 what in the conference biz they call a pacer which means I pace and there's something epic going on here because I can pace all the way from here to that column which okay anyway I'm Michael up and let's get this started there's some screens I don't even know where to like center on so I'm gonna center on right here okay sorry about the column guys in the south room we're gonna do this now you ready here we go okay humans are bad humans are bad what the hell happened here people these is a plug let me tell you what a plug is a plug takes energy from here and puts it over there and what you're seeing here is I forget how many are here if there's a 17 there's 17 different plugs that do exactly the same thing they move energy from point A to point B look at this this is a mess this is a design mess now there are good reasons for each of these plugs for example the one from Britain which I forget where it is on here is there and it was designed using materials were available at the time during World War 2 they had a brass shortage so they said we're gonna have this kind of plug but this isn't this is what how many of you ever designs doing exactly the same thing what happened here let's make it worse here are these plugs that I showed you around the world so if you go and look at this you know USA is pretty good Russia looks like they've got one but here's an interesting one if you go look down and what is that is it El Salvador right in the middle there there are 10 different plugs in play I mean if you're wandering around El Salvador with your MacBook you probably have to have like 10 adapters going on there what the hell happened here why did we end up with this huge diversity of plugs okay that's too many plugs we can't talk about all of those plugs so let's just talk about one plug remember this event you remember this event there was this event I believe Steve was still alive I forget who was doing it but they got up and they wandered on stage and we had how many of you have this plug on you right now right how many of you have multiple versions of this plug in your house exactly they're all over the place so they're blight but but the thing was we're all sitting in that keynote years ago and we were up there and they're like hey this plug is now this plug and I went oh shit I have to buy everything again and it's all because of this damn plug was it worth it or not I want to I want to talk about the decision behind this plug but I also want to talk and more importantly I want to talk about the people that make these decisions I want to talk about stables and volatiles I'm ranz I'm this guy on Twitter that sounds like a fortune cookie I was a I was at Apple for eight and a half years I ran the Apple store and I ran part of Mac West ten team I worked at this creepy place for four years and now I'm the head of engineering at Pinterest which is an interesting contrast between two companies I am this guy on the internet I tweet things I wrote a couple of books one about leadership for engineers another one about a cure a handbook for engineers and there's some themes that kind of are relevant to the stables and volatiles talk that come out of these books that I want to start with number one is these are some of my favorite lines you're in a hurry you're in a hurry I've seen a lot of them I've seen a lot of resumes over my life out of my career and I went over I look at them I am reminded how quickly we in engineering high-tech move between jobs you're in a hurry you're three years away in my opinion from your brand new gig you could be very happy with what you're doing right now but what I've seen is every three years we tend to throw everything up and change our gigs why do we do that why does our gig have this expiration date it's because we get bored super easily we're high-stim creatures we like to figure things out and as soon as we actually figure things out as soon as the flow chart reveals itself as soon as the people in the politics and the products become obvious we tend to go and switch our gigs I my wife I was at Apple for eight and a half years and Apple still doing pretty well and we were having a chat and I was telling her I'm like hey honey kind of getting bored and she just went ashen and then her head she's like oh god not this again because she knows what's coming she knows and I'm about to just like hey it's Apple that's doing great but I want to go do this thing of this company called Palantir that no one's ever heard of and it's all these engineers and they're doing amazing things your gig has an expiration date there's you have a certain you have a certain amount of time before you're going to do this next thing the other thing I want you to think about how many of you have done a 1.0 in your life was it easy did it suck it's really really hard it's really it's really exciting but it's incredibly hard because you're making all of these decisions for the first time you're making all this is you're bringing something brand new into the world 1.0 is going to kill you starting to do something new for the first time is an incredibly hard experience it's a good thing to go do after you've done something for three years the other thing is I don't know how to use keynote which is ironic the other thing is around this word here when I hear that when you say disruption I hear someone or something is about to go eat my lunch this is sort of a this is sort of a marketing word these days you know Uber is disrupting taxis just it but throwing it out there like it's this new thing that's been going on it doesn't mean much of anything other than people are really working hard to invent new things but people are saying it right now like it's something new but the thing about it is it's been going on for decades this is a postcard of the Silicon Valley in my mature year it is many many years ago blossoms California poppies it's beautiful isn't it gorgeous we did we took that and we turned it into this 1854 square miles 3 million souls incredible nerd density and a very unique culture which I think is not just in the Silicon Valley it's here it's in a lot of different places and as we talk about stables and volatiles I want to give you a little bit of history about the culture that got created because it got created a lot many years ago how many of you show hands I always wonder how many people you know to answer this question how many of you know who William Shockley is who is he the Nobel Prize winning inventor of the transistor there's a lot of transistors in this room right now a whole crap load he he invented the transistor and he was a really awful human being by the way we'll talk more