like, we could kind of get away with, I think because we were slack, you know, we could like say, Oh, here, you have to do this. Take them to come talk to us and stuff. And some people were so excited to work there. [00:22:00] I think that's, it's a harder sell, for like.

**Josh:** Especially when you're trying to hire people who have kids and stuff like, like, if you gave me a take home now and was like, Hey, Josh, do this take home before you, I'd be like, not so much. No, thank you. Um, but like, but in any case yeah, so we, we gave a take home coding exercise. I think it's okay.

**Josh:** I don't think they use it anymore. At least God, I hope that hope Slack doesn't use it anymore. I developed it off of the the Enron email data set. It was the Enron email data set which is a famous data set, like a big collection of emails and stuff. Right. And so, I had the person do a kind of bunch of different data clean, data cleaning, data prep, data modeling, data structure, things written in whatever coding language they like, do it all in SQL, do it all in Java, Python, whatever.

**Josh:** I don't really care. And it answer a few different questions basically about it. And I generally cared about. The quality that I look for, at least in data people, and maybe I look for it kind of to a fault, I think, in all engineers, is conscientiousness, conscientiousness, um, in the same, in the way that you [00:23:00] are mindful of the fact that even though this is a coding exercise to throw out for the interview, I am going to be reading this and so, like, things are sort of thoughtfully laid out, Like a style has been imposed.

**Josh:** It's not just kind of chaos with like a bunch of stuff randomly commented and things indented or all kinds of weird lines and stuff like that. That was really. The like behavioral attribute that I looked for and stuff like that in data people was this sort of sense of conscientiousness. I've been just like stupid fortunate.

**Josh:** So many folks I've worked with have gone on to do like great things. It's just, anyway.

**Guang:** Like that attention, I guess, to detail and also sort of the empathy of having someone who's reading this like actually knows what's going on. Like, did you like find that like kind of translating well into like when they're actually working, together, they're like being a lot, just like better teammates instead of just being really trying to focus on getting their stuff done without

**Josh:** Getting their stuff done. That's a great, that's a great point. And I think, I feel like the answer would have been yes, if I had been a good enough manager or good enough leader to allow that to [00:24:00] happen. Because I think what happens too often, and on small teams, like I think the core data team I managed for a while was like four people.

**Josh:** And it took us, we had a super hard time hiring for any number of reasons. So I, got to meet a lot of people. The problem was that, if you're doing data stuff, the surface area that you have to cover is essentially the entire company. And so, like, if your data team is, is roughly the size of, like, more or less 1 percent of the company, you just don't have anywhere near enough capacity to have people really working together and stuff.

**Josh:** What I would say is that, like, even as I spread all of these, these, my data engineers out kind of among the company, People really liked working with them and they formed good relationships with the growth team, the platform team, the infrastructure teams, and like all this kind of stuff. So I think it did contribute in that way.

**Josh:** But again, I just like, as I regret, as I look back on things I regret and mistakes I made, really just not focusing the entire team on like one sort of problem to me. Like just to say like, look, everybody, listen, I know we got [00:25:00] platform problems. I know we got customer success problems. I know we got infrastructure problems.

**Josh:** But look, growth is the most important thing right now. Growth is the most important thing in the company. We are all going to do growth. Everything we're going to do, we're going to do for growth. And I feel bad that I have to say no to literally everyone else at the company right now who needs data for things.

**Josh:** But this is the most important thing. This is what we're going to do to the exclusion of all else. And I didn't do that. I was too busy trying to make everybody happy. and of course in doing so I made, you know, no one happy in the process. Again, a very classic. Very normal very predictable. You know, early engineering managers mistake.

**Josh:** Yeah.

**Guang:** In our email exchanges, you mentioned something about the, uh, the hard power of management versus like the soft power of the, like a senior

**Josh:** Of an I see. Yeah, yeah.

**Guang:** Can you tell us more about that?

**Josh:** Yeah, for sure.

## The Power Dynamics in Engineering Roles

**Josh:** So the hard power of management is the hiring. It is the promotion process. It's literally money, more or less like money and status and title and stuff. That is the hard power that is bestowed upon you by the powers that be that you kind of get by [00:26:00] virtue of organizational, positioning.

**Josh:** That's the hard power of management. The soft power. Of being an IC is general, especially in engineering. I C is knowledge is, you know, where the bodies are buried. You have the context on the system. You know why things are the way they are. You kind of know what needs to be done.

**Josh:** I think to the extent that I had like a superpower or still perhaps have a superpower, I'm not sure I haven't exercised it in a while. I. Because of where I've worked and the things I've done, I have the ability, and this is not just unique to me, a lot of senior ICs do this, you can see around corners kind of what's coming and what's going to happen as a result of things.

**Josh:** And again, great engineering managers can do this too. And in different for a different class of problems, right? So I was really good at slack and at weave grid, which is where I worked, the climate tech company I worked at, which I'm sure we'll talk about in a little bit. At, yeah. Proposing things relatively early on.

**Josh:** That seemed like [00:27:00] relatively low stakes, minor decisions that I could just kind of get a quick consensus on that ended up having kind of dramatic, profound, long term impact on the company and sort of how things were done, like how work happened at slack and we've created and stuff like that. And that was, that is sort of my secret joy, when I talk about like everyone in Silicon Valley is obsessed with power.

**Josh:** And people make this engineering IC sort of trade off, right, as they go from kind of the implicit power of knowledge of seeing around corners and all that kind of stuff that ICs have, and that's sort of the power they provide, and they transition to the hard power of management, and they find they aren't as good at wielding it, I think, as they thought they might be, and that they kind of miss They miss the power, they miss the feeling, they miss the work of being an IC, and that's what pushes them back, and that's why you don't generally see them go back the other way, is they sort of know, they know what power is available to management, and they know it's not really for them.

**Josh:** John Carmack had a great quote about this the other day, like you can talk, we can talk about a lot of the stuff [00:28:00] around like AIs and LLMs and how does that shift the balance of power in these ways and stuff, John Carmack was talking about how he is deeply uncomfortable with the power of management, he doesn't like it, it's not the kind of power he feels comfortable wielding, he much prefers, the power of being John Carmack, of being, basically one of the best software engineers to have ever lived.

**Josh:** And that's the kind of thing he likes to wield, and that's, that's the sort of, you know, place that provides him the most satisfaction, most agency, most sense of mastery, all, all the good things, all the things that, again, contribute to happiness and thriving and all that good stuff.

**Josh:** Yeah.

**Guang:** So it's like one example would be like, say, like implementing like RFC process, right? Like that's something that it's very, especially like if it's earlier on in like the growth of the company, you can like, Oh, everybody's like, Oh yeah, that's a good idea. And then, but then like, that really has like a profound .

**Guang:** Impact in terms of, I

**Josh:** Exactly. And if you're good at it, if you're good at it, these sort of decisions are basically invisible. No one, people take them for granted. It's just the way it's done, right? I like to, the joke of being a, a senior or early IC, early engineer in any successful [00:29:00] company, is you get to make an enormous number of decisions.

**Josh:** And the vast majority of decisions are good decisions. Because if they weren't good decisions, the company probably like would have failed, right? So you make almost all decisions correctly. They're good decisions. And they're invisible. No one can see them. And also, because you're a person, and you're human, and you're flawed, you make a, you know, small number of like, really bad decisions.

