Software Misadventures - Chris Pruett - On deciding to leave LinkedIn and co-founding Jam, values based decision making and compassionate leadership - #19

Episode Date: June 3, 2022

Chris Pruett is the CTO and Co-founder of Jam - a new way to share and listen to bite-sized audio. Prior to Jam, Chris spent 9+ years at LinkedIn growing from an engineering manager to VP of Engineering. During his tenure at LinkedIn, he worked on almost all aspects of the app and towards the end, led an org of 500+ engineers working on Feed, Messaging, Identity and Search. In this episode, we discuss how he made the decision to leave his leadership position at LinkedIn and co-found Jam. We also spoke about his time at LinkedIn and how he developed the practice to make value based decisions both in professional and personal life.

The last bit for me was like, well, what's the opportunity cost for me here? Right. Like if I were to do this, right. And versus, you know, you can, you know, I was very surprised by and still kind of find it hard to believe the kinds of job opportunities that I sort of had access to as I was leaving LinkedIn. Um, and I wanted to know that I wouldn't lose that. And actually I'll share one of the most impactful or memorable conversations as I was leaving

LinkedIn. As I sat down with Ryan, our CEO to tell him that I was leaving and why. And he said to me, he's like, Hey, Chris, you should know that you can, you know, if this doesn't work out, there's a job for you here. You know, you can go work at any major tech company and get a leadership position. And he's like, you take comfort in that. And now never think about it again. Like, don't let it cross your mind again. Just go win.

And that just meant a lot to me. Right. And so, you know, I share the story because I do think about it a little bit, but that is my mentality. It's like, I, I It's like, I don't want another job after this, right? My goal is to go build this company, make it really successful, build a leadership team that is, you know, 10 times better or more than I am, and hand it off at some point, you know, in the distant future, and then do something else with my life. Welcome to the Software Misadventures podcast.

We are your hosts, Ronak and Gwan. As engineers, we are interested in 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 have learned, and of course, the misadventures along the way. Our guest in this episode is Chris Pruitt. Chris is the CTO and co-founder of a startup called Jam. Jam is a new platform to share and listen to bite-sized audios.

Prior to Jam, Chris spent nine plus years at LinkedIn growing from an engineering manager to VP of engineering. During his tenure, he worked on almost all aspects of the LinkedIn app. And towards the end, he led an org of 500 plus engineers working on feed, messaging, identity, and search. We had a great time talking to Chris. We discussed how he made the decision to leave his leadership position at LinkedIn and co-found Jam. This wasn't a simple decision to make, and Chris walked us through his thought process. And for anyone thinking about leaving their job

to start a company or join a startup, it's worth listening to Chris's journey. We discussed how Chris and his co-founder are coming up with the company values at Jam and we also spoke about his time at LinkedIn, practicing compassion and leadership, work-life balance, and how he developed the practice

to make value-based decisions both in professional and personal life. Please enjoy this fun conversation with Chris Pruitt. Chris, super excited to have you on the show with us today. Welcome. Thank you. Happy to be here. So we thought we would start with a story that I found who someone posted on LinkedIn. And if someone Googles us, I'm sure they would find it too. There's a picture of you giving a hug to another LinkedIn employee. And this person actually wrote quite a bit in detail about their experience,

which happened during All Hands. Would you mind sharing that story with us and what happened there uh absolutely so um it was it was not an all-hand it was actually a little bit more emotionally charged than an all-hand so we were uh coming together to talk about a decision that we either had made or were going to make i can can't remember, there was a couple of these meetings. It was a town hall, and it had to do with what we were going to do with LinkedIn's mobile web. So at the time, our mobile web application was basically at parity with our desktop application that was using a certain technology stack,

and we were considering moving over to the sort of light mobile web that we served at the time only in India. It is now fully the mobile web. And so it was a town hall where we were talking about all these sort of different stakeholders. And there's just so many different facets of that decision that had many different consequences, some of them real, some of them

perceived. And, um, one of the, uh, he's now a senior manager. He's still at LinkedIn. Um, he's someone who came in via an acquisition actually. So he came as an IC as a, as an acqui-hire that I sort of oversaw. And so I'd known him as he grew from like senior software engineer from small startup to staff engineer, to becoming a manager, to becoming a senior manager. And he got up to ask a question and he got really nervous. Like he just, like his voice got shaky and he was like, he's kind of like, you know, it kind of, this guy that like wears his emotions on his sleeve. And I just like spontaneously jumped up and gave him a hug. I was like, Hey,

you know, it's fine, dude. Like, you know, I mean, it was a very authentic, genuine moment. Like I was in the audience. I jumped up, gave him a hug. I was like, dude, it happens to the best of us. Don't worry about it. Like you're amongst friends. And then, um, he regained his composure and I found out, I think like that moment, you know, it's funny. You never really realize what, like in the moment, what sort of impact you're going to have. And, um, not to get too far ahead of myself, but leaving LinkedIn, I just had a ton of

conversations with folks where I was like, wow, you remember that? Like some, most of the things I did remember, but my memory of it is very different or maybe not different. You just don't know the impact that you have. Right. And so, um, leading up to that post that you're talking about, I had learned that it had become a meme within his team where they were sort of light heartedly making fun of him about it. And I like to think it was lighthearted and hopefully it was

where someone made like an animated GIF out of it. So literally like they would, it would, the animated GIF would get posted in Slack pretty regularly of me like getting up and giving him a hug. And so I found that out and I think it's got a, you know, a pretty Tinder ending there with the LinkedIn post. That's the, that's the story behind it. So genuinely it was just like, I mean, it's one of those moments, I think where hopefully what I can do for him is, you know, there's this saying like, you know, everybody, you know, puts their pants on one leg at a time, right? Like we all, we all have these moments where it's like, I mean, honestly, in all sincerity, I can stand up and talk in a room of a thousand people now from my experience

at LinkedIn, I've posted, I mean, I've actually talked at the all hand, like the LinkedIn all hands several times that pales in comparison to the nerve that I get when I stand up and ask a question on all hands. So I just like, it was a pure moment of empathy and then compassion, right? Like I knew him well enough to know that like, you don't just get up and randomly hug, you know,

people that you don't know very well, but I knew him well enough to know that it'll actually be meaningful to him. So that's what I did. That is incredible. And while reading through that post, at least that's what I did. That is incredible. And while reading through that post, at least, that's what I took away as well, the compassionate part that you mentioned. And it's something that I've been researching about this episode. I spoke with a couple of people who you've worked with closely at LinkedIn, and this is a theme that came up recurringly where people mentioned that you are

a very compassionate person and very compassionate manager. And I mean, you were at LinkedIn for, I think, about nine years where you started as an engineering manager. And then towards the end, you were the VP of engineering at LinkedIn. And at least based on your experiences, you work almost as far as i can say the main link pretty much all the features of the main linkedin application from like profile feed to messaging to an extent and much more that i'm missing right now in in that journey like can you share some aspects of like what helped you grow as a manager uh going from like that initial role to building it up to leading org with hundreds of people i mean there's a lot

that goes on there and we have specific areas you want to dive into but uh could you start with like what aspects helped you grow as a manager or as a leader overall yeah i mean that's that's a that's a big surface area so i'll try to i'll try to like be as concise as i can be and let you ask follow-up questions but just to maybe uh so first off just i mean thank you for sharing that that theme came up um you're right i started linkedin uh i was an engineer manager i had two direct reports i had come from a small startup a a very small startup. I think some people say small startups and you know, it's hundreds of people. Like, I mean, it was like four or five of us. Right. And, and everyone else went to a big company. Uh, I was going to go with them. I decided to go to

LinkedIn because I, it sounds cliche, but it's, I mean, nine and a half years of experience to say it's true because of the people I was just like blown away by the people that I met. And I was managing a venture within LinkedIn. So I, you know, it was the higher education team. We were trying to figure out what to do for students and universities. And so I had the good fortune of starting off in a very hands-on role where I got to know the team super well. I got to know the technology stack.. I got to know the technology stack,

you know, this was in 2012. So we had IPO, but it was still relatively early in the journey of LinkedIn. And so, and as that first year, I just got a chance to like really own something end to end and kind of get to know, like find myself as a leader there. Because again, I had come out of a startup where mostly I was writing code. So it's like, I started to learn what it meant to actually be a manager in a company like LinkedIn. And then I was asked if I wanted to lead profile. And I might literally, my answer was no profiles done.