about that in a second but he did give us the transistor which is kind of awesome right so he took this he took this ego he took this transistor thing and he went to a lab in Palo Alto a garage if you will in Palo Alto and he said hey I invented the transistor and what he did is he attracted an incredible amount of engineers around him because the dude invented the transistor but the thing about it was the thing that's really interesting about this about him is he was an awful manager this is a horrible person he's actually a racist too but that's a whole nother topic this is a really really bad human being and his erratic behavior his personality his morals caused a group of folks to leave they're called the traitorous eight and they left after one year to found companies like Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel and but more which is amazing right this is this is an amazing business that they created but the other thing that they created which is far more interesting to me as nerd culture or a nerd whisperer guy is they hated this guy so much that they said we're gonna do everything differently because this was an awful experience we moved from the East Coast where we lived out here to the West Coast it's very nice out here but we're gonna go do things completely differently so they got rid of titles they got rid of a dress code and ties not completely they got rid of the reserve parking lots they got rid of they had everyone in an open workspace does this sounding familiar it was called an egalitarian egalitarian workplace is what they were going for and I like to think he's the reason you're sitting here wearing flip-flops any flip-flops in the room right now in the back all right this test better on the West Coast but he's the reason we did this awful human being this is the reason we're all sitting here I'm in a button-up shirt we're all in t-shirts and we're hanging out and we're wearing whatever we want we have this open spaces that we work in there's things that came out of this that we still hold true in a lot of our engineering culture for example a flat organization they wanted to keep it really really flat this is something that's still going on at Apple which is a bajillion people right now but we knew the teams that keep that Steve cared about at Apple because he had three levels of management and it was Steve who's a VP director lead of leads manager and people at three levels of management sounds like a lot but anyone from IBM here really actually is anyone from IBM here because I mean making fun of you in about 20 minutes I see in the back I apologize right now okay cool really flat I mean it's three levels of management that's like sounds like a lot but if you've been anywhere large company that's not actually that much you we built the same model of talent here three levels of leadership it can go out to we can fan that up to like 5,000 people and still keep it kind of flat flat organization so it's a flow of information it's anti bureaucracy hopefully and it fosters the intellectual process by allowing us to cross pollinate easier the other thing we got out of this this reaction to Shockley speed with this free flowing information with these flat organizations you get faster decisions hopefully better decisions hopefully and products get to market faster and you get the collaboration piece idea the best idea winning this is one of things I love about engineers something at Palantir that love dearly it's like I came in with all of this gray hair and all of these punks who are awesome and they didn't believe the word I said because hey Palantir we did I mean Apple we did this they said why like well because I don't know I saw it 20 times and it worked this way they're like why all right so I have to go sit there and go up to the whiteboard and do the math and all this sort of thing they force us they force us to explain our decisions regardless of what our titles are the other thing is having a results orientation like I just said it's not about what your title is it's not about whether you've written books or not it's like what value have you created HR are you in the room would you raise your hand if you are here I don't think you would HR sorry HR if you're here or in the other room hello the problem that we have as engineers with HR is and this is not a gent this is a generalization but there's lovely HR people out there is we don't understand as engineers how they inherited that power they just kind of show up sometimes when you get the smell of like someone getting fired why what's going on there right it's strange and we were laughing about it but it's not really a pleasant experience but that's our problem that was HR with these teams where we're like explain to me the value that you're creating and it's not it's not a judgy question it's just I want to know the facts about why you can do this thing and why I think you're the grim reaper anyway at Palantir we had this hiring criteria which I called the second test it was a really if you guys don't know Palantir we had a very high hiring bar we aspired to be Apple from you know about a decade I'm sorry a Google from out a decade ago where the bar was really really high and we wanted to keep it really high but that was only half of it that was the first test could you get hired at this very at this company with a very high hiring bar there was a second test to and it wasn't written down anywhere it was you got hired congratulations but you had to build something of value no one would tell you to actually go do this they would tell you what it was and they it had to be recognized as valuable by the rest of the organism and we didn't quite trust you until you identified a piece of work built it and the rest of the company said oh that was valuable it's a second test we didn't actually trust you as an engineer whether you'd written books or had a million twit ballers on Twitter or anything until you actually created some value results orientation it's a Zuckerberg era this is why we're wearing hoodies or wearing shoes flip flops whatever it's this era of you know hey engineers are running the show we kind of are Dropbox Google Palantir other companies CEOs are engineers it's just fascinating to me but the thing about it is that it started a long time ago in this reaction is awful human human being we're risk takers we have a high tolerance for risk one in 10 startups are successful I told you there's a 90% chance that you're gonna walk out of this building and get hit by a lightning you would stay in the building right one in 10 do it why would we do this what is interesting about failing 90% of the time we as