In today's episode we sit down with Venkat Venkataramani to talk about his role as a co-founder and CEO of Rockset. In this part 1 of our two part interview, we dig into leading a company during difficult times.
In today's episode we sit down with Venkat Venkataramani to talk about his role as a co-founder and CEO of Rockset.
In this part 1 of our two part interview, we dig into leadership mindset and leading a company during difficult times.
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Hey everyone, welcome to today's episode of Developer Tea. My name is Jonathan Cottrell. In today's episode, I speak with Venkat Venkataramanee. Venkat is a CEO. He is a co-founder and a CEO at Rockset. We talk about ways to lead people through difficult times. And man, have we had some of those this year, both in the United States and around the world. So I hope you enjoy this interview. This is a two-part interview, so make sure you subscribe so you don't miss out on the second part if you enjoy this episode. Let's get straight into my interview with Venkat Venkataramanee. Venkat, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thanks for having me. I'm very excited to talk to you as a CEO of a successful company. And really, today we're going to get into a lot of topics surrounding leading teams, especially leading teams through data. And I know it's a lot of difficult times, but I want to start out with a question that I ask everyone who comes on the show. What do you wish more people would ask you about? What do I wish more people would ask me about, really? I wish more people would talk to me about one of the foundational kind of philosophies that defines a lot of what I do is around this whole concept of growth mindset. I think it's almost cliche now. This is seminal work done by Carol Dweck. A lot of people would have probably read that book, the Growth Mindset book. I wish more people would talk to me about it because it's so applicable in so many different situations, both in my personal life, how I work with my kids, to boys we have, to how we build teams. And how I approach problem solving. And I think a lot of what I bring to the table is about the perspective. And I think it kind of like growth mindset is probably the best way to think about that. And I wish more people would talk to me about that and not confuse learning from failing. And I think that's the essence of the growth mindset that I think if more people understand the difference and when they feel the same when you're learning something, you're falling off a bicycle that you don't know how to ride yet and failing, they kind of like have a very similar feeling when you're going through those motions. And I wish more people would talk to me about that because I have some opinions about that. Well, that's good because I love talking about this topic. So we're going to talk about it a little bit here. I think I'd love to hear your short answer. What is the definition of a growth mindset? And if you will contrast it to what isn't a growth mindset? You know, I believe Carol Dweck calls it the fixed mindset in her book. But I'd love to know, can you contrast those two things and give an explanation, especially for people who don't know about this topic very much? Yeah, for sure. I think the way I understand it and I apply it is, you know, the way I think about growth mindset is that it's a very complex concept. And I think the way I see it is, you know, when you're doing something new and you don't know how to do it yet and you have a growth mindset, you want to learn more. The challenging it gets, the harder you focus, the more commitment you show and you get better at it over time. And the fixed mindset is the opposite, which is when you try something for the first time or the second time and it doesn't work and you're like, well, I'm not cut out for it. And you're very quick to dismiss it and move on to some other things. And you never get better at that particular skill. Ever, because you're, you know, you think you're not cut out for it and somehow you won't, you know, your own mind becomes kind of like a blocker that limits your growth and limits your, you to be able to unlock the potential that might be, you know, kind of like within you already. And so that's kind of like at a high level, how I understand it. The flip side about attitude, one thing that I always say is, again, don't confuse learning from failing. The other one is often mistaken as humility, right? Like, oh, you're not. You need to be humble to know what you don't know and admit it. I almost come, I say it's kind of like should come from confidence that I can learn, you know, if I put my head, you know, head together, if I can really learn something and get better at it. And if you're very confident about it, then you're not really afraid to say, well, I actually don't know. I have no idea how to do it. And I think that's kind of an important aspect of a growth mindset, because it's actually not humility. It's often. You know, comes across as humility. It's actually confidence that by admitting that I don't know something, I am not, you know, suddenly becoming less of a person in front of my peers or anything like that, because I'm pretty confident that, you know, if I if it's really important, I will learn it and I can become good at it if it's really needed. I'm kind of blown away right now because last night I actually recorded a kind of a monologue episode about exactly this. It was exactly this idea. And the idea of accepting that there are some