Like that was literally what I, I never, I said it to a Ron Berger, who's still a VP at LinkedIn, who was the person that asked me to do it. Um, because again, I was like this venture person, right? I was like profile, like, what do you mean? Why would I want to leave profiles right at the core? And so, um, and he said something, which I think is very relevant to your question to an extent, which is like, look, if you are in the role that you're in today, like you need something from everyone like literally everything that you need like you have to go ask someone else to do it and being the

manager of profile will invert it because at the time linkedin was not yet a social network right i mean it was but it wasn't like it wasn't an active community product yeah it is today profile was was i mean it was a resume of data or a database of resumes right and so that profile was at the core of it and you're like it's going to flip around and suddenly everyone's going to want something from you. And it's going to help accelerate your career by a number of years. Like basically you can stay in this role or you can do this. And it's just sort of fast forward you a few years if you're successful, which at the time I didn't realize how important that was. Um, I was not someone who was intentional about my career growth. I was more doing stuff that was fun. Right. And that I was learning from. And that was, I think the singular moment where, I mean, looking back on it, I didn't know it at the time, but, but that like, I learned to be intentional about my career and what I was doing. And so, uh, once I got in the role in profile and I'm not going to like walk you through step by step, like the whole, the whole way, but, you know, I, I just, I was able to combine the, like doing what I loved and what I'm sort of authentically passionate about with some sort of intentional growth around it.

Right. Where I would say, okay, well, a good example is if we fast forward to, so you're right, I have worked on pretty much every bit of the consumer app that you see today and was very fortunate to be in a leadership position in the sort of the most sort of to I'll call the new LinkedIn. It's like six or seven years old now, but the new, the Voyager, which is the mobile app, you know, I had an opportunity to be like a Lieutenant on that project, if you will. And right. So like I led and learned just an incredible amount about how to lead a big project and how to just sort of like, you know, things like as an engineer, like,

what does it mean to actually commit to a date? Right. Where a lot of engineers, you don't things like as an engineer, like what does it mean to actually commit to a date? Right. Where a lot of engineers, you don't want to commit to a date. And so like learning how to manage through that kind of stuff. And then from there, I built on that skill to then lead the desktop redesign, which we call Neptune. And you may still hear the word Neptune around because it just kind of sticks. And so I think the, the theme is, is just learning to actually combine the thing that I'm passionate about, finding the reason I'm passionate about it. For me, for example, Neptune was like I was excited about what we were going to do in the product, but it was really more about productivity. we got onto the new desktop site, that we would just be orders of magnitude, more productive as a team and be able to then like, you know, innovate much more quickly, which, which happened. And so, you know, and then I'll just, I'll circle back to the people like LinkedIn,

I think is a phenomenal place to learn, to be a leader. You know, there are programs like AMP, which is, which stands for the apprentice manager program. You know, there's incredible professional development support. I think the leaders in engineering, many of them care tremendously about leadership. Like there's a network of folks, you know, that, that you can sort of draw on and support from. And so I think, you know, the, every step of the way there, there, there were opportunities to kind of be reflective on what I was learning and what my challenges were, and then resources around me to help me through those things. Really interesting, going back a little bit, and this, sorry, this might sound a little cynical, but I feel like a lot of the things I hear in terms of complaints about working at a

big company, especially when you're more, you know, entry like mid level, I see, it's kind of like, okay, you're, you know, pouring everything into this project, but then, you know, it gets canceled, or something happens to it for whatever reason, right. And you were saying, so by when they were pitching you to join profiles, it's like you get access to all these sort of other teams that's going to come to you. And so is it fair to kind of think about that as like, you're getting now a lot more information and you're really learning about all the different products that the company is about such that based on that, you get a much better understanding of like more common sense about like what

projects will work versus what will not. And, or is that too cynical? No, I don't think it's cynical. I think, I mean, it, it, it, mean it it i mean i i'm gonna answer that from my sort of own lens and experience which is obviously all i can do so i i have long known about myself well before linkedin that you know i thrive when i have uh context right like i want to know why we're doing things why were decisions made like what, what is the objective? What's the global sort of, what's the thing we're globally optimizing for? And I'm, you know, most, most productive and happiest when I'm in that environment. And when I don't actually have access to that information, I struggle to be

productive and, and, and the worst case, like I get unhappy and, you know, like disgruntled, cause I don't know what we're doing, the things we're doing. I hadn't thought about it the way you said, I'm, I'm, I'm'm certain that by virtue of being in a team, it's not that I had access to the resources. It's more just like they all needed something from me. Profile was the most valuable real estate on the site at the time. It had more traffic than the homepage. It's different today because today it's the feed. But then it was profile. Actually, in a silly kind of way, we used to pride ourselves in

the fact that we had more traffic than the whole thing but like yeah those home page like they think they're special but like profiles got more traffic right and it's in like with it as you know run off with like the data at linkedin like all that stuff it's super simple right and just go right to n graphs and see what the traffic is right and so um i hadn't thought about it but i but you're, you're, it's an insightful question because certainly I then just by virtue of my job had access to more information because what would happen naturally is I get six different people asking me to do something and I can only do one or two of them. Now, what is my goal? My job is to figure out

what's actually most valuable to the business. Right. And then compassionately help them understand that. Right. And so, um, and you know, you start to hear a lot of the same things that would sort of trigger me over and over where it's like people would, people would show up, you know, in the last month of the last week of the quarter and they'd be like, but it's my OKR. I'd be like, okay, like, that's great. Like I, I have a sense of empathy for you that you signed up for something that you're not going to deliver on, but maybe you shouldn't have made it your OKR, you know, without talking to us first to see if we could commit to this thing. And so, so yeah, I don't know if I'm diverging from your question a little bit, but I mean, certainly I think like being in a role where you naturally have more access that it makes, it makes it easier because I don't have to fight as hard for the information, if you will. Um, part of, I think part of the interesting challenge and like

growing as a leader, uh, maybe to get ahead of a question a little bit there, maybe tie together. The other thing is, you know, figuring out when and how, like when it's actually now my job to be the decider. Right. So I think like early on, it's like, okay, well I can broker this. I can say there are six people that need something. And then I go to my boss or to my product partner or whatever and say, help me figure it out. But, and I can tell you precisely when it was, it was actually during Neptune. I was like, oh shit, like this is actually my job to make this decision. Right. Like, you know, like my job, you know, I've got a room full of people sitting here waiting for me to decide, are we going to ramp with this site speed or something? I'm like, oh, this is actually my job.

Right. Like, and it kind of clicked for me in that moment. But, you know, I think you can't do that if you don't have the information that you need or, or the, I guess, enough, enough information to be able to take risks. Right. I mean, it's like, I never had all the information, but I would, you know, say, okay, well, I think I know enough. This is what I think we should do. Right.