**Josh:** Kind of like a bunch of things where like, ah, you just, you just got it wrong. And those decisions inflict pain and suffering on everyone forever, and everyone hates you for them, and all this kind of stuff. And that's Like, congratulations! That's the prize. Also, you get a lot of stock, so it, it, hopefully it works out in the end.

**Josh:** But yeah, but that's, fingers crossed. Yeah, but yeah, but that's the nature of it. That's the nature of the job. That's what you're signing up for.

**Guang:** Right, right. I remember at the first company I worked at, it was really small when I started, and it was my first job. So I remember, and they're still around, so it's like after four or five years they're saying this sort of really stupid process that they had to go through it. I was like, oh, yeah, I remember that.

**Guang:** That was me. I'm sorry, guys. Um, [00:30:00] Yeah, definitely cuts both ways, yo.

**Josh:** it absolutely does. And again, the great stuff you see, no one sees that. And it's like, of course it works that way, how else would it work? I'm like, you know, actually, actually like, no, that was a really good decision I made. Like, it's actually very important. Like, anyway, yeah, yeah,

**Ronak:** PE people remember you for the wrong decisions that you made. For sure.

**Josh:** They absolutely, absolutely,

**Ronak:** No. No. No one ever comes and says, Hey, this thing has been running just fine. Or, the decision was pretty cool because we, we, we didn't have to go back and revert it, but yes.

**Josh:** Utterly, utterly invisible, utterly invisible. No one appreciates it again. And you know, again, to your point, same thing with engineering management, good engineering management is invisible. And it's what is it you people do here? Right. And it can only be appreciated by experiencing a lot of really bad engineering management and understanding like, wow, good engineering management is like, you guys are doing a really good job of not fucking this thing up for everyone.

**Josh:** That's, that's it. Congratulations. Good, good work, everybody.

**Ronak:** uh,

**Josh:** Easier? You know, easier said than done.

## Discussing the Transition from Engineering to Management

**Josh:** Easier said than done. It's hard, hard to do.

**Guang:** Okay, so, hate to [00:31:00] do these like two part questions, but they're kind of, you know, related in

**Josh:** inevitably. Yeah,

**Guang:** Yeah, please don't, please don't hate on me, Ronak. Um,

**Josh:** It's fine. It's fine.

**Guang:** so, one is sort of like, do you recommend then like every engineer to at least try management? And then the second thing is sort of like, ah, shit, I forgot the second part.

**Guang:** Great. Yeah, let's just go with the first

**Josh:** I think everybody, I think it would be a good thing if everybody who wanted to do management or was curious about management had an opportunity to do it. I very much do. And I, I mean, I think that's generally true. I think if you want to, for instance, manage an intern or something like that, which is like in many ways, like the lowest stakes form of engineering management that opportunity should be available to everybody like kind of without a doubt, right?

**Josh:** Pretty much anywhere you go everywhere. Someone should have the opportunity to do that. I think if you are curious about this stuff, if you think it is something you might ever do for any reason if it's something you'd like to understand better, like all of these kinds of things, [00:32:00] I think it's worthwhile.

**Josh:** I also think, and like, look, I should have met people who were just very clearly engineering managers, even when they were ICs. They could not help themselves. They were obviously engineering managers. They had engineering manager written kind of all over them. In, in everything they did and how they approached problems and how they did things.

**Josh:** It was just unambiguously clear they were going to be an engineering manager and potentially a very good one someday. Yes.

## The Importance of Emotional Intelligence in Management

**Guang:** Do they know that at the time? Because I feel like, right, for engineers, a lot of times the skill set is pretty different, right? Like, for example, like, EQ right, like, you know, it's not as highly Okay, I'm getting some, uh

**Josh:** No, no, I mean, you're, I mean, you're right. I think again, I think if they, if they do have the EQ level. It's, it's, kind of a cliche to say they can generally clear, clearly tell that they have a higher EQ than the people around them. Let's just, let's just stipulate that's something that people who have high EQ are good at, right?

**Josh:** Just by nature of, tautologically, like of like being good at EQ means you can tell, right? So I think there's certainly a, I think they're aware of that [00:33:00] fact, I think. I think the tricky thing, um, and this is, can be like a very engineering culture specific kind of thing. I think at Google, I think it was hard to be a pure EQ manager because of how highly Google, arguably to a fault, kind of, prioritizes technical excellence and, I've used the term like technical pyrotechnics, which is kind of a redundant sort of phrase, but You need some sort of level of like pretty serious technical credibility as an engineering IC to progress up the engineering ladder at Google just because of like All those senior ICs we talked about who were like, again, are there because of their technical prowess need to respect your opinions, need to like be willing to listen to you and stuff.

**Josh:** And so you need some like pretty serious technical credit under your belt in order to do that. And I think that is often, I think the hard thing for those people to sort of keep in mind is to say, look, yes, you were good at this. Like, yes, you have the knack for it. Yes, you will very [00:34:00] clearly, you will very clearly be doing this.

**Josh:** This is destined for you, right? For better or worse, because again, it's not an easy job carrying other people's emotional burdens and all these kind of things. It's not like it's, it's not an easy thing to do, even for a high EQ person. But you should be sure. To build yourself up as as technically as you can, because that will provide a foundation for you that will pay off your entire career without a doubt, anyway, and that's, and that can be tricky because again, their inclination is that way they start taking on more engineering management work, especially if, say, hypothetically speaking, they're not working for a super high EQ engineering manager and that's not good.

**Josh:** That's your hand, like you're, you're really handicapping yourself when you do that sort of thing. You're holding yourself back. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, everyone's got a different set of challenges, right? This is just the set of things I've seen in my, in my life and times.

**Josh:** Yeah.

## The Role of Senior ICs and Engineering Managers

**Ronak:** I just want to add one thing to what Guang was asking. So like, there's a huge overlap between what an engineering manager does and what a senior IC do does. I think there are, in my experience, yes.

**Josh:** It's not, it's not actually, it's not actually [00:35:00] necessarily true. That is very much a

**Ronak:** depends on the team, I would say.

**Josh:** Depends on the team, depends on the company, I think. Depends on the company in a lot

**Ronak:** on the company for sure.

**Ronak:** At least in my experience, I think there's a huge overlap in terms of you're involved in priority planning, calibration, performance reviews. What you're not doing as a senior IC is giving people the bad news. Deciding how much they should get paid. Yeah, pretty much that I would say.

**Josh:** Yeah, that's a

**Guang:** I'm with Josh on this one. Sorry, go ahead,

**Josh:** I, I, I'd say it very much depends on the company. I think, like I, I, you know, but I love you, but like you've been at LinkedIn for like six and a half years and I think being at LinkedIn for a long time has certainly colored your way to think that the way LinkedIn does certain things is the way,

**Ronak:** No, for sure. Yeah.

**Josh:** you know, not true.

**Ronak:** Yeah. I have one, only one perspective, which I agree with. Yeah.

**Josh:** At some places yes, that is very much the case. At other places, nah, not so much, not so much. I think at Slack, engineering management was not generally involved in like technical architecture decisions in any kind of meaningful way. It was not really, it was not their [00:36:00] purview. It really was the Very much the senior ICS and the council of senior ICS purview and a lot of ways, and I would say the senior ICS were less involved in like the promotion process and like that kind of stuff in the planning process.

