[ { "start": 0.14, "end": 2.66, "text": "Hello friends, this is the AlphaList podcast." }, { "start": 3.04, "end": 4.08, "text": "I am your host Tobi." }, { "start": 4.4, "end": 11.5, "text": "The goal of the AlphaList podcast is to empower CTOs with the info and insight they need to make the best decisions for their company." }, { "start": 11.84, "end": 17.76, "text": "We do this by hosting top thought leaders and picking their brains for insights into technical leadership and tech trends." }, { "start": 18.16, "end": 24.06, "text": "If you believe in the power of accumulated knowledge to accelerate growth, make sure to subscribe to this podcast." }, { "start": 24.4, "end": 33.6, "text": "Plus, if you're an experienced CTO, you will laugh at the discussion happening in our Slack space where over six hundred CTOs are sharing insights or visit one of our events." }, { "start": 33.88, "end": 36.2, "text": "Just go to alphalus.com to apply." }, { "start": 51.6, "end": 53.68, "text": "Welcome to the Alphalus podcast." }, { "start": 54.12, "end": 60.56, "text": "My guest today is Lee Zen, and it's a very crystal special moment for me." }, { "start": 61.42, "end": 66.94, "text": "because Lee is the CTO of the first website I ever visited in my entire life." }, { "start": 67.42, "end": 67.94, "text": "Welcome, Lee." }, { "start": 68.72, "end": 69.88, "text": "Thank you for welcoming on the show." }, { "start": 69.98, "end": 74.16, "text": "And yeah, I'm honored, I guess, that we were the first website you ever visited." }, { "start": 76.06, "end": 77.76, "text": "I think that also applies to many of my guests." }, { "start": 77.8, "end": 79.98, "text": "So Lee, you're the CTO of Yahoo." }, { "start": 80.6, "end": 85.4, "text": "You're operating a broad consumer portfolio, mail, finance, sports, news, search." }, { "start": 87.06, "end": 90.48, "text": "And Yahoo is these days owned by... private equity company." }, { "start": 90.62, "end": 97.68, "text": "So I think it was public first, like in the Mercer Maya times, and then changed quite a lot." }, { "start": 98.82, "end": 110.58, "text": "And I'm super, super interested what changed in the last years, since that time, and how you got into the game, et cetera, and how you see the world out there right now." }, { "start": 111.14, "end": 112.02, "text": "Super, super curious." }, { "start": 112.46, "end": 120.42, "text": "And also the tech angle to it, like, I guess you have to deal with legacy quite a lot, with AI quite a lot, so super interested in that." }, { "start": 121.6, "end": 127.72, "text": "Before we start, I also discovered a personal angle, so you lived in Berlin for quite a while, worked for HelloFresh." }, { "start": 128.199, "end": 128.8, "text": "That's right." }, { "start": 128.86, "end": 131.38, "text": "Yeah, I never lived in Berlin, but I did work." }, { "start": 132.16, "end": 134.78, "text": "I was there pretty often, probably once a quarter, something like that." }, { "start": 134.86, "end": 138.9, "text": "So I think I lived for a month, one summer in Berlin, but never lived." }, { "start": 138.98, "end": 139.96, "text": "lived, I guess, in the city." }, { "start": 140.26, "end": 143.26, "text": "And you only want to live there for one summer, right?" }, { "start": 143.34, "end": 144.66, "text": "You never want to hit it in the winter." }, { "start": 145.48, "end": 145.82, "text": "Exactly." }, { "start": 146.22, "end": 146.66, "text": "Exactly." }, { "start": 146.9, "end": 147.2, "text": "Yeah." }, { "start": 147.44, "end": 149.96, "text": "Before we start with your history and Yahoo!" }, { "start": 150.06, "end": 155.68, "text": "Insights, maybe we start with your early computing history and your nerd path, as I always say." }, { "start": 156.22, "end": 156.44, "text": "Sure." }, { "start": 157.34, "end": 161.98, "text": "What was the earliest moment when you thought, okay, computers are magic?" }, { "start": 162.18, "end": 164.52, "text": "Like, why are you doing what you do?" }, { "start": 165.58, "end": 166.02, "text": "Oh, gee." }, { "start": 166.06, "end": 166.28, "text": "Okay." }, { "start": 166.44, "end": 169.26, "text": "So probably, you know, you're way, way, way back." }, { "start": 169.48, "end": 172.18, "text": "I remember my dad brought home a computer when I was a kid." }, { "start": 172.4, "end": 174.98, "text": "I think I was probably ten years old or something." }, { "start": 175.04, "end": 189.26, "text": "Um, and uh, I remember firing, you know, I saw him fire up MS DOS and open up, uh, actually it was it was Lotus one, two, three at the time, uh, been doing spreadsheets and being like, what, what in the world is that?" }, { "start": 190.04, "end": 195.8, "text": "And then, you know, he let me play around on not, not in the spreadsheets, that would have been bad, but he let me play around on the, on the terminal." }, { "start": 196.5, "end": 201.58, "text": "And I was just learning some of the commands and figuring out what was going on and that, and that felt like magic, right?" }, { "start": 201.62, "end": 203.8, "text": "That you could type something and have." }, { "start": 204.64, "end": 207.94, "text": "output come back and manipulate this thing." }, { "start": 209.26, "end": 210.0, "text": "That was very magic." }, { "start": 210.06, "end": 218.72, "text": "And then I remember shortly after, probably a couple of years later, kind of discovering how QBasic worked and running, again, exploring on the computer." }, { "start": 218.76, "end": 219.98, "text": "It's like, oh, what's QBasic thing?" }, { "start": 220.74, "end": 224.0, "text": "And then running that and then finding the default demo programs." }, { "start": 224.76, "end": 230.68, "text": "And then be like, oh, you can actually tell this thing what to do because you saw the code behind the games." }, { "start": 231.02, "end": 233.2, "text": "And then it's like, okay, let me try to understand." }, { "start": 233.94, "end": 235.24, "text": "how to change the way the game works." }, { "start": 235.56, "end": 239.56, "text": "And that was some of my earliest memories of working with computers and software." }, { "start": 240.32, "end": 242.32, "text": "So gaming and cheating, I guess, then." }, { "start": 242.8, "end": 243.18, "text": "Exactly." }, { "start": 243.72, "end": 252.96, "text": "Yeah, that's actually funny, because I remember the two demo programs that came with QBasic at the time, one was the Snake game, and the other was Gorillaz." }, { "start": 253.7, "end": 260.24, "text": "And I remember, yeah, cheating and Gorillaz to figure out, like, how do I make it so that The banana always flies in the other gorilla, right?" }, { "start": 260.279, "end": 263.84, "text": "Or how do I change the physics of the thing to my advantage?" }, { "start": 264.74, "end": 270.24, "text": "And then ultimately you ended up studying IT or what like." }, { "start": 270.28, "end": 270.78, "text": "how did you?" }, { "start": 271.86, "end": 