And, and there's always, you know, we have a wonderful culture at LinkedIn of like clean escalation. So it's always like, Hey, like if you really disagree with me, like, and you know, we can go figure out who the decider is. And I'm happy to like go go escalate that with you, right? It's interesting, you mentioned about the decision making, when there are a lot of things that we'll jump into there. But about decision making, as you keep growing in your role, many times, it's not just moving up, but it's also the role changes and the scope grows and with

every step of the growth the amount of information you have at least on the ground is less than what you had before like for example when you were managing a direct team as a line manager the amount of information you have about the engineering aspects of things very different from being a senior manager director or vp of engineering for example so as you abstract as you're dealing with more abstract pieces of information how do you make effective decisions and also many of these decisions need to be made promptly because of the mistake uh that the decision relies on it's it's it's interesting it took me a minute to understand your question because i which i which i totally get now because i think there's a there's there's there's a a content there's sort of a uh well thank you

chris i asked better questions let the records reflect that uh no no actually well that's not what I meant. Get us into a jam. You said you have less information. And I was thinking, no, I have more information. But I think what you mean is you have less information about the detail. Less details, yeah. Okay, let's say we need to choose some, let's say it's a decision of what, uh, which sub, which technical architecture to go with. Right. Or like, okay. So, but on the flip side of that, and this kind of ties to Gwang's question is you have more information about

what's important to the company, right. And you have more information about like, what is the problem that you're solving for? And I think the other thing that happened for me, uh, which is probably one of the most important sort of personal growth things that happened for me is I learned how to make values-based decisions, right? Like I learned how to like take the values of the company and use that to make decisions, right? I realized like that's why we have values. They help drive and empower us to make decisions, right? So things like

members first, for example, one of the absolutely critical and essential value at LinkedIn that drives decision-making every single day, right? And so I think the, you know, it was not my job. And actually I, it's like in my jam last night, I talked a little bit about why I'm writing code again right now.

And the, you know, there's a little bit about why I'm writing code again right now. And the, you know, I, there's a little, a little moment where I'm like, look, everything that I just said can go sideways where basically I'm saying, Hey, I can make better decisions and all these other things, but it's not my, like, it's not my job to go in and pretend that I, as a, as a leader to pretend that I know better what the right technical decision is. Right. It's my job to make sure that I can connect the context and the outcomes that we're looking for and the objectives and our values to the people that have the details so that then together we can kind of, you know, like they can make the right decision based on that information,

right? And maybe it's like, maybe a lot of times it's just as simple as actually making sure that the people making those detailed decisions know what the objective is. times it's just as simple as actually making sure that the people making those detailed decisions know what the objective is. Sometimes it's about reframing it for them in some way, right? Sometimes it's about actually, you know, oftentimes it's funny as, as, as important as like members first is sometimes people would struggle to sort of understand what that means. And it's actually, you know, so you'd help them apply a value in a moment and help them see like, no, this is the right call because this is the right thing to do for members. Even if it means that, you know, X metric is going to go down for a little while or forever or whatever. And so, um, I think, I think to me, that's kind of where the

magic is. It's connecting like the, the connecting the objectives and getting people aligned on those. And then once you have that, then the details tend to work themselves out a little bit more. The other thing that you have the luxury of doing and the more senior of a role that you get in, and maybe we'll touch on this some, I don't know, as we talk about my job today, but you kind of have the luxury of taking a long view right so like i can say hey look as a vp at linkedin right it's like hey i know like let's talk about like neptune again for a second this the desktop redesign is like i know that we're going to be more productive i like know it in my bones that we're going to be more productive and eventually we're going to sort of accelerate past all the sort of stuff we're doing. But the product manager or engineering manager that's working on, you know, sub feature X of profile is feeling a lot of pain in that moment because they want to ship their feature and they can't because their whole team is doing this thing that's not going to pay off for nine months or whatever. Right.

And I recognize and I think you have to you have to recognize and name it and be compassionate about the fact that like, I've got that luxury of time. Right. And they, they may not, right. Like they're feeling like, I mean, hell, it could be any number of things, but they're, they're feeling a much shorter, shorter window of like reward. Yeah. So Ron, I seem really prepared with all the questions. Everything's really well organized for this episode. So I decided to, you know, kind of spice things up and throw in some random tangents.

So following up on the value based like decision making, like, is that something you apply to your personal life as well? Like in terms of, um, like outside of work? I do. Um, and a step further. So I have three kids. they're ages four to 11. And, uh, we joined, uh, an independent school in the Bay area called Hillbrook about four or five years ago. And the reason that I joined them, I mean, it wasn't the reason why I like started looking like, so my kid, my, my, it was my oldest who was in first grade at the time. So he started there in second grade. They have values on the wall. Actually, the podcast, they're literally right here. Be kind, be curious, take risks, be your best.

So this was, I bought this at the school auction. This, this a couple of weeks ago, my son made a couple of these letters, my second grader. Nice. And so it was because I saw the values on the wall. And then I heard the head of school talking about the values. And now that I'm part of the community, like every year they pick a value and they kind of come back to it. You know, during the sort of Friday, they have a Friday flag where the whole community comes together. And so, like, you know, I think I don't know what it is this year, to be honest.

But but last year it was like, take risks, right? And they talk about what that means. What does it mean to take risks? And so, uh, I put my kids in the school because I was like, man, I did not have that until I was in my thirties. Like I couldn't tell you what the values of the companies I worked at before LinkedIn were. Um, but I can still tell you what the values actually, I think I heard that, that Ryan might've just rolled out new values. I'm curious what they are, but like, but, but are. But I could tell you what they were when I was there. And then I think in – I wouldn't say – it's not like every single day I come back to values-based decision going in my – but there are moments when I think about it. uh a very silly little story as i was bothered by something in the kitchen that like just that that uh my wife had done and um i was bothered by it and i was like why do i care right like like why do i why do i care right and i actually peeled back to figure out what the value was for me in

that moment that bothered me because it wasn't the outcome of the thing in the kitchen right it was like there was something deeper and so i think i primarily i i sometimes i'll do it to try to figure out what's bothering me in a certain moment right or like like what what is it what is it about a decision that i'm trying to make the so the reason why i ask is because i'm you know trying to come up with my own values and it's a pain in the ass there's so many options and it's so i've done that i've i've done that exercise and i i don't i couldn't like please don't ask me to tell you what my set of values are i use it a little bit more like in real time like i described i'm sorry i cut you off i didn't know no no no no okay what was that journey like like was it was there fruitful i'm sorry i cut you off no no no no no no okay what was that

journey like like was it was there fruitful bits that other people can you know learn from because it seemed it's hard well so so actually let me answer it with slightly differently so um i i don't think i got there personally yet and maybe it's because i was trying to do it by myself um and i'm gonna use but but in the startup, you know, the company that I've started, we have just gone through the exercise of defining our values. And it's one of the reasons, like, this is the kind of thing, one of the reasons why I wanted to start a company,

because like while I'm an engineer by trade, and that's where like most, like I'm, you know, I want to, like I'm happiest when I'm learning other things and like, you know, I want to like, I'm happiest when I'm learning other things and like, you know, kind of learning more about like the business outside. And so we partnered with an, a phenomenal, just absolutely phenomenal marketing agency who specializes in helping startups basically figure out like, what's their vision, what's their mission, what are their values? Like what, like, how do you talk about yourself in a way that people understand what the hell you're talking

about? Right. And so the process of coming up with values for our company has been awesome. Like I, you know, we're, we're very close to being able to like roll them out, um, and having a partner in it, like having, you know, actually in this case, two partners, it's like, they're not just my values, it's mine and Pete's values and it's a business, but the values very much reflect us as people. I mean, you can see me and him like throughout the values. Um, but then having, you know, uh, a partner in the marketing firm that is expert in like doing this with companies and sort of walking you through it and providing a framework is nice. And then it's like the, you know, I think the challenge maybe I had, like, like you said, Gwang, it's like, I don't know where to start. Like, you know, if I, if I look a list of like 30 values, I'm going to say like 27 of them apply to me. Right.