things that I wouldn't trust myself to do. Right. I wouldn't trust myself to go and play a game of pickup basketball because I'm just out of practice. I know I can confidently say that I'm not a very good basketball player. That's and I'm OK with that. Right. And the interesting thing, what I asked listeners to do was accept two realities. One, that we. Don't necessarily trust ourselves in every single endeavor possible. Right. I wouldn't trust myself to know, you know, every programming language as a simple example. And the second thing to accept is that you can change it. There's two kind of really important things and that the the driver for this, the marker of somebody who is truly confident is someone who can stand up and say, I. Have no idea about that thing, but I really do know about this other thing. Right. I really do have experience in this other thing. I can trust that more, more than I can trust somebody who appears to be experienced in everything. Would you agree with that? Absolutely. I think the more every expert in the field that I've had the pleasure of working, the more they know, the more the expert they become. The less certain they are with everything. Right. If you ask a five year old, what's going to happen if I have a glass of water and I just fling it in the air, the five year old will say, oh, duh, it's just going to fall on the floor. You go and ask a, you know, somebody who studies chaos theory and fluid mechanics and whatnot and say, what's going to really happen to this fluid that's in this cup? And they'll be like, no mathematical equation in the world can exactly predict. Why? You know what exactly is going to happen? What's going to happen in the next, you know, 72 milliseconds or whatever it's going to take from this to drop to the floor. And then he'd be so uncertain about that whole situation. And that's what makes them the expert, because they actually know what can actually, you know, all the possibilities and have studied it deeply than anybody else. So I think I think it's really, really important to never confuse that. And I think I think it comes from insecurities. Right. I think you people are afraid to admit that they don't know something because they're like, oh, somebody is going to judge me. And I'm going to come across like a fool then. And they won't trust me to be able to do the next big project and, you know, whatever. And I think this was this is why I say it goes back to confidence. I think confidence comes not just from within, but also from your mentors, your managers, people that you look up to. If you are the CEO of the company and you in all hands, you have no no problem admitting I actually have no idea what this is about. And I'm but I'm going to go find out and you find out and you give a, you know, a good response. A week later, then that's not a taboo. You know, if it's OK for Venkat to have his job and he's not, you know, the board hasn't fired him yet. So and he says, I don't know a lot. OK, so maybe it's OK. Maybe I don't have to pretend that I know something. And so so I think it actually comes from both, you know, self confidence, but also the environment that you're part of where pursuit of excellence. You can never really learn something new until you admit that you don't know it yet. Otherwise, you never really. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We'll never actually learn something. I have I have a specific question about this because I've certainly seen teams that agree with this. Right. We've seen the study from Google and we've talked about on the show before about psychological safety. We know that that's a marker of healthy teams. And I believe that, you know, as these kinds of things kind of become stylish in vogue, that leaders try to adopt them. At face value, in some ways, without really understanding them thoroughly. So I want to ask you a specific question. Have you ever encountered a leader, whether they're a manager or somebody in higher level leadership, who would say, oh, you know, I don't know, and I have this kind of sense of humility, but they wouldn't expect their team to be able to have that. In other words, it's kind of like a privilege of leadership to be able to. you know be the the person who doesn't know and to act like that's the ideal state but then they don't really follow through they expect uh their their for example their individual contributing engineers to always know have you seen that kind of leadership happen yet i i've definitely heard of them i've seen in in kind of secondhand circumstances but i have to say uh you know like i've been extremely fortunate uh to to be part of uh you know teams that never had that kind of attitude uh just just very fortunate through every part of my career all the managers i've had and all the environments i've been part of to never have that kind of like uh duplicity or or hypocritic you know hypocritical managers and whatnot so i think um honestly it's a it's a blessing um i know a lot of people who are in the industry who are in the industry your audience are very very technical and i think one thing that goes with a lot of developers that i work with is they have an amazing bullshit radar and so even what could fly in other teams it's not going to fly in when you manage a technical team which is almost always what i've been part of and so so they have a you know they almost have a very cynical view in many many different situations uh often rightfully so if i were to agree and uh and also i think you know there's there's just a very