272.04, "text": "Sure." }, { "start": 272.26, "end": 272.36, "text": "Yeah." }, { "start": 272.48, "end": 279.1, "text": "So, you know, I was always fascinated then with software from that point on and I learned programming and I spent a lot of time learning." }, { "start": 279.5, "end": 285.98, "text": "different software, you know, different languages and learning more about computers and software in general, you know, building my own machines, right?" }, { "start": 286.46, "end": 288.06, "text": "Ultimately ended up studying computer science." }, { "start": 289.52, "end": 292.04, "text": "It's kind of funny, actually, that was not for sure." }, { "start": 292.18, "end": 297.24, "text": "When I entered university, I was deciding between applied physics and computer science." }, { "start": 297.28, "end": 302.14, "text": "Those were kind of like the two areas I was most interested in, but ended up choosing computer science." }, { "start": 302.78, "end": 308.86, "text": "And then actually also ended up doing my master's degree in computer science as well with the specialization in AI." }, { "start": 309.42, "end": 309.88, "text": "Okay, cool." }, { "start": 310.1, "end": 314.78, "text": "And I guess that that is what you can use these days quite well at work again." }, { "start": 314.98, "end": 317.5, "text": "or is that outdated knowledge?" }, { "start": 318.36, "end": 320.68, "text": "It's it's you know, I mean a lot of it's funny." }, { "start": 320.74, "end": 324.84, "text": "a lot of the original things You know, we were studying at that time still apply today." }, { "start": 324.96, "end": 336.72, "text": "Obviously, you know, we studied both the combination of statistical methods and also Kind of first-order logic inference methods and and I think those are actually super meaningful even today, right?" }, { "start": 337.2, "end": 345.98, "text": "so obviously You know, the deep learning revolution had not happened yet and some of the beginnings of deep learning were present in a lot of what we what we were doing in university." }, { "start": 347.76, "end": 350.22, "text": "But yeah, so I think still still very relevant today." }, { "start": 350.62, "end": 350.72, "text": "Yeah," }, { "start": 350.98, "end": 354.74, "text": "but I mean, it kind of developed nicely, right?" }, { "start": 354.8, "end": 355.06, "text": "Yes," }, { "start": 355.48, "end": 355.76, "text": "indeed." }, { "start": 356.18, "end": 357.08, "text": "And do you know the history?" }, { "start": 357.16, "end": 361.04, "text": "Because that's when, like, I think many people that I know lost track of it." }, { "start": 362.28, "end": 364.14, "text": "What happened since Marissa Maya has gone?" }, { "start": 364.38, "end": 365.58, "text": "Like, what changed?" }, { "start": 365.68, "end": 369.04, "text": "I mean, you know, PE owned, yeah, who was taken private." }, { "start": 369.54, "end": 372.24, "text": "Yahoo is still one of the most visited sites on the internet, right?" }, { "start": 372.44, "end": 374.98, "text": "That's probably the key thing for listeners to know." }, { "start": 375.12, "end": 380.94, "text": "is, you know, we're still one of the most visited sites and really is still a top five internet company in the US." }, { "start": 381.98, "end": 383.94, "text": "And you know, across the board, right?" }, { "start": 384.0, "end": 394.64, "text": "Not just in general, but, you know, if you look at how we're performing in the various categories, you know, news, finance, sports, mail, et cetera, we're still, you know, the top three in all those categories." }, { "start": 395.78, "end": 402.24, "text": "And so, you know, it's still a very storied brand and well respected and well visited website on the internet." }, { "start": 402.44, "end": 405.24, "text": "You know, you asked about kind of what happened since the Mercer Meyer era." }, { "start": 406.46, "end": 409.06, "text": "You know, we were part of Verizon for a while." }, { "start": 409.68, "end": 415.88, "text": "Before being sold off the sold to private equity and then yeah, obviously under private equity ownership the last few years." }, { "start": 416.44, "end": 419.56, "text": "And how does private equity life change the company?" }, { "start": 419.68, "end": 422.34, "text": "and in total can you can you say that like?" }, { "start": 422.94, "end": 424.24, "text": "are you allowed to say anything like." }, { "start": 425.34, "end": 428.82, "text": "I think ultimately you know private equity is great in the sense that." }, { "start": 429.48, "end": 433.32, "text": "I think any company that's public is under a lot of scrutiny all the time." }, { "start": 433.6, "end": 435.44, "text": "You expect to have quarterly results." }, { "start": 435.52, "end": 443.04, "text": "And I think we have an opportunity being private to really work on all the modernization pieces we need to do." }, { "start": 443.2, "end": 455.3, "text": "And that's a big part of what we've been doing here, going through this transformation journey and do that without having the external Wall Street perspective all the time." }, { "start": 455.54, "end": 456.78, "text": "The pressure of the Wall Street." }, { "start": 457.34, "end": 462.84, "text": "And we get to innovate and find a way to reimagine the entire company." }, { "start": 462.9, "end": 464.56, "text": "And we've done that over the last few years, right?" }, { "start": 465.82, "end": 472.5, "text": "In the last eighteen months, we've updated nearly every pixel of every product and supercharging them with AI and refreshed experiences." }, { "start": 472.68, "end": 473.92, "text": "We have a whole new homepage." }, { "start": 474.76, "end": 476.88, "text": "The news at Mobile App is brand new." }, { "start": 477.84, "end": 482.1, "text": "You've seen all sorts of new features, I'm sure, in young fantasy, young sports." }, { "start": 482.72, "end": 485.32, "text": "And so really, yeah, I think an opportunity to reimagine." }, { "start": 486.1, "end": 490.58, "text": "how we still do what we do in terms of the original mission of the company, right?" }, { "start": 490.62, "end": 499.9, "text": "We're still really here to help people, you know, help them know what to do next, help them, you know, figure out how to live their life, how to achieve their goals." }, { "start": 500.16, "end": 503.78, "text": "Ultimately, we're here to help people help consumers achieve their goals in life." }, { "start": 504.6, "end": 508.66, "text": "And I think, you know, having an opportunity to do that in a refreshed way is fantastic." }, { "start": 509.86, "end": 510.08, "text": "Okay." }, { "start": 510.4, "end": 510.7, "text": "Yeah, cool." }, { "start": 511.18, "end": 522.26, "text": "And I think the biggest challenge then or one of the big challenges is then to innovate while having to deal with, like, thirty years of history, right?" }, { "start": 523.34, "end": 524.86, "text": "I mean, I know tech, we both know