It's like, yes, of course. I think it's important to me to be funny. And yes, integrity is important. And yes, and yes, and yes. Right. And so I think having someone that can kind of help you distill down is really useful. So if I were to do this again as an individual, you know, I'd probably look honestly for some sort of like executive coach or someone to help me with it and say, hey, like, I want to actually codify what my values are. I haven't

gotten there yet. But I do do it sort of in real time, the way I describe it's like, in this moment, what is that? Like, what is the thing that I'm like the principle that I'm operating from? Nice. Thanks. I'm glad we're talking about this. So you mentioned you recently went through this exercise with Jam. Can you describe what that process was briefly for folks who might be interested more in this? Yeah. So this is actually I'll plug them. It's a marketing company called Five Foot Two Marketing. And they they basically sent us a, a Google, it started with a, with a, with a Google survey. Um, I don't remember how long they told me I should carve off,

but I literally spent the entire flight from San Jose or San Francisco to Charlotte, North Carolina, like a cross country flight filling out this survey. And I don't know if I ever would have gotten it done if I hadn't been on an airplane, nothing else going on. But within that forum, they, I mean, it was asked, like, some of it was very much like, you know, here's a list of 37 values, like which ones are important to you. Right. And some of the, some of it was like very open-ended, like, you know, how do you describe your company? But I mean, basically it was a very, I mean, this is part of what we paid for, right? Like they kind of have a package of, of like, Hey, we've done this before. We'll help you with this. But there

was a lot of within that, a lot of introspection. Right. my uh pete my co-founder also did the same thing and so um the first thing and this is a phrase that jeff weiner used to use a lot a lot is like they just held up a mirror to us right like jeff would say that a lot in a meeting he's like hey i'm just gonna hold up a mirror to you so and so you sort of like let's just tell you what we heard here right and like even like, even that itself is, um, a really interesting sort of moment of discovery, right? It's like, Oh, I said that. And, and there were like much of it, Pete and I were pretty aligned. And then there were a few areas where we were like complete opposite, like some of them were sliders, right? It's like, where are you on the, like,

you know, you want to appeal to, you know, like everyone, or you want to repeal, you want to appeal to like very niche audience, right. Things like that. And like, there were a number of them where we were within one or two points on a 10 point scale. And there were some where we were pretty far apart from each other. And so then that led to some real sort of discussion about why that was and what did those terms mean to us and um i can give a quick example yes please if you'd like okay so a really one example um of that uh the market i can't remember where pete and i were on the spectrum uh like with with respect to each other but but the marketing agency was intrigued that like i know i'll just speak myself. I had not put innovative as high on

my list of priorities. She's like, I'm surprised you didn't have innovative. And I was like, look, I was like, I, I actually, I think part of it is my, what my definition of innovative is, which has evolved a little bit since that moment in time. But I was like, look, I actually don't think that like being innovative is, is a goal in and of itself i actually think it can be counterproductive to teams and i remember actually i remember people during that project i mentioned earlier voyager when we redid the mobile app where we had very like loud critics that were like hey we're not innovating enough here like we're not doing anything interesting in the product and i like i felt very strong i was like that what like that, what, like,

that shouldn't be a goal. Like our goal is to actually deliver value and to help like the, like transform this thing to like a community product. Right. And so, um, but it led to a bunch of back and forth and now with their partnership and their help, they're able to kind of listen again, hold up a mirror and like pull out the nuances of what's important. Um, so, so, so anyway, that like, but then there's just been just to kind of come back to the first question and just kind of close it out as it started with a survey, some discussion, but then, you know, they've just very methodically walked us through and it kind of helped hold us like, honestly, project manage

us through like, like, okay, well first, like, you know, we're going to, these are our sets of deliverables. Like we're going to draft a vision statement. We're going to draft a mission statement, you know, at the end, we're kind of at the phase now where like, we feel really good about it, but like where they're now there's like literally a copywriter, like going through and making sure that like tenses are, you know, consistent and stuff like that. But, um, you know, there's a level of creativity where maybe they would listen to me talk for a couple of minutes and then they would kind of come back with a pithy version of what I'm trying to say. Right. And so, um, but the, the real learning, or I guess,

like, I guess, challenge and personal growth for me in this was, you know, in my role at LinkedIn, I had an opportunity to sit in conversations like this, right? Like I, I probably would have not sat into a conversation with Ryan in terms of what the values are, but I would have had an opportunity to like hear a preview of it as a VP. Right. And maybe ask a question or two, but here, you know, I, like ultimately I was like, fuck, that's kind of like that saying earlier, like, this is my decision, right? It's mine and Pete's decision. Like, like this firm is not going to write these for us.

Like we're, we have to own it and feel great about it. And so, you know, and it's like, I don't, I don't know that every engineer is going to want that responsibility. And I'm sure there are CTOs that don't, and I'm sure there are CTOs that are just like me. And there are probably some even more that are like, hell, I'm going to write them all right. Who needs an agency? Right. And so, but for me, it was actually having that responsibility and accountability to, you know, it's like, I'm sure, you know, like you're reading that, reading a doc and it's like,

I don't feel good about these words. And maybe you ask a question, maybe you don't, but ultimately it's somebody else's decision. And this it's like,'s like, you know, that word's not sitting well with me. Why is it not sitting well with me? And I can't just criticize it. I have to, you know, then like constructively say, well, you know, how about this or how about that? It's a very deep exercise, like going through all of it. Lots of introspection, I imagine.

It totally is. I'll tell you what i like i hope that i have the opportunity to build an organization around it right i mean that's the goal right it's been and i mean we didn't you know pete and i've been working together since september right we didn't start with our vision and mission and values um although it's always something that i've had a sense that it's important, but now that I'm starting to hire, like, I'm, I'm glad that I have it because, you know, great engineers, they want to know, like, what's your vision, right? Like they want to, they want to know like, what, you know, what are your values, right? Like, and, and, and, you know, many of them want to help

bring those to life or weigh in on them. Right. And it's like, for me, I like, I talk to people, I'm like, Hey, look, like, we've got a good start on what the values are. They may evolve. They probably will evolve. Right. But you know, the trick is going to actually be to scale a team that actually lives those values. Right. And you know, it's, it's like right now they're reflective of me and Pete, but like I have to scale and continue to maintain them and role model them and, you know, apply them. And so it feels, the timing feels right to me. I just, you know, hope to have the opportunity to build an organization around them. So you mentioned you and Pete have been working

since September on Jam, the company that both of you co-founded. Can you tell us more about how that came to be? Like you were atin for a while and you were in this leadership position how do you go from there to founding a new startup can you walk us through that journey sure so um pete and i uh where do i start i Maybe just do it kind of chronologically. Sure. It was probably the easiest way.

So Pete and I worked around each other for a couple of years at LinkedIn. He was leading the feed. And at the time I was leading the growth team. So we weren't directly partner, but we were in similar like R and D we were in the same R and broad R and D Oregon. So got to know each other. And then for about, I don't know, two-ish years, give or take, I sort of moved from growth back over to lead basically the other part of flagship.

So content, feed, profile, search, number, like everything but growth, essentially. And Pete was leading most of the same product area. So he and I were partners, you know, he was a product leader. I was an engineering leader for like the sort of core consumer product and, uh, just very like-minded in the way that we worked. I mean like friends, but I'm just like thought very similarly about stuff. He cares a lot about leadership. He cares a lot about the people on the team. And he's also a very thoughtful product leader. And then we led a project together and, uh, it was whatever, no need to go into the details, but we led a project together that required us to basically like bring a bunch of people across the company together to get something done.

And so like we're in the trenches, I mean, literally running a standup every day. And so, you know, and so I think we'd sort of been to war together tactically and also sort of strategically had worked together in partnership. And so I just knew he was, I mean, I had an opportunity to work with a lot of really amazing people at LinkedIn, but to me, he was a very special sort of product partner. And then he left and he worked on, uh, went and worked for some nonprofits for a little bit. And after the nonprofits, his background is in journalism.