**Josh:** Companies have different cultures, a lot of you know, Google, very engineering driven, like again, to a fault slack was much more product driven, like really it was product driven, product kind of coordinating design engineering together. And in those, and in those kinds of cultures, I think engineering management is, is sort of more important because.

**Josh:** Product is really sort of driving things forward, right? It's like that becomes a much more important relationship. So I mean, it really is.

**Ronak:** Yeah, it depends on the

**Josh:** And that's, that's, it depends on the big part of it for you is like, what kind of engineering manager are you the more technical engineering manager or are you the more, again, high EQ, politically astute, all of this kind of stuff.

**Josh:** Again, these are real things. These are valuable skills. And a lot of it is about finding the right company, not just the right role, but like the right company where your particular approach to these problems will be appreciated, will be valued, [00:37:00] all that kind of stuff. Yeah. I mean,

**Guang:** Thanks for being, uh,

**Josh:** I, yeah, I've just, I've had the experience of being the guy who's like, well, Google did it this way and therefore all companies should do it this way.

**Josh:** And like, that's not, that's, you know, deep, deeply, profoundly, not true. I'm like, not even close. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah.

**Guang:** cool.

## Venturing into Climate Tech and the Challenges Faced

**Guang:** after Slack in late 2020, you joined a climate tech startup called Weave Tech, which you

**Josh:** We've, WeaveGrid. WeaveGrid. Yep. Yep. WeaveGrid.

**Guang:** not cut that

**Josh:** fix, fix that.

**Guang:** wrong things all the time,

**Josh:** Oh, okay. All

**Guang:** of the brand now, apparently.

**Josh:** Saying wrong

**Ronak:** Yeah.

**Josh:** Yeah,

**Guang:** exactly, so, sorry, so what they, what they do is they build software to help the power grid to better adapt to changes in usage pattern as more people have EVs in their homes.

**Guang:** During this sort of search [00:38:00] process, uh, yeah, what was your search criteria like, right? I think you mentioned that this was like heavily impacted by like COVID and then, you know, like, yeah, walk us through like how

**Josh:** it's sort of late late 2020 kind of stuff. Right? So, yeah, I mean, I think I left slack in at the very end of October 2019. And I was just, deeply and profoundly fried and burned out. I think I did. I did the software engineering daily podcast like a month or so after I left go back and listen to it about, like, just how like, So I was basically just how, like, super fucked up I was basically like I really, I didn't touch a computer in anger.

**Josh:** At all in like four, in four months, I didn't do any coding and all that kind of stuff. Right. And I was really sort of like at a loss. I really like, I was not thinking about like another job or any kind of role or doing anything with computers possibly ever. Again, I wasn't really sure. And then, you know, COVID happened, and COVID happened, and when COVID happened, my friend DJ Patel.

**Josh:** Uh, he's done a bunch of cool stuff. He used to be the chief data scientist at LinkedIn. He used to be the [00:39:00] deputy CTO of the United States. He's a venture capitalist now, great guy, kind of gave me a call. He was like, Hey we're helping out the state of California with like pandemic response stuff.

**Josh:** We're working with these epidemiologists at Hopkins and the state department of public health. And they could use like some help basically Kind of running these, like they've gone from running like little toy epidemiology models for fun, you know, or for like their students and like epidemiology one on one to running them for like the governor of California and like the president of the United States and they're under a little bit of stress and they could use some, they could use some help.

**Josh:** So can you come help them? And so I did. So I did that for a few months. And it was really, it was the kind of thing where like my head state was such that the only thing that could get me, Back, programming and engineering. Essentially, these are just gigantic data pipelines, right?

**Josh:** To be honest with you, right? Was a global pandemic emergency type situation. And so, Fortunately, unfortunately, one came along and that was like, I started doing it again and it was, it was a profoundly great experience for me. I loved, loved working on it. And it [00:40:00] was, it was all the things.

**Josh:** It was like let's scale this stuff up. Let's identify the performance bottlenecks. Let's like fix them. Let's break them down. Let's run stuff, as fast as we can under, under high pressure deadlines. And y'all, I loved it. I loved it. It was, The best working experience of my life. I think it was like one of the reasons I really like startups and I've primarily done startups for the last decade or so after Google is I just feel a tremendous sense of joy.

**Josh:** When working with people who are all aligned towards the same goal in a very clear way, like really before the big company, inevitable politics and difference of opinions and visions and all this kind of stuff inevitably creeps up. There are these moments early on when everyone is rowing in the same direction.

**Josh:** And again, you can find pockets of these things at any, anywhere at any stage, but it's just tremendously satisfying. That stuff for me, that sort of March 2020 thing was [00:41:00] amazing because it was cool to work, government, academia, industry, like everybody was very briefly because God love America, very briefly. Rowan in the same direction. We were all aligned on what needed to be done. And that was, that was really powerful. And it was a very special experience. Like we get together for like a little reunion, like, the sort of general crew of people who does stuff like, like about once a year or so.

**Josh:** And it's just, it's just, it's the happiest day of the year for me by a wide margin. Right? So, two things. I mean, the mission without a doubt, obviously the mission, the impact was profound and tremendous. The other thing was like, it was, It's really nice to just be free of like JIRA meetings, really of any kind you know, I was doing this, I was doing this, I was doing this, as a volunteer, it's like, if they wanted me to go to a meeting and I didn't want to go, I just, wouldn't go what are they going to do, fire me?

**Josh:** Like, it's, it's fine,

**Ronak:** Like, actually get shit done. Yeah.

**Josh:** that was it. That was the whole thing, right? And so anyway, that experience very much influenced what I [00:42:00] was looking for next, I think. Yeah. That, and I think, you know, again, 2020, like Jesus fucking Christ, like, fuck that year, but, um, September 2020, I don't know if y'all remember, like in the Bay Area, there was the day where the sun didn't rise, the sky was orange, everyone woke up, scary, scary ass day, right?

**Josh:** That was terrible. I remember, like my son again, who's like, you know, he would have been four at the time, like wakes me up at seven and he's like, he has a light in his room that goes off when it's, when it's time to wake up. Or at least, you know, he did when he was a little kid and he said, daddy, it's, you know, It's seven, but the this, the sun's not out yet.

**Josh:** And I was like, what? And then like, you look at the sky and it's like, basically like hell, more or less, like, it's like descended upon you. Right. So all these kinds of things. Right. I had been feeling for a while, for a number of years, I think a lot of people have felt that I should be doing something to help fight the good fight, like against climate change as in whatever way I could, in whatever way I can meaningfully do that.

**Josh:** And that really kind of really drove it home for me. It was like, I want to, you know, this, I suspect this will be a formative, [00:43:00] memory for my son when he is older. And when he asked me when he's like 20 or something, Dad, what were you doing? You know, when the sky turned orange, I wanted to have a good answer for him.

**Josh:** So it was really those kind of things. I was looking for something very small where I would have the same kind of freedom to execute and just crank. Yeah. That I had during the COVID stuff. So I'd never been at something truly like that small before. And I was looking for something in the climate space.