tech." }, { "start": 525.18, "end": 531.96, "text": "Like, if many people work on one product, that is not necessarily good, I would say." }, { "start": 532.68, "end": 535.1, "text": "At least from my experience, I don't know about Yahoo." }, { "start": 536.34, "end": 547.12, "text": "And that brings up some challenges of being able to innovate while being able to also re-factor, re-platform and reinvent." }, { "start": 548.34, "end": 555.56, "text": "I think that's a huge challenge from my perspective if I can play the outside in view." }, { "start": 556.54, "end": 560.64, "text": "Well, I think any modernization journey is gonna be challenging, I guess, right?" }, { "start": 561.16, "end": 564.26, "text": "But, you know, I think we're excited about how we can move faster than ever, right?" }, { "start": 564.54, "end": 574.08, "text": "Really, we're trying to, as I mentioned earlier, you know, unlock that shipping velocity and, you know, do bold experiments and, you know, be smart about our risk-taking." }, { "start": 575.14, "end": 586.24, "text": "And so, you know, I think... On the one hand, yes, we have to deal with the thirty years of things that have been built over the many years, but at the same time, you know, we can take a complementary approach, right?" }, { "start": 586.32, "end": 591.2, "text": "So, for example, you know, we have been migrating a lot of our systems to the cloud." }, { "start": 592.2, "end": 601.68, "text": "We're able to, you know, take advantage, actually, of the fact that we have all this physical storage in our data centers, and we can actually make them work together." }, { "start": 602.12, "end": 613.56, "text": "And that helps us, you know, have greater resiliency and helps us deliver a great solution to our customers without necessarily having to throw away everything that's been built before." }, { "start": 616.14, "end": 630.52, "text": "And if I would ask you for your mode and tech, is that the fact, not necessarily your technical mode, but your mode and tech, is that the fact that you're able to move fast while still having to deal with that?" }, { "start": 630.64, "end": 631.36, "text": "Or what would it be?" }, { "start": 631.82, "end": 637.5, "text": "Well, I think for any consumer internet company, Velocity is a key differentiator, right?" }, { "start": 637.56, "end": 648.34, "text": "Being able to respond to customer needs and being able to build the experiences that customers desire and, again, going back to our mission to help people fulfill their goals, right?" }, { "start": 648.44, "end": 659.76, "text": "I think, especially to think about one of the things that, you know, we talk about is the digital wilderness that people are trying to wander through and how, you know, over the last three years, that hasn't really changed to some extent." }, { "start": 659.88, "end": 664.08, "text": "You know, people think if you think about Why was Yahoo originally built, right?" }, { "start": 664.66, "end": 667.38, "text": "Thirty years ago, it was to help people navigate that digital wilderness." }, { "start": 667.44, "end": 668.68, "text": "It's where do I, where do I go?" }, { "start": 669.82, "end": 671.12, "text": "How do I find the things they want to find?" }, { "start": 671.18, "end": 672.84, "text": "How do I make sure this is good information?" }, { "start": 673.64, "end": 677.4, "text": "And somehow, believe it or not, thirty years later, we still have that problem." }, { "start": 677.6, "end": 685.9, "text": "How do we make sure that people are able to achieve their goals safely and securely and in a trusted way that, you know, they want to achieve those goals?" }, { "start": 687.14, "end": 687.78, "text": "How do we do that?" }, { "start": 688.12, "end": 692.5, "text": "But that all comes back to you asked about Moat, how do we do that quickly?" }, { "start": 692.62, "end": 698.82, "text": "How can we quickly get the right product into our customers' hands so that they can achieve those goals and navigate that digital wilderness?" }, { "start": 699.88, "end": 701.04, "text": "Fast, I guess." }, { "start": 701.14, "end": 701.34, "text": "Yes." }, { "start": 702.94, "end": 705.06, "text": "And what does that mean technically?" }, { "start": 705.28, "end": 714.94, "text": "I guess if I look at your tech stack, I find whatever technology I touched in the last years as well, or is it very strict?" }, { "start": 715.72, "end": 719.28, "text": "No, no, you'll find a lot of the same technologies that other people are using." }, { "start": 720.08, "end": 729.44, "text": "We are, again, when we think about modernization, we're very much embracing all the modern software technologies, including, for example, the cloud." }, { "start": 729.82, "end": 736.86, "text": "We're using the cloud, and then obviously, but in the cloud, we're doing things in a very cloud-native way, for example, Kubernetes across the board." }, { "start": 737.9, "end": 743.7, "text": "We're utilizing a lot of various... Cloud services that are being offered by cloud providers." }, { "start": 744.48, "end": 751.1, "text": "And so, yeah, really trying to, you know, embrace a modern way of building software within our systems." }, { "start": 752.1, "end": 754.92, "text": "And Pulumi, I guess, because you work there." }, { "start": 756.62, "end": 766.4, "text": "No, so, you know, I'm not going to get into specifics about what we use in terms of our exact stack, but, you know, I'm definitely not, you know, necessarily pushing my own." }, { "start": 767.5, "end": 769.98, "text": "previous biases, let's call it into the teams." }, { "start": 770.62, "end": 771.4, "text": "Yeah, your dog food." }, { "start": 772.04, "end": 773.32, "text": "Yeah, eat your own dog food." }, { "start": 773.68, "end": 775.08, "text": "No, just joking." }, { "start": 776.8, "end": 780.78, "text": "When you talk about velocity, I mean, you have a huge organization." }, { "start": 782.12, "end": 788.62, "text": "What's your ideal setup from your today's perspective to kind of keep track of what is happening?" }, { "start": 789.92, "end": 799.52, "text": "Is it purely trust and having leaders in place that like Make sure that that Velocity is right?" }, { "start": 799.78, "end": 802.62, "text": "or is there like to use Dora or what?" }, { "start": 802.72, "end": 802.98, "text": "what do you?" }, { "start": 803.12, "end": 804.1, "text": "what do you what do you believe in?" }, { "start": 805.38, "end": 806.22, "text": "Yeah, that's a great question." }, { "start": 807.1, "end": 809.08, "text": "I think obviously trust is the big part of it." }, { "start": 809.16, "end": 813.58, "text": "I think in any organization you have to trust your leaders and you have to trust that your team can deliver." }, { "start": 813.74, "end": 815.48, "text": "so obviously, you know, there's trust." }, { "start": 816.7, "end": 820.44, "text": "I guess, you know going back to some whoever coined the term, trust but