And so before becoming a product manager, he worked at the BBC and he produced Radio 5. So he was sort of behind the glass, like producing, you know, as a producer on radio five. And so he has a very authentic and, and sort of a lifelong love of audio that started when he was like interned, I think at 14 or something at the BBC. And so after he finished working at the nonprofit and took a little time to himself, he started tinkering with what is now jam. And so this was about exactly this time last year, maybe a little bit like what roughly spring last year. And after he'd been tinkering for a couple of months, um, I was chatting with him and I like, I was like, dude, send me an invitation, right? Like what, like, what are you doing? And so, and I, you know, the core service it is today,

which is essentially like the way the product manifests as we send you an SMS every day with a link to a playlist and you listen to your playlist of jams, right? These short audio bites or sorry, I try not audio bites, bite-sized audio. Right. And so, um, I started listening to it on my commute. I've taken the kids to school and I would listen to it every day. And I like shared it with my wife and I shared it with a couple of people. I worked at LinkedIn and they were all listening to it every day. I was like, I was like, huh, like this is like really sticky. Right. And I'm like learning it and I'm enjoying it. So I'd call him and kind of riff with him about what he was doing on the phone. Right. Like, and, and eventually, you know, as I was

trying to think about what was next for me and, you know, my goal for years had been to run an engineering team and, um, you know, and that's something, I mean, all the engineering leaders and Ryan, like everyone at LinkedIn knew that that's what I wanted. And that's kind of where I was working my, working my ways towards. And I started thinking about like, you know, maybe now is a time for me to, you know, like just put my head up and look around. Right. But, but, but while this was going on, I was, uh, just very authentically like kind of reconnecting with Pete and what he was building. And I was like, dude, like, what are you up to? Right. Like, let's like, so we went and

had lunch and chatted and like, he kind of shared his vision with me. And then, you know, it nagged at me for a little bit. I had a long drive to LA with my wife where she started by saying, I don't want you to go back to working at a startup. And I said, well, let's chat about that. Why? Um, maybe this was a values conversation in retrospect. And so anyway, I, um, I, i you know on one hand sort of emotionally knew that i wanted to do this for a little longer than i decided to do it um there was the first conversation was just like what's the vision the second one which is really important is i was kind of getting in touch with my ambition where you know like you know and like, you know, and I wanted to know that Pete had the shared ambition. Right. So, and the punchline there is neither of us,

let me maybe say this positively. We both want to build a like massive, you know, impactful consumer product, right? Like we're not in this to build like a, a niche product that, you know, gets a few hundred thousand users. Like we believe that there's an opportunity here to build like a, a niche product that, you know, gets a few hundred thousand users. Like we believe that there's an opportunity here to have like hundreds of millions of people using this thing. We believe there's an opportunity to really, um, help. I'll actually test out our, our, our new vision statement to entertain curious minds. Like we think there's an opportunity here, you know, via audio and there's a moment in time and there's, there's, there's no one else doing exactly what we're doing. And so, and so another really important

step along the journey for me was like, do we have shared ambition? Right. Cause if Pete's goal was to go build a lifestyle business, you know, where we have a few, whatever, like a small number of people, then that might've led to, it would have led to a different outcome, but that's not his goal. And it's hard to tell that actually, I think from talking to either of us, neither of us sort of wear on our sleeves, I think that sort of what we're doing. And so we're learning, I mean, I'm sharing it forward here because I think it's actually important. Engineers want to hear that that's what you're want to do. Right. And so,

and so once I sort of understood what the vision was, you know, I mean, already sort of can check the box that like any I think any great consumer product starts with like a small number of like dedicated people that use it. And I can tell you, you know, when people don't get their jams, like it's fortunately knock on wood. It's been a little while since we had like an SMS deliverability problem, but I start getting text messages. Right. And they're like, hey, where's my jam? Right. And so I like to joke, although it's serious, this is the fourth consumer company that I've worked for. And it's the first one that my wife has used on her own, you know, like with any amount of like, like I self-driven, right. I mean, like,

you know, she would begrudgingly, like if I'd send her a LinkedIn message, she might like, she's like a badge clear. She opens LinkedIn to get rid of the badges, but not for any other reason. And so, you know, but jam, like, I mean, she just, she uses it. Right. And she meant we have conversations at the dinner table about things that she heard on jam without me asking her. And so to me, like, that's, that's all like, these are like good signs that, that there's something here. And so the last bit for

me was like well what's the opportunity cost for me here right like if i were to do this right and versus you know you can you know i was very surprised by and still kind of find it hard to believe the kinds of job opportunities that i sort of had access to as I was leaving LinkedIn. And I wanted to know that I wouldn't lose that. And actually I'll share one of the most impactful or memorable conversations as I was leaving LinkedIn, as I sat down with Ryan, our CEO to tell him that I was leaving and why. And he said to me, he's like, Hey, Chris, you know, you should know that, you know, you can, you know, if this doesn't work out, you, you know, there's a job for you here. You know, you can go work at any major tech company and get a leadership position. And he's like, you take comfort in that. And now never think about

it again. Like, don't let it cross your mind again, just go win. And that just meant a lot to me. Right. And so, you know, I share the story because I do think about it a little bit, but that is my mentality. It's like, I, I don't like, I don't want another job after this. Right. My goal is to go build this company, make it really successful, build a leadership team that is, you know, 10 times better or more than I am and hand it off at some point, you know, in the distant future and then do something else with my life. Right. Like I would like to, you know, like I've, I mentioned my kid's school earlier in part because it's a passion of mine. Like I joined the board of the kid's school a couple of years ago. And so, you know, I would, I would love to finish this, finish it. Right. And, and then like,

commit my life to other stuff. Right. And so all of that is, was part of my journey and my decision-making that was, that was like kind of all that came together and like the timing just felt right. And so I made the leap. That is incredible. Thanks. Thanks for sharing that thought process and walking us through how you came to make that decision. And also, the aspect that you, the part that you mentioned, like the opportunity cost. So you had a job at LinkedIn, and the opportunity cost of going here is losing out on potentially the trajectory that you were either on or probably a job somewhere else again any of those number of things which are possible what made you eventually make peace with it and say it's okay and i'm gonna take this risk and when you made that decision is it something

that you felt fully committed to so the part that you mentioned ryan said about that know that this is there and then don't think about it again it's really important advice how easy was was it to actually apply it i think i think by the time i made the decision it was pretty easy It took a lot of, again, like self-reflection to figure out what really mattered to me. And there's something I is now very clear to me, which I'll share and hopefully can help, you know, anyone that might be listening to this is it took me a while. And it was really mostly in retrospect that I realized this, but there's really two dimensions. I think one dimension is your career or my career, right? I'll use first person. So what are my career goals?

What are my life goals? And what am I doing to sort of maximize achieving those? And look, before I joined LinkedIn, I didn't even have the language to even say that, right? I don't know that I would LinkedIn. Like I, I didn't even have the language to even say that. Right. I don't know that I would like, and I, but one of the things I learned as a, as a manager is, and I'm sure you may know this, like, you know, as mentors is like, it's hard to help someone if they don't know what they want. Right. And so I, I've, I, I, I learned to be, I learned to at least feel like in a moment, I know what I want. I learned that it's okay to be wrong about it, but it's so much more helpful

for the people trying to help you. It's like, you can give them something to go on that you believe in that moment may be right. And so that's sort of dimension one. It's like, what do I want in my life? Which I just shared a minute ago. Like I have way more clarity about that than I've ever had.

Actually, I'll share part of the journey to get there because it was a really important question. Mohawk asked me, this was well before my Ryan conversation, Mohawk's the head of engineering at LinkedIn. He said, what is this next job setting you up for? And it actually stumped me because I was like, huh. I was like, actually, I was so focused on getting to that head of engineering job that I don't know what the answer to that is. Right. And now I can say with certainty, like, I don't want another job or not another like engineering leader job. Right. That's my that's sort of my conviction in this moment.

The other dimension is actually how you're spending your time. Like what you know, what are you doing every day? And is it rewarding to you? Right. Is it fun? Is it, is it support the lifestyle that you want? Right. And so, and I, you know, I, there, there's so much about LinkedIn that I absolutely loved

as a phenomenal company. And I would, you know, I would work there again in a heartbeat. Um, and I think everyone that has their job there, like, like I think, you know, it's, it's a job to cherish. Um, the job that I had, I, you know, it's like eventually it's like, I just, I was at a point where I wanted to do something different for a while. Right. Like I was doing a lot of change management. Right. I was doing a lot of like, just a lot of things that I felt, I started to feel like I was solving the same kinds of problems, but with different sets of people. Right.