very good bullshit radar it's just very common and so i think i think in these kinds of environments especially engineering teams and technical teams i think um this is hard to get by in my opinion and i haven't really seen it first uh but i i can totally see in in in teams where it's not about some technical you know back in you know like our engineering team it's like you know where there's a lot of lot more uh kind of nuanced decision making uh you know in in other making strategic bets and what have you i can totally see how uh you know all these things creep up where uh you know it's okay for some you know the leaders to do it and not i i can see how an environment could easily be created but i personally have not seen anything um i i don't as far as i you know as long as i'm part of uh rock set uh that will never be part of our culture it's encouraging to hear absolutely i i think it is something for leaders to to stay aware of the idea that you know these these ideals that we for our teams sometimes don't get practiced or played out to their fullest extent but i'm very glad to hear that you have seen it the other way that uh generally you know developers have been willing to call it out and i do agree i think that engineers typically uh tend to have you know a little bit more of a free uh opportunity to speak their minds partially because you know for the most part engineers tend to have job security um and so you know we since we can go and do a lot of work in another company for example uh then if we're not happy with what we're currently experiencing either we can leave or we can speak our mind and things will change um and so uh i i find it to be a unique scenario to be in because even though you're not in a position of leadership engineers tend to have a leverage point in some ways because they are in demand would you agree from your perspective that engineers are kind of in that same position and that they're not it's a great very very interesting perspective i've never thought of that before it comes actually from a position of job security i always associated that with like a more kind of like a very mathematical mind you know analytical mind uh that sees things for black and white and and right and wrong and and very quickly tries to like categorize you know categorize things in in in or see the world that way um and so it's easy to spot bullshit you know when when you have that kind of a thought process so i always associated that with the uh with with the yeah with their thought processes as opposed to job security but but i think i think there is some truth to it i think the more the way you say it i think i think it's probably a combination of a bunch of factors and i think job security is definitely one of them yeah it's a good point it's a good point and i i do believe you know that that engineers have the opportunity to use some of that analytical uh um bias maybe right a bias towards analytical or logical uh approach to point out when there's inconsistencies in a culture um and i'm curious you know with you know speaking of cultures um you know one thing that we kind of discussed right before we started rolling was the idea that there's all different kinds of stressors all different kinds of crises that we can go through as teams and what i'd love to do is to hear your perspective on how you think about job security and how you think about job security and i'd love to hear your perspective on how a growth mindset could help us kind of weather the storm um how how can a growth mindset help you deal with a crisis on a team very interesting um very interesting question how do you help your team deal with the crisis um i think crisis comes at least in two different forms for for a team for a company. One is like the roof is on fire, the service is down. Previously, I was managing online data infrastructure at Facebook. And so anything that can take the site down is what we used to call a SEV1. And so all SEV1s are all hands on deck. Now we are building a real-time database in the cloud. Rockset, very similar. When there is any kind of a SEV, it's kind of like a roof is on fire type of a crisis because production applications are affected and our customers will be affected by that event. And then there are crises like COVID, right? Where our market crashes and things like that, where there are forces beyond your control that are working against you. And how do you help your team through that? And so for the first one, I think it comes down to really having the discipline in my mind of being able to support the team, shield the team. When we are fighting a SEV and we have a kind of a war room, if anybody says, I told you so, this is why we should have done this in the first place and start post-mortem, starting doing post-mortems before we are even in the clear, I kindly go and stand next to them and say, hey, I think you need to leave the room and you can come back later when we actually do a post-mortem. And so keep that in mind. And then the third one is, you know, you have to be able to support the team. And so that's the first one. And so I think it comes down to really being able to keep the people, support them. There's no finger pointing. There's not, you know, blaming going around and support them in a way where you encourage and keep them, you know, get, you know, help the team to resolve the issue as quickly as possible because it's an extremely stressful situation and you don't want to be there for too long. And once it's all done, then you also support the