verify." }, { "start": 822.02, "end": 829.04, "text": "There are a lot of mechanisms that I like to have to make sure that I can understand the state of the organization." }, { "start": 831.18, "end": 842.84, "text": "Every month, we have a monthly business review within my teams to understand what's the delivery, how's the delivery been, how are we tracking relative to our goals and we set goals at the beginning of the year." }, { "start": 843.7, "end": 847.0, "text": "So we have a lot of different mechanisms to make sure that we're heading in the right direction." }, { "start": 848.1, "end": 852.96, "text": "A lot of those mechanisms are oriented around building, going back to velocity, rapid feedback loops." }, { "start": 853.54, "end": 856.48, "text": "How quickly can we know if it's working?" }, { "start": 857.02, "end": 860.72, "text": "How quickly can we know if we should double down or pull the plug?" }, { "start": 861.3, "end": 866.58, "text": "How quickly can we know if there's any kind of signal that indicates success?" }, { "start": 867.28, "end": 888.58, "text": "And so everything's oriented around operating that feedback loop, making sure we know what are the signals we're looking for and having a scientific method, let's say, like having a hypothesis ahead of time so we don't try to, you know, p-hack our way into success and really setting up those experiments, running those experiments and then, okay, based on the results of that experiment, how many more experiments can I go run quickly?" }, { "start": 889.92, "end": 893.24, "text": "And that experimentation, by the way, applies in multiple ways." }, { "start": 893.34, "end": 895.76, "text": "It applies both to how we operate." }, { "start": 895.82, "end": 899.22, "text": "So there's like a meta element of, okay, can we experiment on ourselves?" }, { "start": 899.28, "end": 901.7, "text": "And there's also obviously experiments on the product itself." }, { "start": 901.94, "end": 904.78, "text": "Can we actually experiment with, you know, what we're shipping to our customers?" }, { "start": 905.4, "end": 912.64, "text": "And is there one, I mean, you talk about experience, but is there one technical KPI that you also trust in?" }, { "start": 912.7, "end": 917.26, "text": "that is maybe more like a proxy metric that you attached before?" }, { "start": 917.36, "end": 922.28, "text": "Like, I don't know, per request per engineer, per week or something like that?" }, { "start": 923.26, "end": 926.92, "text": "No, I don't think there's kind of one metric that tells us if we're successful or not." }, { "start": 927.72, "end": 932.54, "text": "I think if I think about at the Yahoo level, I think we're often thinking about user growth." }, { "start": 932.76, "end": 935.06, "text": "Are we really helping user engagement?" }, { "start": 935.64, "end": 937.38, "text": "Are we getting more users?" }, { "start": 937.54, "end": 938.94, "text": "Are those users more engaged?" }, { "start": 939.12, "end": 940.42, "text": "Are they actually getting what they want done?" }, { "start": 941.46, "end": 944.58, "text": "From an internal perspective, I think that's kind of maybe what you're pushing on." }, { "start": 945.12, "end": 952.22, "text": "There's no one single metric that tells us, hey, are all the engineering teams delivering at the rate and, you know, quality and, you know, et cetera, et cetera." }, { "start": 952.32, "end": 953.04, "text": "Dora, for sure." }, { "start": 953.66, "end": 954.5, "text": "I've used Dora before." }, { "start": 955.9, "end": 957.0, "text": "I'm a big believer in Dora." }, { "start": 957.06, "end": 960.4, "text": "I think kind of understanding that the key Dora metrics is helpful." }, { "start": 961.06, "end": 971.56, "text": "But there's no, I think Dora is actually an interesting example of it is a very useful telemetry, in my opinion, for self-improvement." }, { "start": 972.4, "end": 976.06, "text": "But it is very hard to compare door metrics from team to team, right?" }, { "start": 976.12, "end": 981.68, "text": "Like the, you know, lead time to change on one team could be drastically different from another teams." }, { "start": 982.38, "end": 983.28, "text": "For very good reasons." }, { "start": 983.36, "end": 988.16, "text": "And so, you know, to say like, well, you're four hours different from the other team, you must be worse." }, { "start": 990.08, "end": 997.0, "text": "Yeah, it's not really meaningful, but saying, hey, can I go from seventeen hours to sixteen hours to fifteen hours?" }, { "start": 997.06, "end": 998.74, "text": "Can I improve on my own metric?" }, { "start": 999.18, "end": 1000.18, "text": "I think is very meaningful." }, { "start": 1001.36, "end": 1001.96, "text": "Yeah, absolutely." }, { "start": 1002.36, "end": 1012.82, "text": "And tracking that over time, understanding over time how velocity changes in a team is what I also find meaningful." }, { "start": 1013.66, "end": 1019.6, "text": "And then, I guess, you have stuff like SLIs, SLOs on top of that for your team." }, { "start": 1020.68, "end": 1021.2, "text": "Certainly, yes." }, { "start": 1021.78, "end": 1028.359, "text": "We track, I mean, we take operations very, very seriously, obviously, and we're constantly looking at our metrics there as well." }, { "start": 1029.7, "end": 1030.44, "text": "OK, OK." }, { "start": 1031.319, "end": 1053.82, "text": "Would you describe your job, your day-to-day as more as like the job of a portfolio manager because you have a huge portfolio of like even like almost companies below yourself or to what degree are you yourself involved in technical decisions and where can you as a leader make a difference from your perspective?" }, { "start": 1054.74, "end": 1056.38, "text": "Yeah, that's the question I think." }, { "start": 1057.1, "end": 1058.3, "text": "It's a combination of things." }, { "start": 1058.98, "end": 1060.8, "text": "I guess portfolio manager is a pretty good term." }, { "start": 1061.26, "end": 1069.26, "text": "I do think probably, if I think about how much time I spend doing various things, a good chunk of my job is portfolio manager." }, { "start": 1069.36, "end": 1084.6, "text": "It is thinking about, and I actually do take it, if you ask anyone on my team, I do take an investment view of this, which is, for every single thing we're doing as a team, what's the cost and what's the expected ROI gonna be for that?" }, { "start": 1085.04, "end": 1094.3, "text": "that activity we're doing and how do I maximize yield across my portfolio given the resources that we have is something I am constantly thinking about." }, { "start": 1095.56, "end": 1100.0, "text": "And so in that sense, very much, yes, I play that portfolio manager role." }, { "start": 1101.54, "end": 1110.44, "text": "But that would be, I think, if I thought about my job just as that, that would be pretty sad, I guess, because a big part of what I love about my role is getting to work with