So, and I, like, I can work with, I mean, I actually think part of why I thrived at LinkedIn is I'm very good at that. I'm very good at building the relationships and, you know, and, and I appreciate the recognition that like people saw me as a compassionate leader, but it's like, I just kind of felt like I was doing it over and over. And so I wanted to do something different. Now it wasn't like I was running to writing a code, writing code again. Right. Although I have, as you've heard me talk about, I have enjoyed that tremendously. Um, but I wanted to do something different with my days. And the thing that I wanted to do was build a company. Right. And then that, as I talked about last night, like, or that, that is why I'm writing code because I feel like

that's what needs to happen right now. It's not because I just wanted to go write code every day. It's because I was like, well, that's what this company needs right now. And so, um, I wanted to do something different with my time. So you put those two things together by the time I made the decision. Um, I felt pretty certain about it. Right. And, and like, there's, there's the other thing which I'll name just because it's kind of like maybe an elephant in the room and some, if I don't name it, which is the financial aspect of it. Right. I mean, like, you know, you're well compensated as a, as an engineering vice president. And I had been there for nine and a half years. And so there's both sides of that one is, you know, I'm fortunate to be in a position where I could take the financial risk to go do this for a

little bit. But on the other hand, you know, there is no more, you know, I walked away from stock, like RSUs, and, you know, bonuses and salaries, you know, that, that are nothing like what, what I have today. And so, um, you know, and I think that is an incredibly personal thing, but you can come back to like, what are your goals, right? Like what, you know, what is the real material consequence of that in this moment? And for how long can you afford to take that risk? Right. And so there was an element of, I didn't actually go to the point of building like a spreadsheet and putting a date on it, but, you know, I did some kind of back of the napkin math of like, you know, what is the consequence here for me? I have to remind myself sometimes, you know, where it's like you get in these moments where,

you know, I think twice about spending money on something because, you know, my liquid assets are like, you know, nothing like they used to be. And then I remind myself that like, that's totally fine. Like this is a very rational decision in my mind that I made. And so like quit being irrational about being like, oh man, I don't have this like paycheck to pay for this Hawaiian vacation. Right. I have to, so, but, but like, so that I'm just like, you know, transparently like that, that is something that like has real world consequences, but it's, but, but I can go back to the like thoughtfulness that I made the decision. Right. So when I, in those moments is probably the closest I get to like, did I do the the right thing it doesn't take me a lot of energy to go back to like yes i did the right thing and this

was the right decision and i mean i think you know i 100 committed myself to this right like that was i think like i think it would be really really i would not advise anyone to do this with like not a commitment right i think the you could probably put a time on it and as i talk to engineers about the idea of joining jam right like i think there's a version of this story with them where it's like look yeah you know you can leave your senior staff engineering job you know at a big tech company and you won't make as much money. Right. But if you believe, if you believe in the company, like the upside is enormous. And, and if the downside is basically just the cost of the time, it's not like you can't go back to big company, get a job.

Right. And like, you can always, like, no, one's going to take your experience. Let's say to you, right. Like your experience that you have to date at LinkedIn and the role that you're in away from you, you still have that experience and you've probably got a lot more valuable experience. And so I think there's a like downside calculation there that, um, isn't obvious to everyone. It wasn't to me at first to think about it that way. It's like, okay. Yeah. So I'm like, let's say I do this for a year, right? Like, okay. Like it's not actually the end of the world. If it you know again i try not to focus on the downside but you got to be realistic right because you don't want to pull the wool over anyone's actually i mean any engineer that i hire is going to be too smart to pull the wool over their eyes anyway but like

yeah you don't want to be dishonest intellectually dishonest about what the downside is um actually chris we're trying to get linkedin as a sponsor to this podcast so uh let's not uh encourage ronick uh leave linkedin oh sorry i i only used him as an example that was i'm not encouraging ronick but that was a pretty bad joke but there will be worse ones so i was like where did that come from very very careful about that sorry go ahead uh no i was just, where did that come from? I might lose my job just because of that. Our future sponsorship money, you know, potentials. Well, there's a whole LinkedIn podcasting network now, right?

I don't know exactly. I don't know much about it, but yes. I've heard there is one, but haven't looked into enough to know how we can be a part of it yet. Maybe someday. Coming back to this, I'm glad you walked through that thought process of actually going through the downsides too, because it's very important for someone to be very thoughtful in that decision making, because otherwise they're in for a surprise.

In many cases, that's the opportunity cost, which is very very tangible as opposed to many other things which one might realize at some point so thanks for sharing that and being so transparent i think it is super helpful for not just people who are wanting to start a company and who work at big tech but also for engineers who might be thinking of joining a startup yeah and so either joining or in specific cases, like in your case, starting a startup, it's not just a professional choice. I also think it's also a lifestyle decision to an extent, because at LinkedIn or in big tech, for example, especially in your position, you have a pretty packed calendar, which in a way structures your day. You can draw boundaries around it to make sure you have time for personal life, family. And you've actually written about this on LinkedIn and I think Thrive Global as well, where you mentioned how you took paternity leave when you had your third kid.

And family time is something that's very important to you and it's something that is a very high priority when you start a startup it can take up and consume pretty much everything that you have to give so as you've made this transition now that your calendar is technically fully open and the time is completely yours to choose how you spend it how do you balance that how do you structure things such that your priorities are still aligned in terms of family and you're able to spend time productively where there's not a calendar block saying a person need to meet to make a decision for example. Yeah. I mean, I think this is, this is a,

at least for me. And I imagine for most, like, you know, it is a, a loft, a lifelong journey and like learning, like I'm sure there's not a,

if there's a magic answer to this, like how I'll go write a book and like, maybe that'll be my, you know, my fortune. But I think it comes back to like, I'm going to use the word values, but a little bit more lightly than, you know, the codified values here. Right. So I think, you know, going back to that time in my life where I, you know, so my daughter is now four and a half.

So I wrote that article about four and a half years ago because I think it came out right after my paternity leave. I just actually made a conscious choice. I was like, my family's important to me. And I, I had like, it's not that I hadn't done it sooner. I mean, my wife and I had always like from day one of like our first child, we're like, we're going to have dinner together as a family every night. And, you know, we do that almost every night, right? Like there, there, you know, but there would be exceptions or like, I mean, I was working at a startup then too, when he was born. Um, and you know, like I would leave work at seven and get home, you know, seven 30 or eight or whatever. And so I just started, I decided, I was like, okay, I'm going to leave work at five every day. And I just made that like, uh, uh, like a choice, an explicit choice that I made

and I was intentional about. And I also around that point in my career, like learned to just turn off work on vacation or like on nights or on weekends and like consciously. Right. And it's a skill that I, I try to anybody that I sort of manage or mentor or whatever. I try to instill, like, it really is just that simple. Like, honestly, you just, I mean, I'll talk a little bit more about tactics, but it starts with just making the choice that you have to decide that it's important to you, be clear about what's important to you and then commit yourself to doing it. Um, and then of course it helps if you have family members that hold you accountable to it. Right. I mean, you know, my, my kids and my wife will let me know if I'm, you know, looking at my phone during dinner, I don't want to pretend that