**Josh:** I was also, I mean, for better or worse, I am an investor. Like, I am a hoodie. Like the, I've been fortunate to work at, Cloudera went public. Slack went public. Google is, still around and kicking and doing okay as far as I can tell. Well, I don't know

**Ronak:** uh,

**Josh:** but they're still, yeah,

**Ronak:** mine, mine is the last two weeks, but

**Josh:** yeah, that's a, they've, they've just got, I just, I love them so much and they're just so hapless.

**Josh:** It just kills me anyway. Um, I've done okay. Basically I was like an investor at like picking companies and stuff like that. I do angel investing now and stuff. And so I invested in a lot of data tech startups dbt most famously but mother duck [00:44:00] materialized tabular bunch of different AI things. Like I've just, I do a lot of angel investing and I, I in spite of myself trying to be cool and like, look at me, I'm in my hoodie and I'm an engineer and all that kind of stuff.

**Josh:** I am in many ways like an investor. And I look at these, I look at opportunities as an investor. And so I wanted to find something that was a real business. So. Tiny team where I could execute hitting in the mission and was a real business that I felt like would actually do some good in sort of the climate fight.

**Josh:** And we've great checked all those boxes for me. It was only 10 people. They had hired my friend, Bo Cronin earlier in the year. So I had like a good kind of connection there to, uh, engineer. I knew well and worked with and like, just, thought very highly of and yeah, it was, it was the mission and it was, it's an interesting mission.

**Josh:** I mean, building. And, um, and this is kind of a, I guess I don't want to segue into this kind of stuff. Like how can the tech help climate tech stuff? People ask me this a lot because I've, I've done this work and I obviously I don't work there anymore. I've, I left last year. And my honest answer, it's kind of a bummer, [00:45:00] is that the, if you want to have, if you want to meaningfully impact climate change.

**Josh:** The best thing you can do is start a company or go work at one of these very big, high paying tech jobs, make a lot of money and pay your taxes. It's such, it's a bummer. I know no one's going to write a folk song about you for doing this kind of thing. But that is honestly the best way to help. We have a lot of really smart people.

**Josh:** I'm so I'm so much more optimistic, I guess, about climate change and our ability to handle it than I was when I started doing this stuff back in 2020 because there are so many good, smart, decent mission oriented people like working on this kind of problem. And so I'm not nearly as worried about it.

**Josh:** I do worry about, like, we have a lot of infrastructure to pay for we have a lot of transformers to buy, we have a lot of solar panels to [00:46:00] build, we have a lot of infrastructure we need to pay for, and it's going to cost a lot of money and so that's, being in a position to provide that money is honestly, again now I say this, it doesn't, most people don't find this very satisfying, like, as an

**Guang:** No, but, but, but like, I, I can totally relate to that because, um, actually for me, climate change got like personal, , it was like that exact moment. And then, so I spent like, like a month trying to, I was also sort of in between jobs to try to figure out like, okay, if I can do something with like climate tech.

**Guang:** And then, I mean, what you said after, like, a month of, like, listening to a bunch of podcasts, right, like, doing research, looking at, like, all the, what the companies are doing and stuff. And then the biggest conclusion I had was, like, oh, I should have done, like, materials engineering and then learn how to

**Josh:** I mean, that's, that's super true. You know, it's funny you say that. I work, like, one of the, uh, one of the folks I work with at the Weave Grid actually, uh, is, is a physicist. He's a PhD in physics from Berkeley. And he did it to study photovoltaics and build better solar panels and stuff back in the aughts.

**Josh:** And it was great when he got out and finished [00:47:00] his Ph. D., he discovered that it wasn't really a physics problem. We had actually solved all the physics problems. What it really was was like a utility, bureaucracy, regulatory nightmare, like, kind of problem of actually building this stuff. And so that's what he does.

**Josh:** That's how he helps. He's a Ph. D. in physics. He studied photo photovoltaics and like building solar panels and solar cells and stuff. That's not the problem. He works on the problem. This is the problem. Right. And that's, I don't know that's like, just super cool to me.

**Josh:** I mean, that's, that's absolutely tremendous. I have, I really, profoundly admire that stuff. Um, there aren't many like tech problems. Honestly, there's nothing that like a better key value store or like an S3 backed postgres engine. These are all amazingly cool pieces of technology.

**Josh:** They aren't like the core of the problem in in climate change. There's a few folks I think who are making a meaningful difference. There are some climate finance companies like kind of fintech for climate financing is very interesting to me. And I actually think is both a [00:48:00] real business.

**Josh:** And Materially, because again, we really just need money to build all of this stuff. That's really, we know how to build it. We know what we need to build. We just need to build it. That's the problem. So the financing stuff I think is actually like quite interesting and it is an opportunity for leverage.

**Josh:** But again, it's not it's not the, it's not AI, it's not large language models, it's not like we don't need rocket science, you know, super, super hardcore tech stuff. Like that's, that stuff is just kind of a sideshow. It's really, yeah, we need money. That's what, it's really what we need. Yeah.

**Guang:** So, I wanted to get your take maybe on two points. So one is because right, like I imagine maybe things would like, or as the landscape changes in the future, maybe things become different. So like one is like, are there any tips like for other like engineers, like maybe five years out? That's doing this search of changing from like a traditional software engineering in the tech company to like, is there anything like when you were doing the search that you like, you were like, Oh, this is very helpful.

**Guang:** And then the second thing maybe is actually, yeah, let's just start with the first.

**Josh:** Yeah, it's good. I mean, the hardest problem [00:49:00] by far is the network issue. And again, it's kind of back to what we were talking about, relationships and stuff like that, right? The most important thing for me joining WeaveGrid was that I knew someone from the tech world who had joined WeaveGrid. And was there already.

**Josh:** That was a huge help, right? I think you see a lot of folks, especially in like the recruiting industry and stuff like that, who've been recruiting stuff for a long time in tech, pivoting to doing recruitment, recruiting for climate tech. That is enormously helpful. That is tremendously helpful. Building these networks that allow us to cross over finding people you know, who you like, who you like to have worked with before, who are doing this stuff now.

**Josh:** This is like most of the problem. It's like you come in, you don't know anybody, they don't know you. How do you know if you're going to like working together, right? I mean, they don't necessarily understand the technology stuff you're doing. You don't understand the climate stuff they're doing.

**Josh:** This is a problem. Like this is the big problem. And again, lots of people have made this leap and the more people who make it, the better off we're going to be because the network will get richer and denser and all that kind of stuff. And [00:50:00] then ideally climate tech becomes the same sort of village, right?

**Josh:** You see this kind of already. There are already, I would say like there's a company a few years ago called Opower. Um, it was eventually acquired by Oracle and went public and stuff like that. And it was, like, I think in many ways, the first big, successful climate tech, traditional tech company, right?

**Josh:** There was a bunch of hardware and solars and stuff like that, right? But this was, like, a software company that made the leap. And those people are everywhere. Their alumni are percolated all throughout the ecosystem, much, much in the way that, like, Sun Microsystems and, like, Silicon Graphics and all this kind of stuff.