people." }, { "start": 1111.24, "end": 1119.68, "text": "I think that's Really what got me into management actually is when I you know going back to my nerd path or whatever." }, { "start": 1121.0, "end": 1139.02, "text": "At one point I thought I was gonna be in academia or I thought I was just gonna be working you know in kind of applied research and I Had a manager at the time who conscripted me let's say into management and she's basically said hey the team is growing a lot I kind of need you to step up as a manager." }, { "start": 1139.64, "end": 1141.84, "text": "and you know take on some management responsibilities." }, { "start": 1141.92, "end": 1145.04, "text": "and at the time I was Like, I don't want to do that." }, { "start": 1145.16, "end": 1146.18, "text": "That's the dark side." }, { "start": 1147.46, "end": 1151.02, "text": "I want to spend my time doing research and hacking on code and stuff." }, { "start": 1152.28, "end": 1159.48, "text": "But after I was forced into doing that, I really came to appreciate just how much I love working with people." }, { "start": 1161.0, "end": 1165.64, "text": "And that's stuck with me ever since is, you know, at the end of the day, your greatest asset." }, { "start": 1165.94, "end": 1168.56, "text": "at any company is going to be the employees and the people." }, { "start": 1169.38, "end": 1171.12, "text": "And I'm a big believer in that." }, { "start": 1171.44, "end": 1183.72, "text": "And I love developing teams, working with teams, building culture, developing culture, you know, building organizations, right, that are, you know, able to deliver." }, { "start": 1183.9, "end": 1191.94, "text": "And what I think is so interesting about that, too, is I think you can actually, like I tell a lot of people this, I think you can take an engineering approach to doing so." }, { "start": 1192.88, "end": 1209.22, "text": "And so I often think of my my organizations as things I'm engineering, let's say, where there's an API almost to an organization and there's certain capabilities or features that the organization has." }, { "start": 1209.52, "end": 1212.14, "text": "And that's really a big part of my job also." }, { "start": 1212.5, "end": 1220.86, "text": "It's not just to be the portfolio manager, but to really shape what that organization looks like and to make sure that we have a great place for everyone who's working there." }, { "start": 1221.94, "end": 1228.28, "text": "I'd love to talk to you about AI, but first I have one question which kind of is a nice follow-up on that." }, { "start": 1230.66, "end": 1234.14, "text": "You considered yourself a nerd and you wanted to go more into research, etc." }, { "start": 1236.62, "end": 1244.44, "text": "What is like, if you look back, what's the last important piece of code you wrote personally and when was it?" }, { "start": 1245.64, "end": 1247.86, "text": "Well, I'm still coding today, I guess, right?" }, { "start": 1247.92, "end": 1250.18, "text": "So I guess it depends on how you define important." }, { "start": 1250.9, "end": 1254.18, "text": "I have some fun side projects I'm working on and those are important to me." }, { "start": 1255.18, "end": 1265.78, "text": "So for example, you know, one of the side products I've been working on more recently has been using AI to help actually classify and understand basketball plays." }, { "start": 1267.3, "end": 1268.2, "text": "I love basketball." }, { "start": 1268.8, "end": 1276.98, "text": "My kids play basketball and I actually, you know, but I don't want to... have to scrub back through all the film that I've recorded." }, { "start": 1277.82, "end": 1286.2, "text": "And so I'm having AI help me scrub back through and take out interesting clips of like, okay, here's interesting place where, you know, the defense could have been tighter or what have you." }, { "start": 1287.16, "end": 1288.78, "text": "So that's important to me personally, I guess." }, { "start": 1288.9, "end": 1294.96, "text": "So that's, I'll say, you know, even just the code I wrote a few weeks ago is probably some of the most important code." }, { "start": 1295.02, "end": 1295.28, "text": "I've written." }, { "start": 1295.52, "end": 1295.74, "text": "Okay." }, { "start": 1296.56, "end": 1296.74, "text": "Cool." }, { "start": 1297.16, "end": 1306.42, "text": "That means that like, uh, with your kids, you, whenever you visit a basketball game, you have a Raspberry Pi with you recording the, like taking a video recording of the game then or." }, { "start": 1307.2, "end": 1307.22, "text": "Oh" }, { "start": 1307.28, "end": 1310.1, "text": "no, I, I, what I'm, what I'm doing is I'm just recording it on my phone." }, { "start": 1310.28, "end": 1315.02, "text": "Um, and then I, you know, bring it back home and then, you know, having it processed by this, this app." }, { "start": 1315.16, "end": 1315.3, "text": "Cool." }, { "start": 1315.82, "end": 1315.96, "text": "Cool." }, { "start": 1316.38, "end": 1316.56, "text": "Cool." }, { "start": 1317.08, "end": 1322.58, "text": "Um, and I, I, I assume you also use AI or cold code or whatever, like." }, { "start": 1322.96, "end": 1323.34, "text": "these days." }, { "start": 1323.68, "end": 1328.94, "text": "Yeah, I think I just described I built with, yeah, with some agent decoding tools." }, { "start": 1328.98, "end": 1329.18, "text": "Yes." }, { "start": 1329.64, "end": 1329.88, "text": "Okay." }, { "start": 1330.12, "end": 1330.5, "text": "Okay, cool." }, { "start": 1330.98, "end": 1332.12, "text": "And how do you see that?" }, { "start": 1332.2, "end": 1337.22, "text": "Like, how do you actually or how does Yahoo utilize AI these days?" }, { "start": 1338.76, "end": 1345.32, "text": "And how do you see this, like, entering the world of engineering and the world of your tech teams?" }, { "start": 1345.44, "end": 1349.54, "text": "Like, and how do you make sure, like, do you want to make sure it arrives, I guess?" }, { "start": 1350.58, "end": 1354.64, "text": "Yes, but do you want to make sure that everyone adopts it?" }, { "start": 1356.44, "end": 1356.78, "text": "and how?" }, { "start": 1358.04, "end": 1361.78, "text": "Yeah, I think we do want to make sure everyone adopts it." }, { "start": 1362.04, "end": 1366.42, "text": "And I think during my tenure here, we've really shipped it from AI as a tool." }, { "start": 1366.76, "end": 1372.3, "text": "When I started, I think a lot of us were using AI as a chat prompt, basically." }, { "start": 1372.94, "end": 1376.44, "text": "And now, I think more and more of us are really adopting AI as a co-worker." }, { "start": 1377.64, "end": 1386.26, "text": "I think that's a big shift because it's not just this interrupt driven back and forth, but really finding ways to have AI be more agentic, right?" }, { "start": 1386.36, "end": 1389.72, "text": "And actually doing tasks in the background on your behalf." }, { "start": 1390.84, "end": 1392.5, "text": "And we're doing that across