I'm perfect. Right. I will still, if my phone buzzes and I'm, it's right next to me at the table, it's very hard for me not to look at it, but you know, I just keep making that same choice over and over usually not to, um, now the big change. And so earlier I sort of mentioned that when we made that trip to LA, my wife said, uh, I don't want you to work for a startup. I was like, all right, well, let's unpack it. And the main thing she was coming from was exactly what you alluded to. It was like time, you know, because her memory of me working for a startup was around the clock working. Right. And so, and I, and I was like, I was like, well, let me break it down a little bit. Like one is I won't have a team for a while. So if there is a production issue, I'm going to have to stop what I'm doing and fix the production issue. There's just no way around that until I have a team. Right. And like, um, but then there's the, like, you know, I'm in control

of the engineering choices we're making. I've learned a lot about how to build systems that aren't going to fall apart. Right. At least I hope they don't fall apart. I'll do everything I can to prevent them from falling apart. Right. I I'm in control of the prioritization decisions we're making. I'm in control of the commitments that I make. And Pete, my co-founder also has two, two kids, right? And he also has had the experience of being a senior leader and a nurturing environment like LinkedIn. And we both know the importance. I mean, it's hard to have lived through the last couple of years without understanding how critical mental wellbeing is. And, and so I think just baked into who we are as people and as leaders, we want to build a company that sort of honors that and, and creates the space for people to have other priorities. So,

you know, I mentioned earlier, I'm on the board of my kid's school. That's actually, it ends up being a much larger time commitment than I realized, but I'm super passionate about it. And so, you know, I'm just very transparent. Like, Hey Pete, I'm going to be at a board meeting this morning. I got a thing at the school this evening, et cetera, et cetera. And so I just, you know, work around it. Um, and yes, I am working around the clock. Like I actually, but I'm doing it out of passion. And I, and, and I also do, I also, you know, don't let it interfere with the time, like the critical time that my family's home. Like I said, you know, I'm going to go pick up my kids from school here in an hour or a little less than that.

And I'm not going to work until they're in bed. And then when they're in bed, I'll sit right back down, you know, at this computer and I'll, you know, work for a little while. And so, and usually my intention is to sit down and work for like an hour or something. And often this is where like, often it's like three hours later. And I was like, I really need to go to sleep, but like, I'm solving a problem that I just don't want to walk away from. Right. And so it's kind of self-induced. So, and I will just one last thought here. Like, I think like if we were having a conversation about how you learn to do that as a leader and scaling a team and stuff, like, I mean, I've already written about that a little bit, but like there's, there's a lot, a lot of the things I learned to do at LinkedIn, they

just don't apply in this moment right now. Right. And so that, that that that it is different and that's why i said like i'm figuring it out as i go in terms of the tactics for doing that like when you first realize like uh or the moment that led to you deciding hey i'm gonna make the conscious decision of leaving uh at work at five o'clock what was the i don't know the right like the exercise i've heard before it was like you know sounds a little janky but it's like you know you you ask yourself it's like oh yeah you know are these the decision or like

is this how i choose to spend my time and then you like literally ask yourself that like every single day or you know uh like are there any sort of like tactics that you use that helps you in terms of getting to those moments? Yeah, I mean, super broadly, I do think it's important to ask, like in any of these moments, whether it's work or the weekend or whatever. It's like, like, what's the most important thing right now? Right. So what you'll hear, like, I think I had to learn over and over at LinkedIn. Like every time my job changed or my responsibilities changed or project got added or whatever, like, I mean, I would sort of just get into a situation where suddenly I felt like I was not in control of my calendar again. And I think that's a very normal thing for someone

that's scaling and like managing and, you know, engineers often have the perceptions that their managers are too busy for them. And that's because they look at their calendar and it's too busy. And so, you know, and I've fallen into that trap a few times. And so like the key thing in every single time, it's the advice is the same that you've probably heard a billion times. And it's very simple. It's just like, look, it's all prioritization. A hundred percent is like, what is important right now? And how are you choosing to spend your time? And so I think that applies and work and applies in life. It's, you need to be in an environment where you feel safe to actually like do something about it. Right. And like, I mean, whether that's vulnerably going to

your boss or your partners or whoever it is that you're accountable to and saying, Hey, look, I'm doing too much stuff right now or whatever. Or if you're fortunate, you know, if you have a team that you're managing and figuring out how to delegate, like there's lots of tactics to, to sort of create the space, but it all boils, boils back down to that. Now in the environment that I'm in today, I think I try to, you know, again, like I am acutely aware that, you know, I am half of a company, right? Like Jam still has two full-time employees. It's me and Pete, right? I have a little bit of like contracting help, but not, but, but it's like, you know, it's, it's, I'm half of a company. So every time that I'm not, I mean, taking time to talk to a podcast, I'm like, is this a good use of my time right now? Because half of the company is not

doing something right. Like I'm go to, you know, it was just spring break. Pete went to Southern California for a week. I went to Hawaii for a week. The company effectively like more or less like shuts down for two weeks in that situation. Right. But like those are conscious choices, but putting aside those things, like when I'm actually working, it's like, what's really important right now? Like what actually needs to happen? Right. What do we need to learn today? And I think a lot of it at this stage is learning, right? It's like, okay, we have a hypothesis about, um, let's say sharing a jam on LinkedIn and what's going to work well. Right. And so what do we need to change in the code to make that happen? Or, uh, you know,

SMS deliverability isn't great right now. So, you know, we need to have, like, we moved to a short code, right? And it's like, what's the work that it's going to take to move to a short code or, you know, like X and Y and Z, like, like there's any number of things that I can go spend time on on any given day. And so I will usually ask myself, like, what is the most important thing? It's funny on that flight to North Carolina that I mentioned, I filled out the marketing survey on the way back. I was actually planning to, um, uh, without going into a ton of boring detail, like I was planning to approach a problem one way. I'll just say it really generically.

Like I was going to go write a bunch of actually JavaScript and like move over, move our web architecture. I was convinced that the launch, the new player that we launched a few weeks ago, that I needed to actually move the whole website to React, which is something I'm doing, but I haven't done yet. And when I sat down on the plane, I just kind of had this epiphany that I was like, one, it's actually funny.

It was a little bit just circumstantial. I was like, man, I don't think sitting on a tiny laptop screen writing React like is the right thing to do. But what I can do is some of the lighter weight, like restyling it and like you know in css and make it look better and so i spent the first part of that flight actually basically rebuilding just the markup and the css to make it like a sexier player and then as i was doing it i was like you know you know, I'm really like, we need to move to react.

There's a whole bunch of reasons why I want to like move off the current architecture that we have, but that's not important right now. The important thing is like, I can follow this thread that I started on the flight. And then I just spent like the next week, you know, rebuilding the player and our old stack so I can get it out there so that people can start using it. And like, you know, we get the benefit that we need out of it. And that what drove that decision was not, this is, it's kind of like the opposite of the engineering thing I was talking about earlier with like the desktop redesign, right? It's like in the longterm, it's going to be better for us to be on react. But right now, actually,

you know, there's a whole host of like reasons why we need a new player in front of our listeners today. I can get there faster here, even though it's at the expense. And like it was a real sense of what's important right in this moment. So having said all that, it's hard, right? There are days like what, one other quick story. Like the other day I woke up and I had logged a bug and this open source framework that we use months ago. And you know, the,

of course the maintainer was like, Hey, why don't you fix it? It's actually, it's in our, it's in our react native app, which is not a priority for me right now. And so I got not doing any react native coding at the moment. And so I wasn't worried about it. I was like, I'm not, it's just not a priority. Like I kind of like the idea of fixing it, but like, I'm not going to. And then out of nowhere, I woke up and someone's like, Hey, I have a fix for your bug. Can you test it? That's pretty neat. And I was like, Oh, that'd be a good diversion, right?

Like I'll spend, you know, an hour or whatever. And then, and so that sort of snowballed by the end of the day, I'd spent like six or seven hours basically testing and discovering that there were new bugs, logging the bugs, all this other crap. And at the, which is all very valuable to the open source community. Ultimately it's valuable to me because this is like a pretty critical library that we use. It's literally the player. It's like the player library that we use in our, in our React Native app.