**Josh:** This is how this happens. And so you want to join. One of those kinds of companies, and I think for what it's worth, weave Grid is one of those companies. I think Weave Grid will be one of the companies that Seeds the next generation, builds the network and stuff like that. That become the next, like to your point, the com, the climate companies, we don't know we need yet, the ones we need in five years and stuff like that.

**Josh:** That's that's what I think. Yeah.

**Ronak:** think at least for right now, based on what you said earlier, anyone who wants to [00:51:00] get into climate tech, I think mission driven being mission driven would be the first filter. Like they can't go into it thinking what I'm going to work on the hardest technical problems. Uh, that's not what would give them satisfaction.

**Josh:** If you go in hoping for that, you're going to be, I think, sorely disappointed. Yeah. Again, it's just, it's just not the, it's not the issue and it's a lot of people are trying to marry the two because it's sexy and it gets good press and it's just really deeply. Not the problem.

**Josh:** It's just, it's not serious. People doing that. Sorry. Hate to be a bummer here. If you want to do LLM stuff, don't do LLMs for climate, like for the love of God. Don't please don't do that. It's a terrible idea. It's just absolute nonsense. Yeah.

**Guang:** So one kind of a random question I had was, um, We were talking to Mitchell Hashimoto, and then one of the things he said that really, uh, resonated with me was, like, the most important attribute for engineers was, like, being practical. And in your experience working in climate, because there's so many people there because of the mission, right, not because of the money, not because of, [00:52:00] like, the technology. Do you ever, like, run into coworkers that are, like, very motivated and driven? But then They're also like less practical in terms of like compromising and Like how do you and like how do you address like or like how do you deal with that in those situations?

**Josh:** mean, not very well, I guess it's like, like thinking and reflecting on it. Yeah. Yeah. Not very well. I only really have. Patience these days for one junior engineer. And that is my son, my eight year old. Um, As is, yeah, there's a lot of this stuff. It's a bummer. I mean, I, I first of all agree, agree with Mitchell.

**Josh:** Like it's, he's right. Pragmatism. There's a quote I saw once, for any given problem, the question is like, what is the simplest thing that could possibly work? And I try to be empathetic because I was [00:53:00] once that junior engineer, um, who was, again, Really, it was very important to me to like impress everyone with how smart I was and all this kind of stuff and like look at all this cool shit I can do and look how awesome I am and stuff.

**Josh:** And getting over that has been like the work of, of the last 20 years or so, like more or less. Ah, I wish I had higher EQ here, guys. I really do. I wish, I wish I was better at this kind of stuff. I do. I just sit and I just sort of seethe. But yeah, I don't know.

**Ronak:** Yeah. You're self aware. I think that's, that's pretty good. EQ.

**Josh:** It's good, it's good EQ, but I need to get over the like, the fury more or less.

**Josh:** Again, people who are better at this than I am can like, get past the blind rage and like, we're best at like, we're best at judging the faults in others that we see in ourselves, right? Um, and so this, this is a fault I am all too familiar with and have a, have a super hard time who has, because it just reminds me of all of the terrible decisions I have made and the, and the pain and suffering I've inflicted and stuff like that.

**Josh:** And that's. It's a tough one for me, man. It's a [00:54:00] tough one. Again, why it's good to have that hiring power. Like you can screen for that. It was like, I think in my Enron email database, I remember some, I got a few submissions where like someone used like Neo4j, like a graph database to solve it. And I was like, yeah, no, absolutely not next.

**Josh:** Like under no circumstances, like this is instant red flag for me. Not for anything. When I was, when I was interviewing inside data science people, I would often see a lot of really not so technical architecture. Let me use every single thing that I possibly could to rebuild Uber on top of Kafka or whatever.

**Josh:** And I was just like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Absolutely not. Thank you. Next. Like that kind of stuff. Yeah. Sorry about that. That's

**Guang:** We were set up for failure, they told us to use the

**Josh:** No, I mean, I, I know.

**Ronak:** mean, in many cases, like why, Kafka reminded me of some other discussion we were recently having at work and it's like. Just use MySQL until it doesn't work. Just use [00:55:00] MySQL.

**Josh:** One of my other like super favorite quotable instances was a tweet I read during the pandemic oh, age, this microservice could have been a SQL query. Um, like, you know, like this meeting could have an email. This microservice could have been a SQL query. Um, like there's a, there's a lot of that stuff, man.

**Josh:** There's a lot of stuff like that. It just kills me. Yeah. What's up,

**Guang:** so how do you filter for, yeah practicality in engineers, like during the interview? So other than, okay, so Neo4j for like

**Josh:** Oh, I mean, I think, oh, I think it's. No, no, I mean, the Neo4j thing is a particularly egregious example. I mean, I do, so I think every technical interview should include a software design component to it of like, let's design a system. Let's build a system from scratch for doing something like it.

**Josh:** I don't know if I can. I don't want to tell you the one we used at Weave Grid because we still used it or whatever, but it, I want to see you design something. I want to see how do you approach the problem design something. I want to see the technology choices you make. I want to see why you make those technology choices.

**Josh:** And that's, [00:56:00] yeah it's, that's essentially how I screen for this kind of stuff is to see, like, what did you use and why? That's usually works pretty well. Not for nothing. Yeah.

**Ronak:** so you mentioned investing. I think this is kind of similar to investing in a way. Uh,

**Josh:** Hmm. Okay.

**Ronak:** well, one, how did he get into angel investing?

**Josh:** Ah,

**Guang:** Okay. That was a hard fit. I see you. I

**Ronak:** know. No, no,

**Guang:** you. I see you. I

**Ronak:** no, no. The reason I'm asking that is, uh, one, I wanted context on how you get into it because I'm interested. I

**Josh:** Of course.

**Ronak:** money, but I'm interested. The, the second

**Josh:** Having having a lot of money helps, but yeah,

**Ronak:** Yeah, uh, I need a few more years and maybe a few more startups which actually go public which may happen.

**Ronak:** Let's see. Jokes apart, but like the reason I brought it up is, in a way when you're hiring during the interview, you're looking for good engineering skills. You want to know the person knows what they're talking about. Being practical is another aspect of it.

**Josh:** Yes.

**Ronak:** You're also seeing, can you actually work with that person or not?

**Ronak:** Or do you lose your patience too quickly? Angel investing, like once you invest for example, and [00:57:00] I don't have any practical experience with it, but from what I've heard from many other folks who have done it, again, other podcasts, it's well in a way that's kind of a working relationship too. Like, do you want to get on a call with that person on a Saturday morning if they're running into problems?

**Ronak:** And you would only do that if you actually like them. Um, kind of similar to hiring, so that's why I asked the question.

**Josh:** That is similar. I mean, there's, I think a lot of things that go into angel investing that are different than normal working relationship stuff. I think, you know, I mean, I guess obviously like much, far fewer people do that kind of thing. Right. I'm thinking of like qualities of an engineer that make them not great angel investors in general.