the board, by the way." }, { "start": 1392.54, "end": 1395.04, "text": "We kind of talked about how are we in the company using it?" }, { "start": 1395.74, "end": 1397.34, "text": "It's affecting how we build, right?" }, { "start": 1397.38, "end": 1408.4, "text": "And so that's, you know, on the development side, everything from, you know, AI assisted coding to testing to how we run, you know, our operations to how we work." }, { "start": 1408.84, "end": 1409.06, "text": "right?" }, { "start": 1409.24, "end": 1412.66, "text": "So, you know, can we actually get better business insights using AI?" }, { "start": 1412.82, "end": 1418.02, "text": "You know, can we have AI help us understand how we do business with fine business opportunities for us?" }, { "start": 1418.7, "end": 1422.06, "text": "And then how we serve, you know, how are we actually helping our customers with AI?" }, { "start": 1422.78, "end": 1432.74, "text": "And across those three different dimensions, I think we've been both trying to experiment quite a bit and also making good progress on all three fronts." }, { "start": 1433.2, "end": 1433.42, "text": "Okay." }, { "start": 1434.0, "end": 1454.4, "text": "And for the folks in engineering, Is it like, I mean, I know many organizations where it's really hard to kind of and the people are not the problem, but the people are kind of the ones stalling down the progress a bit." }, { "start": 1454.54, "end": 1457.88, "text": "because like everyone has to learn it, right?" }, { "start": 1457.94, "end": 1459.76, "text": "And everyone has to learn how great it is." }, { "start": 1459.98, "end": 1463.64, "text": "Everyone has to learn how to self-accelerate." }, { "start": 1464.42, "end": 1471.24, "text": "I mean, I see it as like a big Yeah, Excel skeleton for every engineer, right?" }, { "start": 1472.98, "end": 1478.36, "text": "Even like a bigger thing maybe, like a mechatronic robot that everyone now owns." }, { "start": 1480.46, "end": 1486.46, "text": "And how do you make sure that everyone discovers that or goes through that understanding?" }, { "start": 1486.54, "end": 1489.42, "text": "Is that like per definition if you just spend enough time with it?" }, { "start": 1490.74, "end": 1495.72, "text": "Do you make sure that career trajectories are shaped on behalf of that?" }, { "start": 1496.08, "end": 1498.44, "text": "Or how do you ensure that?" }, { "start": 1498.82, "end": 1501.38, "text": "I think this goes back to building organizations." }, { "start": 1501.64, "end": 1502.6, "text": "It's not just one thing." }, { "start": 1502.78, "end": 1506.8, "text": "It's a lot of different things to help make sure we end up shaping the organization the right way." }, { "start": 1507.78, "end": 1511.34, "text": "For sure, one of the things we've been doing a lot is just encouraging everyone to go use it." }, { "start": 1513.02, "end": 1518.7, "text": "I've had a few opportunities to talk in front of the whole company, and during those opportunities, really making sure people know." }, { "start": 1519.12, "end": 1520.96, "text": "Hey, this is part of our jobs now." }, { "start": 1521.04, "end": 1521.84, "text": "And this is important." }, { "start": 1521.9, "end": 1522.54, "text": "And here's why." }, { "start": 1522.62, "end": 1524.32, "text": "And here's how we want to use it." }, { "start": 1526.02, "end": 1528.9, "text": "And I think the other part of it is, you know, training, right?" }, { "start": 1529.0, "end": 1533.78, "text": "We're providing lots of training opportunities internally for folks to learn some of these technologies." }, { "start": 1534.72, "end": 1539.46, "text": "And not just training, but also, I think, especially because some of it so new is showing and telling." }, { "start": 1539.92, "end": 1543.68, "text": "And so providing forms for people to see, OK, how are other people internally using it?" }, { "start": 1544.08, "end": 1545.0, "text": "How are they benefiting?" }, { "start": 1545.54, "end": 1547.14, "text": "How is it actually working for someone else?" }, { "start": 1547.5, "end": 1549.02, "text": "What are some of the use cases they have?" }, { "start": 1549.86, "end": 1550.8, "text": "And so doing that as well." }, { "start": 1552.42, "end": 1558.18, "text": "And I actually think, because you mentioned the exosaliton thing, I think one thing." }, { "start": 1558.22, "end": 1564.08, "text": "that's also difficult actually about deploying AI, let's say, within an organization." }, { "start": 1564.26, "end": 1565.96, "text": "is it's not just a new tool." }, { "start": 1567.44, "end": 1570.56, "text": "And that's maybe where a lot of people sometimes get tripped up." }, { "start": 1570.84, "end": 1576.54, "text": "is it's not just a new tool, it's also changing the way we work." }, { "start": 1577.34, "end": 1585.06, "text": "And so, you know, it's not like you can just adopt your existing ways of working to using AI." }, { "start": 1585.26, "end": 1590.28, "text": "You have to actually in some cases think about, okay, is my process even correct?" }, { "start": 1590.42, "end": 1591.94, "text": "Like, is this process still right?" }, { "start": 1591.98, "end": 1594.44, "text": "You can't just put AI into the existing process." }, { "start": 1594.5, "end": 1599.34, "text": "You may actually have to change the process or change the way we make decisions or change the way we work." }, { "start": 1599.6, "end": 1603.66, "text": "So, you know, Super simple example is just around documentation, right?" }, { "start": 1604.8, "end": 1612.52, "text": "Or how we write things down, you know, before you never had to think about, well, hey, how do I make sure an agent can consume this information?" }, { "start": 1613.54, "end": 1618.44, "text": "But even just making sure that the information is consumable by agents, I think is kind of a prerequisite now." }, { "start": 1618.96, "end": 1619.94, "text": "We talk about that, right?" }, { "start": 1621.08, "end": 1630.82, "text": "And, you know, similarly, you know, again, going back to how you shape organizations, like as part of our interview process now, we actually ask people, hey, if you want to use AI, go for it." }, { "start": 1630.9, "end": 1636.52, "text": "Use AI, we encourage you to use AI as part of a very big process because we think it's part of how people should work." }, { "start": 1638.16, "end": 1642.7, "text": "Yeah, I mean, I see that also happening in schools a lot where I'm not sure, is that right?" }, { "start": 1643.84, "end": 1646.18, "text": "Is that the right moment to adopt it?" }, { "start": 1646.8, "end": 1648.3, "text": "or what does that lead to?" }, { "start": 1648.76, "end": 1650.22, "text": "And what do we have to learn tomorrow?" }, { "start": 1651.66, "end": 1667.62, "text": "I think one challenge I've been dealing with or one thing I'm observing, Is the fact that also many engineers don't necessarily feel good with it because it changes way." }, { "start": 