team where in a, you know, try your best to not create a, you know, this team is bad or that particular individual, you know, does not know how to write code or anything like that. It should be really coming out of the box. And then you have to be able to support them. And so that's the first one. And then the third one is, you know, coming down into this is what happened. This is how it should, you know, this particular component and this particular module or whatever should have been tested better. And here are the follow-up items that we need to be able to do so that this kind of issue doesn't happen again. And so we even try to write postmortems without people's names to force ourselves to keep the discussion around what happened from a technical point of view and what can be, you know, done to resolve that. And so here, I think the growth mindset is kind of like big into the process. If you were to, like, think about it, right? We're not really, you know, trying to, you know, say, oh, so-and-so is bad and they can't do anything about it. And as opposed to really approaching this as a learning experience for how to make the company, the service and all four teams better. And if you have a process where every time you slip and fall, you get stronger, then you'll stop slipping and falling, you know, very quickly and you'll get stronger very, quickly. And, you know, I think that's a really, really important thing to think about. But if every time you slip and fall, there's a lot of, you know, blaming and kind of like, I'm stuck here, nothing can be done type of a fixed mindset, then you never get better. And so I would say that's the, you know, the analogies or the comparisons I see from how, you know, you deal with like short-term, you know, roofs on fire, put it out as quickly as possible type of a situation and how you deal with crises. When the crisis is more longer term and strategic, you know, you're not going to be able to do anything about it. You're not going to be able to do anything about it. You're not going to be able to do anything about it. You're not going to be able to do anything about it. You're not going to be able to do anything about it. I think then in my opinion, it goes back to the growth mindset on, you know, going back to your team and saying, this is bad for us. And we have no idea how we're going to face this and deal with it. Being able to even openly say that the reason is because the best ideas on how to cope with it might come from completely, you know, you know, unexpected parts of your team, right? Like you're not, you're not like, you know, the best ideas, you know, could come from the team. You're not from anywhere and from any member in your team. It doesn't have to come from some CXX person, some big wig at the top. And you don't really can create a culture or if you don't have a growth mindset, you'd be afraid to admit that, that this is bad for the business and this is going to have these kinds of ramifications. And being able to openly say, you know what, this could be bad and it could even get worse. And I have no idea how we're going to be able to meet our quarterly goals. But if anyone have your ideas, please talk to me or talk to the relevant person and we can figure this out together. And so save this in confidence, dealing with the crisis together as a team and having a very transparent culture so that everybody in your team understands what's working and what's not, I think would probably be, help you find innovative solutions to deal with situations like COVID and other things like that. And I think that's a really good point. Which might not, might be very creative and might come from anywhere in the team and not necessarily from the upper management or whatever you want to call it. And so I think it helps in every one of these situations, I think, because you're constantly looking at, you're dealing with, in every crisis, you're dealing with a lot of unknowns. And again, a growth mindset would give you, would turn that into an opportunity to learn and get stronger at the end of it, as opposed to weaker at the end of it. We're going to take a quick sponsor break and then we'll return to my interview with Venkat Venkataraman. Today's episode is sponsored by Linode. Whether you're working on a personal project or managing enterprise infrastructure, you deserve simple, affordable, and accessible cloud computing solutions that allow you to take your project to the next level. And this is so true. Linode allows you to work at pretty much any size on that scaling chart, all the way down to the smallest size. And so if you're working on a personal project or managing enterprise infrastructure, you deserve simple, affordable, and accessible cloud computing solutions that allow you to take your you can simplify your cloud infrastructure with Linode's Linux virtual machines and develop, deploy, and scale your modern applications faster and easier. And here's the important part, you're going to get $100 in free credit as a listener of Developer Tea. Head over to linode.com slash developer tea to find out more. Linode has 11 global data centers and provides 24-7 human support with no tiers or handoffs, regardless of your plan size. The translation of that is that you are going to, to be treated like a human. Even if you are just paying for a small amount of services from Linode. If you're just starting out, if you are a startup, you're going to get the same support that somebody who is much larger will get. Go and check it out. Head over to linode.com