## Engineers as Angel Investors: The Challenges

**Josh:** There are some like phenomenally good angel investors who are engineers, but maybe not as many as you might think. The hardest one, I think, or I guess the most common kind of failure pattern I've seen as engineering manager or engineers wanting to become angel investors is they are too skeptical,

**Ronak:** Ah,

**Josh:** engineers, especially, especially good ones are generally too [00:58:00] pessimistic.

**Josh:** Pessimism is a desirable trait in a very senior engineer. You want people who are thinking about what are all the things that can possibly go wrong. Absolutely. These are good people to work with. They are desirable coworkers. They are not good angel investors because, most startups are going to fail. They are. If you come in, if you come in with the attitude of, like, well, let's, like, pick this thing apart and see all the ways it can fail, yeah, there's gonna be, like, a million of them. There isn't, like, a shortage of ways for the startup to fail. It's probably gonna happen. You have to kind of reverse your mindset and your orientation to be what would have to happen for this thing to be massively successful. For this to be, like, a billion dollar company. This would be a very valuable, very big deal, transformative company. What would have to happen? And is there, can I foresee a remotely plausible path for that to happen?

**Josh:** So that's like, that's a big shift. It's a very different kind of way of thinking. It's a, yeah, it's just the positive dual of the various sort of negative characteristics. You have to like shift your mentality in that way. That's a hard thing.

## Breaking into Angel Investing: Personal Journey

**Josh:** I got into angel [00:59:00] investing, um, because I did.

**Josh:** quote, like due diligence, that's what they, that's what venture capitalists call it. Due diligence is just like, hey, you engineer or whatever person, talk to the founder of this company, hear about what they're building, and tell me what you think about it. Is this something you would buy? How much would you pay for it?

**Josh:** This is a real problem for you, all these kinds of things, right? And generally you do this for free. This is something, this is not like a When people run into problems getting an angel investing, their first thing is like, why should I do a bunch of free labor, basically? Like, why should I like do all this free labor to help these venture capitalists make lots and lots of money?

**Josh:** This is a fair question. They are going to make lots of money. You're not investing. You're not going to make any money. The only reason to do it really is if you kind of intrinsically find it interesting to think about technology and technology companies and like what sort of potential they could have.

**Josh:** And is that something like where you just, you would just sort of enjoy that? If do you like did you read the book on like the rise and fall of uber or whatever? Like is this something you would do for fun? [01:00:00] And for me kind of tragically the answer is yes I would literally do this for fun.

**Josh:** I it's I enjoy it The reason i'm not a venture capitalist because I have an up close and personal perspective on like all of the shitty horrible aspects of that job but that aspect of it is super fun. It is a fantastic hobby and I absolutely get How people get into venture thinking that's all it is.

**Josh:** And it's like deeply not true. But I get the appeal of that without a doubt, right? And so I did this for years for free. Just cause I thought it was fun. I sort of enjoyed thinking about it, talking about it, that kind of stuff, right? That's how I got into it such that when, you know, at a point in the future, when I did have money, like when Slack went public and stuff, and I could become, I could actually start investing, I just asked those same venture capitalists.

**Josh:** Hey, I have some money now. I'd like to. Be an angel investor. If I, if I talk to a company you're investing in and I see, and I like it and I wanna put some money in, will you let me? And the answer is, of course, they're absolutely happy to, they're thrilled to have you. It's like the very least they can do to pay back all of the years of free labor and stuff like that.

**Josh:** And the relationship that [01:01:00] you've built with them over time. And that's it. That's kind of the whole game. That's how I got into it. I don't recommend a different approach, I guess, broadly speaking. Um, so that's it. That's kind of like thing one. That's how to do it. That's how to get started doing it

## The Art of Successful Angel Investing

**Josh:** .

**Josh:** That's a separate question from like how to be successful at it. Because again, angel investing is a terrible idea. And again, this is one of those cliche and this is me giving you advice. That's the opposite of me and blah, blah, blah. How do you do it? Well, that's a harder one. Like it's a, it's a very difficult one, right?

**Josh:** The general consensus seems to be. That almost all of the really, really good investors you've ever come across, or you've heard of, or you know about, or whatever, had a deal early in their careers that hit in a major way. And then it becomes kind of a, it becomes a sort of selection bias kind of thing, or like a, Hey, we should let Josh into this deal because Josh dbt.

**Josh:** And therefore Josh knows lots about data infrastructure and tooling and what's going to happen and stuff like that. And, [01:02:00] you know. I like to think I know a lot about data infrastructure and tooling, and I can foresee where things go, but like, I'm also basically an idiot, and I get lots and lots of things wrong, right?

**Josh:** Just because I happen to get one thing right doesn't mean I'm going to get anything else right in the future. Like, this is, again there's a significant luck element to this kind of stuff, right? Like, without a doubt.

**Ronak:** Past performance is not representative of the

**Josh:** Past performance is not representative future returns. And I think, you know, again, a lot of people, if you get kind of higher in your own supply and you think that like, Oh yes, because I got this right.

**Josh:** I therefore know what's going to happen with those. It's like deeply not true. And whenever I run into investors who are like that, I just like, give a very,

**Ronak:** Roll your eyes.

**Josh:** felt eye roll. Yeah. Like, Oh God, I can't believe I have to talk to this idiot. But for better or worse, that is a thing.

**Josh:** And it's like. Having that, that early success and getting lucky, I think just contributes massively to your deal flow and kind of everything that comes after that is really ultimately, I think, like important to being a successful angel investor. So this is kind of my, this is my weird advice, work for free for several years, [01:03:00] uh, happened to have an exit to, to provide you enough money that you don't mind setting some of it on fire and then get really lucky early on.

**Josh:** Simple three step process to become a successful angel investor. Easy for anyone to replicate, right? Like it's just, that's just insane. Like

**Ronak:** Yeah. Lovely highlight. We'll, we'll, we'll put that in. Yes. Uh, no, I think that's

**Josh:** like, just terrible. But again, it's, it's why this is basically a bad idea. Only do it again. If it's important to your identity, like the reason I did it was because I wanted to be an angel investor.

**Josh:** That was really it. I was willing to spend, x thousands of dollars just so I could call myself an angel investor. Um, 'cause I'm into moron. Like I'm a, you know, I don't know an idiot. I thought the other cool, other cool engineers were doing it. And I'm like, okay, I gotta do it too. 'cause I gotta be cool like them.

**Josh:** I mean, I mean, I think what's funny and great about Silicon Valley is the amount of status that accrues. I mean, look at I mean look at Jason Callis for God's sake, right? Like. I mean, has that dude done anything in his life besides being an early investor in Uber? Does he ever talk about anything else?

**Josh:** Ever? [01:04:00] Right? Like, no, of course

**Ronak:** comes up a lot. Yes.

**Josh:** It does seem to come up a lot, right? Like, and you talk to me, like, DBT, DBT. Like, I mean, like, again it's just utter nonsense. I actually, like, not for nothing in all seriousness, if you are serious about angel investing, I highly recommend Jason Calacanis book on angel

**Ronak:** Oh, okay.

**Josh:** for what it's worth, I very much wish I had read it before I had started. Um, because I just, again, as in my engineering mindset, I look at him and I think this is the least useful person in the history of the world. And yet somehow he has managed to do this and become like this very successful angel investor.

**Josh:** He must actually know something that I don't know. And it kind of turns out the answer is yes, he does. He kind of actually, his advice is actually like really good. And I, like I said, wish I had read it ahead of time.