1667.96, "end": 1673.2, "text": "they solve problems personally right and it changes perspective." }, { "start": 1673.64, "end": 1683.42, "text": "and also the let's say reward mechanism right beforehand like the reward mechanism was like move a ticket from left to right." }, { "start": 1684.86, "end": 1687.22, "text": "I mean a bit simplified right." }, { "start": 1688.48, "end": 1694.04, "text": "And there was like a clear description given to them why now they have to make the description and they have to." }, { "start": 1695.28, "end": 1700.12, "text": "Describe the problem and they have to like sometimes take the perspective of consumer." }, { "start": 1700.24, "end": 1704.6, "text": "is this you think a change that will even." }, { "start": 1706.12, "end": 1714.8, "text": "Accelerate further so that like every engineer becomes a product manager every product manager becomes an engineer everyone becomes like a mini cx or." }, { "start": 1715.58, "end": 1716.76, "text": "Just a full-stake engineer." }, { "start": 1716.86, "end": 1720.98, "text": "or where does your current imagination look like?" }, { "start": 1722.2, "end": 1727.26, "text": "I mean, I think it maybe gets closer to be everyone's a product manager level of things." }, { "start": 1727.96, "end": 1739.62, "text": "I think, I guess in my estimation, I don't know how much people will need to interact with programming languages as we know them today on a day-to-day basis." }, { "start": 1741.0, "end": 1748.04, "text": "But I think at the same time, Software engineering is not going away." }, { "start": 1748.4, "end": 1762.36, "text": "I think that's the thing I really emphasize with both my own teams and when I talk about this with other people, that's kind of my my fundamental belief that software engineering itself as a discipline does not go away just because AI is here, right?" }, { "start": 1762.88, "end": 1778.42, "text": "The same the same principles, I guess, you know, so we think about the software development lifecycle will still apply and it still requires our critical thinking to make sure that that is applied in the correct way, right?" }, { "start": 1778.5, "end": 1790.12, "text": "So, you know, if you think about testing and you think about security and you think about, you know, all those different aspects of the entire lifecycle, they don't just magically go away because we have AI." }, { "start": 1790.74, "end": 1795.94, "text": "We still need people to think critically about, okay, how do I do the testing or how do I make sure this is secure?" }, { "start": 1796.62, "end": 1804.18, "text": "And we can use agents for sure to help us do all those things, but it doesn't obviate the actual needs." }, { "start": 1805.9, "end": 1807.66, "text": "of those critical aspects of everything." }, { "start": 1808.08, "end": 1808.76, "text": "And you need to do it." }, { "start": 1809.94, "end": 1813.76, "text": "And so I think it will change how we work." }, { "start": 1813.88, "end": 1815.26, "text": "It will change, kind of." }, { "start": 1816.24, "end": 1818.76, "text": "And there will be dissonance, I guess, because now I'm doing different things." }, { "start": 1819.4, "end": 1825.76, "text": "But the fundamental job to your point of moving something from left to right doesn't go away, in my opinion." }, { "start": 1825.82, "end": 1827.7, "text": "And I think just how we do that." }, { "start": 1828.2, "end": 1828.84, "text": "will change a little bit." }, { "start": 1828.88, "end": 1830.66, "text": "And again, I think everything we've learned." }, { "start": 1830.98, "end": 1831.1, "text": "And the" }, { "start": 1831.22, "end": 1832.84, "text": "scope maybe of the things." }, { "start": 1832.94, "end": 1833.06, "text": "And the" }, { "start": 1833.14, "end": 1833.38, "text": "scope." }, { "start": 1833.44, "end": 1833.88, "text": "That's right." }, { "start": 1834.0, "end": 1834.36, "text": "That's true." }, { "start": 1834.46, "end": 1834.58, "text": "Yes." }, { "start": 1835.24, "end": 1844.44, "text": "But I think everything we've learned from a practices perspective of like what makes someone a great software engineer in terms of, you know, their understanding of what is good architecture?" }, { "start": 1845.24, "end": 1846.28, "text": "What are good patterns?" }, { "start": 1846.92, "end": 1848.96, "text": "You know, how do I think about observability?" }, { "start": 1849.08, "end": 1854.26, "text": "For example, those kinds of things don't just go poof just because we have AI." }, { "start": 1855.24, "end": 1869.74, "text": "Yeah, what was your recent moment when you thought okay, this is a miracle like I Mean I every once in a while have it like playing with Claude or whatever and just think like hey this is impossible like I don't believe that." }, { "start": 1869.86, "end": 1870.06, "text": "like." }, { "start": 1870.4, "end": 1872.14, "text": "is there anything you you remember," }, { "start": 1872.76, "end": 1895.84, "text": "you know, there's always times where I think I'm interacting with some kind of a you know, whether it's because an agent did something on my behalf autonomously after some period of time or maybe like if I could think of an example more recently where I was actually kind of playing around with understanding something about myself because it was basically trying to diagnose some like health issue I had." }, { "start": 1897.12, "end": 1904.06, "text": "And I was very surprised at how well it did because it basically helped me eliminate a lot of different things that I wasn't sure about." }, { "start": 1904.22, "end": 1911.52, "text": "And basically, I was able to start trying out some of the things that were being suggested, which worked pretty darn well." }, { "start": 1912.94, "end": 1915.3, "text": "So it's actually very surprising, I guess, in that regard." }, { "start": 1916.24, "end": 1927.5, "text": "But no crazy, a genetic move on a computer where it took over and just made you shiver because things just worked out." }, { "start": 1929.04, "end": 1929.62, "text": "Not recently, no." }, { "start": 1929.82, "end": 1931.28, "text": "Not that it comes to mind." }, { "start": 1932.02, "end": 1939.12, "text": "Lee, you have quite a lot of interesting consumer products under your umbrella as well, such as mail, news, finance, etc." }, { "start": 1941.08, "end": 1946.94, "text": "Where do you actually use AI to delight users and not just add a feature label." }, { "start": 1947.7, "end": 1952.56, "text": "Is that really something where you also partly think about like how we make a difference these days?" }, { "start": 1952.66, "end": 1952.8, "text": "like?" }, { "start": 1952.92, "end": 1954.16, "text": "I mean like." }, { "start": 1954.54, "end": 1954.8, "text": "I don't know." }, { "start": 1954.86, "end": 1955.6, "text": "people use that." }, { "start": 1955.66, "end": 1957.28, "text": "many people use Gmail right like." }, { "start": 1958.08, "end": 1961.0, "text": "And