slash developer T. You can host your website, build your app, store, or backup media. It's up to you. And it's all free with $100 in Linode credit. Just make sure you click the create free account button to get started. That's linode.com slash developer T. Thanks again to Linode for sponsoring today's episode of developer T. You know, there's kind of two perspectives that I've seen, and it's more of a range rather than two discrete perspectives. But the one perspective is the idea that everything I say is going to control this group of people, right? This is kind of the dictionary. The dictator style leadership. And that I am responsible for every step that we take going through this crisis, right? And it's not in the sense that they want to take responsibility, but rather they believe that everyone's actions are just responses to their own actions. And then there's the empowering or transparent leadership that you're talking about, which I think is so much. More effective. And that is to say, Hey, look, this is a hard situation. What do we do? Ask your people for input, right? Ask your team to be a team with you. If you're controlling the information, if you are trying to play all of the psychological games to make sure that, for example, people don't panic, then very likely you're going to end up with people in the end, especially when they find out the truth, about whatever's happening. They're very likely to be frustrated that you didn't ask them for their input or that you were, you know, for whatever reason, manipulating that information or you were holding back from telling them the real truth of the matter. And so I believe that your point about having transparent organizations, I think a lot of people don't even know what that looks like yet. And I really love to talk a little bit more about that. But I think it's important to talk about that. And as a leader of an organization, I'm curious, what are the key, you know, what is maybe a red flag that you would tell, let's say an engineer to watch out for that? Hey, if your company is doing this, then they're probably not a transparent organization. Yeah, I think you made a lot of good points. Like the panic, you know, I'm just trying to like not make sure my team doesn't panic or whatever. I think it's, again, it's almost a lack of, you know, EQ from the leader, if you were to say, because how you say matters, not just what you say. If you say it in a way that, or you frame it in a way that this is what it is, it is what's happening. Here are the some ideas we're thinking about. And in a way to invite them to participate in problem solving, that's a very different reaction people are going to have than say, you know, red flag, you know, you know, whole thing is doomed and you go and start like start ringing all the, the sirens, you know, it's like, it's just, it's just how you say, what you say and, and give people a way to participate and be part of the solution as opposed to just, you know, being, you know, panicking in their own, you know, little corner in their, in the office. So I think that's kind of really important. What are the red flags that engineers should look for? I think I have, you know, we have interviewed people that, you know, have been part of startups and I heard that, Oh yeah, you know, when I was there, a series B happened and so, and so happened and nobody even knows who were the investors or what evaluation the company raised some more money and how, you know you know, I think, I think again, it goes back to like, again, having it's a lack of confidence, but not here. I think the founders of the upper management ends up being, it's probably lack of confidence in the company and the, and the, and the future of the company as opposed to themselves, but it kind of manifests that way in a very similar way. Yeah. So I think that's, that's a, I think that's a very similar kind of a fixed mindset type of reaction. And so what I would look for is, you know, like I would ask for things like how many engineers know what was discussed in the last board meeting? If you're an early stage startup, what were the key topics and what was the main point of discussion? And if you're in, if any, if as an engineer, you can answer that in a, in a company that this was what the last board meeting was about, then you have a, you may have taken the plunge and you may have taken the plunge and you may have taken the plunge and you may have taken the plunge and you may have taken the plunge and you may have taken the plunge and you may have taken the plunge and you may have taken the plunge and you may have taken the plunge and you may have taken the plunge and you may have taken the plunge and you may have taken the plunge and you may have taken the plunge and you may have taken the plunge and you may have taken the plunge and you may have taken the plunge and taken the plunge and you may have taken the plunge and you may have taken the plunge and you may have taken the plunge and you may have taken the plunge and taken the plunge and you may have taken the plunge and you may have taken the the business is much more well established and you don't have to worry about all of that. But when it is 20 people, when it is two people in the garage, it's obvious that they will have, both of them will have a full understanding. But even when you're around 10, 20, 30, less than a hundred people, it is really very, very important to... That's where you get to define this. And that's where I would say, that's where Rockset is right now. We are 