**Ronak:** Are there like two or three things that you remember from the book that are super helpful?

**Josh:** One is he writes a lot about how do you make yourself useful to a company early on. Right. And that's, that's the, how do you break into this kind of thing, especially when you don't have any money, like how did, how was he [01:05:00] useful to his first several angel investments when he didn't have that much money?

**Josh:** Right. How did he make himself useful? What value did he provide? And this is an important thing for everyone to have. And once again, you kind of have to have like a shtick, you have to have like a thing that is your thing that you are known for I think a lot of DevRel people, which is effectively what I used to do at Cloudera, would make great angel investors if they are generally much more optimistic than your average engineer, they have the vision, they have the network, they have the knowledge, they have the reputation.

**Josh:** This checks a lot of boxes, like not for nothing. If there was, there are actually a few, I think, like firms that are basically all ex DevRel people, like doing venture investing. And I'm like, I'm largely bullish on these firms. I think there's, I think there's something to this. Um,

**Ronak:** problems for sure, because they're talking to the people who

**Josh:** Because they're talking to the people who actually have the problems, right?

**Josh:** And again, but they, yeah, so I mean, these are all, these are like good qualities, I think. Right. So you have to have a shtick. You have to have, there's an angle, there's a value you provide. One of the ops, like finance ops persons I worked with at Slack started a venture fund for doing [01:06:00] that, for providing like early stage fractional CFO kind of style investing.

**Josh:** You can like anything you need to have, like a thing that is your thing. You are known for like a brand basically. But like, again, Calacanis is a marketing guy. He's really good at this stuff and his, his perspective is useful. So that's like thing one was very useful. Like how do you get into this? What's your stick?

**Josh:** Figure out what that is for you, figure out how to get in. Second thing is like how do you limit the amount you're willing to wager? Like basically let's put our, green visor accounting hat on here. How much of your net worth should be invested in startups? Well it kind of depends on what you're trying to do, like how much you have to burn, all that kind of stuff.

**Josh:** But he has like a good Discipline perspective on this stuff as well that I was again, super useful to me because like, y'all 2021 was a hell of a drug. Like everyone was investing in everything. It was going crazy

**Ronak:** Everyone was a

**Josh:** flying every which way everyone was successful.

**Josh:** That's where we were all geniuses. Doesn't matter what you're invested in. It was going up. Right. And so being mindful about like, okay, how much money I actually want to play here Is I think a [01:07:00] very, very useful framing and something that's good for you to think about early. Speaking obliquely, vaguely from personal experience, this is a good thing.

**Josh:** Something I wish I had thought about earlier. So anyway, for all these reasons I guess I, I thought it was a good book. I thought it was really useful.

**Ronak:** that's

**Josh:** I, I recommend it wholeheartedly. Yeah.

**Ronak:** So in this case, like you mentioned. The first advice you gave was, well, be useful and work for free. Where this was due diligence. How does one, well, I don't think an average engineer knows a bunch of VCs who would reach out to them for due diligence. So how do you put yourself in a position where you could be helpful?

**Josh:** Got introduced to the first VCs I knew through Cloudera's Venture Capital relationships, because I was a very, I mean I was a, I was a, Not only Lisa Cloudera, I was a senior director which again, I had, no real reports or anything like that. I had a good title because, DevRel didn't really exist as a thing back then and I was doing a lot of customer facing stuff.

**Josh:** So I had a good title. Um,

**Ronak:** You're very humble, by the way, just saying.

**Josh:** I don't know that I am very humble. I think I'm a pretty amazing, I think I'm a pretty, like for all the, I make fun of myself. I think I'm a pretty amazing [01:08:00] engineer. Not for nothing, like my wife makes fun of me for this. She's like, you constantly say you're an idiot, but you also claim to be among the best in the world at what you do.

**Josh:** And I'm like, yes, both of those things are simultaneously

**Ronak:** Yeah, I agree.

**Josh:** uh,

**Ronak:** Could be

**Josh:** a moron.

**Ronak:** with.

**Josh:** I am among the best in the world at what I do, like, without a doubt. I feel both of those things very deeply. And so that introduced me to, uh, Jerry Chen at Greylock. And then Ping and a bunch of folks at Excel.

**Josh:** And so I got and those were my first early kind of venture capital relationships. A few folks randomly just reached out to me. It was sort of great. A lot of early people who just started moving into venture will ping you and they still, they still ping me to this day, early on, they've just started as a, as a principal or something like that at a venture capital firm, and they're trying to build these relationships with people who have a presence of some kind through doing DevRel or whatever, right?

**Josh:** So they'll reach out to you and ping you. I have to be honest, I don't really accept those pings anymore. Um, I know. I like to say I know enough venture capitalists. Like I don't need to add any new [01:09:00] ones. I'm like, I'm good like the ones I have. I'm pretty happy. But early on, when I didn't know anybody I was more than happy to make those acquaintances and like have coffee with people and talk to them and stuff, and that's that provided a foundation for stuff like that was how I originally got introduced to like Um, like Mike Dauber and a lot of folks at Amplify who I work with on a lot of investments and stuff like that was just through like, Hey, we're all hanging out together at a Giants game one day.

**Josh:** Do you want to come just chill with a bunch of data people and some Metricapitalists? And I was like, hell yeah, it sounds like great fun. That was a, that was my idea of fun before I had kids. I could just do things like that. Right? So yeah, Once you establish some kind of public persona, again, find your shtick, find the value you provide, they will come and find you.

**Josh:** They really will. Um, it's they, especially again, those early stage folks who aren't yet partner, they're just building their own brands. They're building other things. Like some of those folks early on have made, they've turned into like phenomenal investors who are very successful. And I'm just grateful that I've gotten to know them for like so many years, especially it's like, you know, getting to know somebody before they're a [01:10:00] big deal.

**Josh:** Right. Is super huge and super important and when someone takes a chance on you before you're anyone, before anyone cares who you are, it feels much the same way. It's like, yeah, it's a great thing. Yeah.

**Guang:** Quick question on being like, uh, sort of having your own shtick. Like, say, in your case, right, like, part of that is like your, engineering, like, experience with the infrastructure and stuff like that. Do you feel compelled then, like, as you're like, I think your LinkedIn title is what, like, uh, fully unemployed data person.

**Guang:** Do you feel like, oh yeah, I need to be spending like, how many hours, like a week, like working on like engineering problems such that I don't lose touch with sort of, you know, what's going on with,

**Josh:** Yeah. I mean, that's a good question. That's a good question. I mean, I do. So I work and have worked for the last couple of years on the dbt adapter for DuckDB. And so to the extent that I have like a shtick online these days that's baked into the data sciences stuff, but it's a lot of DuckDB stuff.

**Josh:** So DuckDB, very cool, embedded OLAP database. I kind of, [01:11:00] there's another, another thing that I sort of like cotton onto earlier where I was like, this is very cool. Yeah. This could be a big deal. I think this is a very neat, interesting piece of technology that could be very useful for people.

**Josh:** And so I am now sort of known for doing that stuff and I do, I guess like I, it's kind of like bringing this back around to like what we were saying earlier about like working with junior engineers and like cultivating taste and a sort of sense of simplicity and stuff like that. I do generally find that hard and interesting engineering problems find me.