there are many many other ideas out there many other meter." }, { "start": 1961.06, "end": 1962.04, "text": "those are out there." }, { "start": 1962.14, "end": 1966.3, "text": "like do you adopt any of those or do you like how do you see your role there." }, { "start": 1966.76, "end": 1971.74, "text": "No, I mean, I think the point isn't just to throw AI everywhere and have AI slop, obviously." }, { "start": 1971.84, "end": 1984.32, "text": "And, you know, if this goes back to what I was talking about earlier, you know, we're really trying to pair the technology with human creation to deliver relevant and engaging content and to ultimately help users achieve their goals, right?" }, { "start": 1984.4, "end": 1989.74, "text": "And so, you know, if you look at a lot of what we've done in mail, for example, we have catch up, right?" }, { "start": 1991.9, "end": 1999.62, "text": "uh, uh, so you can know what's going on with your mail or in news, you know, key takeaways, uh, or in fantasy, we have, you know, AI-powered player insights." }, { "start": 1999.74, "end": 2007.26, "text": "And so it's, it's about, you know, making your daily life easier and not necessarily, you know, just throwing the AI label on there for the sake of, of doing so." }, { "start": 2007.88, "end": 2012.48, "text": "And as I mentioned earlier too, we're also trying to combine that with, you know, human judgment, right?" }, { "start": 2012.52, "end": 2014.44, "text": "That's still a big part of our." }, { "start": 2015.14, "end": 2029.9, "text": "our core value is to add that human layer of input so that people can actually get that that that Taylorized and curated experience that users expect from" }, { "start": 2029.98, "end": 2030.08, "text": "us." }, { "start": 2030.7, "end": 2037.52, "text": "If you look at your top three engineering problems at consumer scale today, what is it?" }, { "start": 2037.64, "end": 2041.66, "text": "Is it latency costs, reliability, abuse, data or what is it?" }, { "start": 2042.6, "end": 2043.96, "text": "And then cost is definitely one of them." }, { "start": 2044.8, "end": 2055.8, "text": "I think for sure, consistently finding ways to optimize, how are we actually delivering to customers is for sure what I would consider an engineering problem, especially at the scale at which we're delivering." }, { "start": 2056.739, "end": 2062.06, "text": "Every time we do anything slightly inefficient, ends up adding up to a lot of dollars, right?" }, { "start": 2062.12, "end": 2067.48, "text": "And so cost is for sure an engineering problem that I think is in my top three." }, { "start": 2068.86, "end": 2078.219, "text": "I think velocity is actually in that top three as well, where again, We really want to be able to go fast and in a safe way though and with a high quality." }, { "start": 2078.4, "end": 2082.02, "text": "And so that's I think a perennial engineering problem for anyone working in the consumer space." }, { "start": 2082.179, "end": 2082.62, "text": "Absolutely." }, { "start": 2083.739, "end": 2086.4, "text": "So I think those are the ones that come immediately to mind for me." }, { "start": 2086.56, "end": 2086.78, "text": "Okay." }, { "start": 2087.02, "end": 2087.219, "text": "Okay." }, { "start": 2087.3, "end": 2087.639, "text": "Thanks a lot." }, { "start": 2088.1, "end": 2090.76, "text": "Then I still have a little surprise for you." }, { "start": 2091.639, "end": 2093.28, "text": "So yeah, yeah." }, { "start": 2095.04, "end": 2104.6, "text": "Back in the Mercer Maya days, there was an Easter egg silently introduced to Yahoo Finance, which is like It hidden date picker." }, { "start": 2105.58, "end": 2111.58, "text": "you can you can use to like go back in time and buy bitcoin if you want right." }, { "start": 2112.14, "end": 2119.58, "text": "or just like travel back in someone someone's life and potentially change things like." }, { "start": 2121.1, "end": 2128.66, "text": "And I'd like to like virtually travel back in time to the year two thousand and six when you worked at Microsoft as an applied researcher." }, { "start": 2130.52, "end": 2132.5, "text": "And I mean maybe you would whisper." }, { "start": 2133.04, "end": 2136.32, "text": "did research, I don't know, go to leadership straight away." }, { "start": 2138.46, "end": 2141.14, "text": "I take that away from your option space then." }, { "start": 2141.72, "end": 2147.38, "text": "You now have a chance to whisper something into your younger, much younger, not much younger years." }, { "start": 2148.72, "end": 2149.28, "text": "What would it be?" }, { "start": 2150.12, "end": 2152.7, "text": "I think it's believe in yourself and love yourself." }, { "start": 2154.44, "end": 2160.6, "text": "I think early on in my career, you know, I had a lot of imposter syndrome and didn't have a lot of confidence." }, { "start": 2162.02, "end": 2170.88, "text": "And I think, yeah, I would just tell myself to believe in myself and love myself to let myself, you know, be willing to make mistakes and forgive myself for those mistakes." }, { "start": 2171.54, "end": 2171.76, "text": "Okay." }, { "start": 2172.14, "end": 2173.0, "text": "Yeah, very good answer." }, { "start": 2174.84, "end": 2176.88, "text": "And yeah, I hope you learned that on the way." }, { "start": 2177.18, "end": 2187.0, "text": "I mean, you have like, you've had a great career so far, I'd say, like just looking at all the all the different like great companies you worked at." }, { "start": 2187.08, "end": 2192.1, "text": "So I think you hopefully received some recognition there." }, { "start": 2194.84, "end": 2200.34, "text": "No, yeah, I mean, that's why I would tell myself, you know, earlier on that information." }, { "start": 2200.44, "end": 2200.58, "text": "Yes." }, { "start": 2201.86, "end": 2202.1, "text": "Okay." }, { "start": 2202.38, "end": 2203.08, "text": "Thanks a lot, Lee." }, { "start": 2203.48, "end": 2205.16, "text": "It was great talking to you." }, { "start": 2205.34, "end": 2206.82, "text": "Really, really proud that we made it." }, { "start": 2207.96, "end": 2212.4, "text": "And I finally got to meet the city of the first website I visited." }, { "start": 2213.18, "end": 2213.94, "text": "Thanks a lot for that." }, { "start": 2214.2, "end": 2217.0, "text": "It's been a pleasure and an honor and thank you for having me on as a guest." }, { "start": 2217.18, "end": 2217.54, "text": "Bye bye." }, { "start": 2217.94, "end": 2218.44, "text": "Have a great day." }, { "start": 2248.4, "end": 2254.52, "text": "Please send us suggestions to cto at alphalist.com, send me a message on LinkedIn or Twitter." }, { "start": 2254.94, "end": 2259.3, "text": "After all, the more knowledge we bring to CTOs, the more growth we see in tech." }, { "start": 2259.6, "end": 2263.64, "text": "Or, as we say on Alphalist, accumulated knowledge to accelerate growth." }, { "start": 2264.18, "end": 2274.64, "text": "See you in the next episode." } ]