30 employees strong and trying to grow as quickly as we can. And every time after a board meeting, the next all hands, which we do weekly, we go over the entire board deck and we go over every slide and summarize what discussions were had and what was presented. So yeah, I think you have to really invest and be very thoughtful about creating that. It just doesn't happen organically. And there are... If a during the interview process, I think you can ask some simple questions like what I... A couple of examples I gave that can easily help you figure out whether or not the company has a very transparent and empowering culture, as opposed to something that controls the information flow and is quite suffocating. Yeah. I think that's fantastic advice. And maybe a heuristic question that engineers could ask is, what do I... What do I not know about my company? And to be fair, there are some things that you don't know, you don't know. There's certainly the possibility that things that are being kept from you, you wouldn't even know to ask about. But there are... I think every company has some things that are kept close to the chest. And for better or for worse, it's at least worthwhile to ask what things are not being shared. What are the things that are being shared? What are the things that are not being shared? What are the things that are being shared? What are the things that are being shared? What are the things that are being shared? What are the things that are being shared? What are the things that are being shared? What are the things that are being shared? What are the things that are being shared? So there are some healthy things to not share. For example, sharing highly personal information, right? You wouldn't expect your manager to do that. That's not the same thing as having a fiscally transparent company, right? Those are two completely different things. But it's worthwhile to say, are the things that are being kept private healthy or unhealthy? Right. I think that's a great dichotomy. I think there are things that need to be in confidence, So, you know, if you're doing your job properly, like HR information, it's like, you know, if you're doing a job properly, this is not public knowledge and it's intentionally, right? Like, you know, health information or, you know, other comp information and things like that, that people, you know, think it needs to be kept in confidence. On the other hand, you know, there could also be, you know, business development kind of deals that are happening where the whole thing needs to be done confidentially. Otherwise, the whole thing goes up in flames and the other partner will walk away the minute it becomes common knowledge and their competitors know that, you know, that this is happening or whatever. So there are definitely situations where it's required, confidentiality is required for the appropriate person to kind of like do their job properly. And that's not what is under question here. That's because it's black or white. It's very clearly stuff that needs to be kept confident with a few people. I mean, to the extreme example of this is like, you know, insider trading. I mean, there are laws, you know, preventing from certain people knowing certain things at certain times. You know, it's illegal. So it's not even a question of ethics. It's a question of, you know, law and order and legality. So and so I think those are not under real question. I think the real questions are the ones that are not under question. The ones that are the gray area in the middle. Right. You know, which is where I think you get to actually draw that line for every company. And that's what defines a culture. What's OK to talk about openly and what is not OK to talk about openly. Right. And what is celebrated? What is cool? And what's a taboo? If I openly raise a red flag and if it's a taboo and I'm always going to be like, you know, alienated in the society, you know, I'm not going to get included. Then nobody will ever raise a red flag ever. At all. things that are right in front of them. And so, so you get to define the culture by defining where you draw that line. And, and that's what we intensely think about and talk about. And if somebody, you know, you know, brings up a red flag, I mean, the first thing you say, if you want to encourage that, because that's what either you believe that that's making you stronger, even though immediate response for that is, oh, I'm uncomfortable. But if you really think about it, two things are true. A person wouldn't bring up a red flag and put themselves in that spot if they don't really care about the company, about the culture. So they're actually putting their reputation, maybe even their job and their happiness at work and their professional career at stake by raising that red flag. And, and, you know, and you say, thank you. And you work with them. And if they're motivated enough to bring it in almost every case that I've worked with, they're motivated enough to be part of the solution. And you just have to empower them and support them and actually commit to addressing that. And it invariably makes the company and the organization stronger if you have that mindset. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. This episode was produced by Sarah Jackson. Of course, this episode was sponsored by Linode. Head over to linode.com slash developer tea to get started with a hundred dollars worth of free credit by creating a free account on linode.com. My name is Jonathan Cottrell. And until next time, enjoy your tea.