**Josh:** I'm going to do it. Yeah. kind of no matter what I do, people, people want to do new and interesting things with dbt doc. Db. A lot of my portfolio companies ping me when they say, Josh, we've got this, we're thinking we're working on this problem and we're sort of starting to suspect that we're going to need to build like a custom database or something like that to solve it.

**Josh:** And I'm like, great. let's just talk you down from that cliff like let's just hop on a call like we'll work through that and we'll figure out like why Postgres is actually the right answer for you right They, they find me. I don't feel the need to go seek them out, I [01:12:00] guess, for what it's worth, despite me, again, not really doing anything.

**Josh:** They still seem to find me okay. I'm very fortunate, I guess. Is that fortunate? I, I'm supposing this is a good thing, right? This is okay. Yeah doesn't really bother me. Yeah.

**Ronak:** Okay, so on the angel investing topic last question there

**Josh:** Yeah.

**Ronak:** What do you look for when you decide to invest in a company?

**Ronak:** Like I'm, I'm sure you're saying no to a lot of them too, but what are some of the signals you're looking for when you say yes.

**Josh:** oh, I mean, so there's a few basic things. I need one of two things to be true as kind of a prerequisite to have the conversation. One is that this is a person I know very well and have worked with before, and I would back them if they were doing, like, a cupcake shop.

**Josh:** Like, I don't really care. Like, anything they want to do, even if I don't understand it, even if I don't agree with it, it kind of doesn't matter. I know them, they're really smart, they'll figure it out. Either, either, even if I think the idea is bad. What happens if like you, you find a really good team or a team, you know, well, um, and you think they're awesome and they're working on [01:13:00] something where you're like, this is a terrible idea and no one should do this, either you're wrong and they're right.

**Josh:** And that's, that's a very good thing, or they're super smart and they'll figure it out pretty quickly and pivot to work on something useful. And so I have run into this problem a few different times where like. Really like the team, but didn't invest in the idea because I thought it was a bad idea. And inevitably, inevitably, they think inevitably either I am wrong or they figure it out and they go on to be massively successful.

**Josh:** And so that's kind of thing one. Think two is if it's got to be kind of pretty specific to data. tooling or something, something LME, AIE where I feel like I know something or I have like some information advantage. The bummer of like, like on my LinkedIn profile, I don't advertise myself as an angel investor.

**Josh:** Because I don't want, I still get spam from people who like, Oh, I saw you're an angel investor, or I listened to this podcast and stuff like that. Right. And that's, that's another reason not to do things like this. Right.

**Guang:** Ha

**Ronak:** you for saying yes again.

**Josh:** yes. Yeah, it's like I just should have my head examined. No, [01:14:00] inevitably.

**Josh:** Inevitably, I get pinged by stuff for people. I literally no background in what you're building whatsoever. Like you're doing some consumer thing or you're doing something for like security teams or dev. And I just like I don't know anything here. I have no special information advantage that makes me any different.

**Josh:** And if I don't feel like I know something, if I cannot delude myself into thinking that I understand the market well, I I just don't invest in it. I just put it all in, total market index funds and, and bonds the way every other sane, rational person does. Right. Like that's much, much simpler. So yeah, either person I like have a strong relationship with doing something that doesn't matter, or it's something where I feel like my expertise gives me some insight or perspective on the market, how the buyer thinks.

**Josh:** And then at that point, it's fairly easy. It's basically like, would I buy this if I was running a data team? At company X, right? What I purchased this, would I pay money for this? And if the answer is yes, then you invest. And if the answer is no, you don't. And that's fine. And then, I mean, again, I think if I could just put a call out there, if I could just, if I [01:15:00] had a nickel for every time, some engineers have pinged me with an idea for some kind of cost saving thing. For data teams. I just, please don't do that. Like it's just those ideas are just so bad. And I know you say to yourself, well, if we could just save the teams 10 percent of their time, think of all the money we would make. Think of all the value we create. I'm like, just no, no, no, no, no, no, no one cares about that.

**Josh:** Doesn't matter. Don't do that. Do things that make people money.

**Ronak:** Yeah,

**Josh:** Do things that this don't. Yeah, don't start it just again. It can work sometimes, but just nine times out of 10. Yeah. 99 times out of 100. Making companies money is the way to go. Don't try to save companies money. Make them money. That's what they want.

**Josh:** They want to make money anyway.

**Ronak:** it's like the personal financing, right? Like, don't worry about spending less. Just increase your total

**Josh:** Just increase your revenue, right? It's the like, it's like I'm building a budgeting app for data teams or something. And I'm just like, no, a terrible idea. It's never work. I know. I know. It feels like a good idea. I understand [01:16:00] how you feel. I get it. I've been there.

**Josh:** It's a really bad idea. It's just not going to work. And so then I spend a lot of time on the call just trying to talk them out of it and then trying to talk them into building something that I want. Which rarely ever works, but I'm just going to kind of keep at it because it's way easier than starting a company.

**Josh:** It's like tricking someone else into working on your idea for you. So that's, that's really much, much, much, you know, great financial returns and a lot less emotional damage. So yeah, it's

**Ronak:** Smart choice, smart choice.

**Josh:** Thank you. I appreciate that. Thank

**Guang:** I spent like, I did like a little startup like incubator program. And then, um, so I ended up spending 7, 8 months like building out this sort of, yeah like platform to

**Ronak:** Oh, that's right. You did that

**Guang:** yeah, cost, cost of AWS bill. And your advice, like I wish I would have listened to what you said, just now.

**Guang:** Because, yeah, that's very real. Um,

**Josh:** like, like so many things, like so many things, these things have to be experienced personally. I've never, I've never successfully convinced anyone with this pitch, by the way. So it's like, again, like so many things in this, be it [01:17:00] engineering management or becoming a senior IC or all these kinds of things, there's no substitute tragic, tragic that it may be for having the

**Guang:** Experiential learning. Yup.

**Josh:** The experiential learning is, is just tough to beat and no amount of wisdom or podcasts or any of these things will ever change. Was ever thus the human condition?

**Ronak:** Human condition. Yes

**Josh:** or the, it's the, it's the, what's the, uh, the, I love the arrested development joke where it's like, uh, it's Tobias and, and, uh, Lindsay and like saying, you know, well, did it work for those people?

**Josh:** No, it never works for them, but it might work for us. Whatever these people delude themselves and Yeah. Yeah. This is, it's so fantastic of a quote. Anyway, just

**Ronak:** that's true. That's true. Well, forever optimism. Um,

**Josh:** Yeah,

**Ronak:** Well, Josh, this has been an incredible conversation. Plus went to our Guang said, uh, both of us have learned a lot.

**Josh:** Was fun. Like I said, I liked, I liked getting to talk about the engineering management stuff. Cause I've just, I've always wanted to talk about it in depth and I haven't had the chance to before. So yeah. Thanks for the opportunity. [01:18:00] Yeah.

**Guang:** Thanks so much.

**Ronak:** Thanks so

**Josh:** My pleasure guys. My pleasure.

Hey, thank you so much for listening to the show. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about us at SoftwareMisadventures. com. You can also write to us at hello at SoftwareMisadventures. com. We would love to hear from you. Until next time, take care.