I was like, that was not the best use of my time. Right. I look back, I'm like, I'm like, you know, I, I think a couple hours on this would have been a good investment, but I, somehow I let the day get away with me. And a lot of, a lot of it's cause it was fun. Right. I was like, Hey, I'm collaborating with this open source engineer and helping like root out some bugs. And I was like, fuck, I don't know at the end of the day, if this is the, the right use of my time. And so in those moments, Guang to answer your question, like you, you, I have to like, I just have to keep learning, right? It's like, it's like, okay, well learn from that. And, and, and actually case in point, like now he's got a revision of the fix and it's been a couple

of days and I haven't, I haven't made the space yet to go back and test the new revision because I have things that are more critical for me in this moment. so i carry a little guilt about it because you know for the obvious reasons but like but it's it's the right thing for me to do in this moment uh there are so many more questions we want to ask and uh but we also want to be respectful of the time so we will start to wrap up and as we do uh we usually ask this to our guests, and we would love to get your story as well in terms of what's your favorite misadventure? Now that you're building Jam, it could be something that happened with the Jamstack. It could be something else entirely. Yeah, you throw me off with the word favorite, but I'm prepared to talk talk about so there's maybe there's there's my go-to answer for yeah so which i i use the term

favorite loosely and this is something that so okay short story we uh we my wife and i train with a gym instructor a couple times a week and every time he pushes us too hard my reaction is oh that was fun and he gave me that same reaction like reaction is, oh, that was fun. And he gave me that same reaction. Like, fun is an interesting word of choice of words there. It's just something I grew up with and I stuck. And that's why whenever we talk about misadventures, I was like, what's your favorite one then?

So that's where it comes from. So got it. So no, there's definitely one that I'm, I'm, uh, happy to share with you that, that actually, you know, I, I remember very clearly and is something I go back to because I learned from. So, uh, the job, so I worked at two startups before LinkedIn. And the second one, um, was a company called FlixLab. And we were doing some pretty cool, I thought, stuff where basically we were, it was a consumer-facing app where basically you upload videos and photos off your phone. And then we would produce a movie for you. It's actually very much like what Google Photos does today. Sometimes, you know, you go on a trip to Santa Cruz and then they notify if you use Google photos, like, Hey, we made a movie for you.

Right. And, um, the technology was actually, uh, very cool. I think it was a little, it was a little ahead of its time. The issue like mini consumer application, it was not a technology issue. It was a, it was just a distribution issue. Right. And like, this is actually not to talk more about jam, but like, one of the reasons I'm excited about jam is I think we have a solution to that with jam, which is why I'm bullish. But so, um, but for us, you know, so we've been hacking away at this thing. My role at the company was like, I was like the application developer and the kind of like the SRE and the tools guy to an extent as well, because the, the, the engineering team, when I started were a couple of video PhDs. So they were brilliant, like video engineers and, you know, they were sort of masters of FFM peg. And like, you know, the day where they wrote all

the really cool code that produced the movies and stitched them together. And it, and, you know, I'm probably giving more context than you need, but there was a lot of media processing behind the scenes, right? And part of the stack for the media processing, this was, we were on AWS, but this was the days of AWS where basically all you had was like the building blocks, right?

So it was like EC2. So we basically had elastic block storage and then we had EC2 with Gluster, which is an open source distributed file system, sort of running across these EBS, like elastic block storage. And then we spin up these EC2 instances that would basically, um, you know, process the media files. Right. So we had to do all kinds of stuff, like whether it was sort of in the stuff that comes in, you got to transcode and get into kind of a gold format. But then we were doing this production of movies, you know, and the, um, you can tell I'm still proud about what we did. So I'm just quit talking about that. But like, anyway, coming back to the distribution thing. So we had launched and we were kind of like, you know, it's one of the things that's

like, you know, some people were using it, but there wasn't a lot of growth. And then we got featured on the app store. And so we were like in the top left corner of the app store. Nice. And we had one of those quote, good problems to have where suddenly, you know, I don't know exactly. And we crossed over a million downloads like pretty quickly. And the site was fine. It actually held up pretty well. And like people were creating movies. And, you know, I think for the most part, they'd come in and make one movie and then leave.

But like they came in and they made movies. Right. But what started, what we quickly realized is the size of our Gluster file system was not going to last for very long. And, you know, whatever sort of amount of space we had sort of pre-configured was, um, was going to run out very fast. And so one of the engineers on the team, basically we were taught during the day, we were talking about expanding the Gluster file system, which we were taught during the day, we were talking about expanding the cluster file system, which none of us had ever done. And none of us were experts in cluster. And, you know, so he, uh, basically decided to do it. So he's like, okay, I think

I know what we need to do. Yeah. And there was, there was no, you know, no one, no one filed like a CM and JIRA, you know, with instructions and, and practice and no one was around. And, and, and I, I say another engineer, like this was on all of us. I don't mean it all. This is not a story about throwing somebody else under the bus. So our team, right. We, we did it right. He, he, this happened to be the person behind the keyboard, but like it's on all of us. And so tried to expand the cluster file system and uh not only did the site go down but all of the data that was uploaded to us

between the site going down and us bringing the site back up which i think took us around 11 hours or something, um, was totally lost every, every like video and image that got uploaded. And so like, and there was a, you know, I think a good 72 hours of, um, no one sleeping, all of us trying to figure out like what the hell was going on and fixing it. And this also happens to have been on a Friday of July 4th weekend. So it started on Friday and we went through July 4th. And I think I managed, like things were starting to stabilize enough on July 4th on a, on the Sunday that I felt comfortable going to a birthday party with my, with like good friends and kids uh but i spent the whole time at the birthday party you know on my laptop and then uh the so anyway so actually now that i say this when my wife says it i was i was gonna say that i see i'm on your lifestyle now yeah so so you

know it was i mean it was it was horrible that's why i start with like good problem the listeners can't see my air quotes like like the good problems to have. But like, you know, it's like, you know, that it was just a nightmare scenario where, you know, not only did the site go down, but we lost a bunch of data. Right. And like if I'm like Ronak, you know, I mean, we take not losing member data. I'm sure every company. Right. Like very, very, very seriously.

Right. And so even with a site of 800 million people or whatever LinkedIn's at now, if we lost like one member's data, we were like, you know, it was like, what the hell's right. And so, um, so yeah, that was my, that was my misadventure. And I have, even today, it's really funny. There's a, uh, I actually recently got in touch with a, with a, one of my favorite SRE leaders at LinkedIn and asked his advice about, Hey, I'm putting together a GitHub sort of issue template for effectively a CM. Like, what should I put in here? Right. And it's like, yeah, there's only two of us,

but I want to put a stake in the ground of before I make some production change, like, have I thought through what could go wrong and how will i know if it worked and everything else so there you go that's a great story um and like like i said earlier there are a lot more questions that we would love to get into however we want to be respectful of your time chris and we do hope that we have around two of this where in let's say some months from now Jam is you have more people on the team Jam is going on the trajectory you're expecting it to and we get more stories about that uh but until then I would love that yeah and until then thank you so much for taking the time this has been awesome awesome. And before we part, is there anything else you would like to leave

with our listeners? I heard Jambi's hiring, right? From your Jambi last night? There you go. I am looking to hire my first engineer. So yeah, if you're listening to this and you don't

work for LinkedIn and you're interested in what we have to do, I would love if you're listening to this and you're, you know, and you don't work for LinkedIn and you're interested in, you know, interested in what we have to do, I would love, I would love to share our, you know, vision and mission and values, which we've talked about a few times in here and, you know, the, our plans. So thank you for that opportunity. And thank you for this. I've, I've very much enjoyed this conversation as well. And so hopefully, you know,

it may, may inspire me to also talk about some of these things in building jam. So maybe you'll hear about it. Awesome. Thank you so much, Chris. This has been awesome. Thank you, Chris. All right. Thank you. Hey, thank you so much for listening to the show. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about us at software misadventures.com. You can also write to us at hello at softwaremisadventures.com. We would love to hear from you. Until next time, take care.