engineers we assume it's going to fail this is our starting mindset we gave ourselves permission to fail right because we know something very important about failure we know we're gonna learn something even if it comes crashing down this is one of my favorite shots from Palantir this is a Gary Kasparov he's playing speed chess he's a chess master against my entire engineering team so this table comes out here and it goes all the way over here look at me pacing and it goes all the way back over here and he's just going around and he's crushing him he's not gonna mount and there's some pretty smart people at this company a lot of talented engineers he's just killing him but the thing about it the thing I like about this photo has nothing to do with Gary well it has something to do with Gary Kasparov it has to do with these people behind there you see them what are they doing they're delighted they're happy they happy they just got their asses handed to them by the master they're learning they're sitting there watching and they're watching their friends get beaten up as well but they're all but they're sitting there and learning I failed but I'm learning as I'm sitting here watching my other all of my friends all my cohorts actually fail it's amazing to me and here's the thing and what is the longest introduction to a presentation ever there's a spectrum to these engineers there's stables and there's volatiles told you it's a big intro and to introduce this once more I want to talk about a guy named Steven Steven was a contractor at my first startup before I went to Apple and he we hired him to come clean up some disaster in our database layer and we said hey come in three months fix this thing please Steven walked into the building and he's like what's that smell it's not HR what's that smell that smell is this team is never going to ship anything hired as a contractor to the database work well to find box go over into your box fix your stuff walked in said these guys are never gonna do anything so he walked around a little bit and he said Stu your name Stu now sorry Stu who was an intern and was happy to be here he said Stu you and I are gonna go into the ping-pong room and we're gonna work on this product until it's done and Stu's like sweet wait one question what does done mean and stuff is like Steven's like I don't know we'll figure out when we get there so he grabbed this guy no one told him to do this he grabbed Stu they went into the ping-pong room and they just started working now two weeks later two or three weeks later the ping-pong reeked ping-pong room just smelled it was Stu in there was Steven was in there there was a four or five other engineers in there and the rest of the company came in three weeks later and they demoed the product working like really working and we were like holy crap now the product manager on this whole situation of the product that was never gonna ship was saying we're about three months away from shipping and they did it in three weeks and we clapped this is amazing it's working everyone was clapping you can actually see it working for the first time there was a couple of people in the room that were not clapping and they were engineers and they knew who Steven was they knew that yes it was working yes it was a good morale boost and awesome look at the product working but they knew that Steven had probably cut some corners to get that thing done he probably decided to say hey you know performance probably doesn't matter because we never ship who cares it doesn't need to perform and these folks who were not clapping were correct they knew that Steven was because they'd seen him before he's a volatile and I want to explain who these folks are we knew he was a lot he got it done it was amazing feat of work but a year later when Steven was gone by the way because he moved on to whatever else was bright and shiny he we were had our first big customer drew a lot of load at it and it came crumbling down he was a volatile these are archetypes I'm going to talk about it now you're going to start identifying with one or the other chances are all of you in here are a little bit of both so these are archetypes I'm going to speak about them as archetypes but it's not black and white super clear stables are these lovely lovely engineers who happily work together with direction they appreciate there appears to be a plan they like schedules they play nice with the yet with others they value efficiently run no drama teams these people are great they calmly assess risks they carefully work to mitigate failure however distant or improbable it might be they tend to generate process which a lot of us engineers don't like it's a seven letter word that begins with P and because I know the process creates predictability and measurability awesome folks they make a good and predictable decisions they are predictable people the way stables make decisions has a lot to do with how they think there's a research that shows if a consumer is given a choice between a good $20 toaster and a somewhat better $30 toaster they'll choose they'll choose that $20 toaster make sense I only need two slices I don't need for I don't want to spend another $10 done but here's where it gets really interesting if you put in a marginally superior toaster into the mix this $50 toaster which has some set of attributes that make it worth $50 the exact same person will go and start doing this now by the $30 toaster which is interesting to me it's called salience in decision-making which is a fancy word for one's attention being differentially directed towards one portion of their environment in this case what they're doing is they're basing it on the basing in a nice stable decision on the road most recent information it's a very stable thing that they do I just realized I have sound by the way surprise you're gonna have to imagine the sound here a second that's what they do it's a very stable decision that's what they're doing there volatiles on the other end of the spectrum here they are a preferred to find strategy rather than to follow it they can't conceive of failing they find a thrill in risk they often don't build predictable or stable things but they sure build a lot of them they annoyingly or often only reliable if it's in their best interest one of the ways I've learned how to motivate volatiles of my career as I walk up and say hey Stu you're volatile now hey Mark is doing this thing it's impossible you couldn't do it by the way but Mark's working on this thing that I know you couldn't do and work it's really really really hard it's gonna take a while I don't think you can do it I know you can't do it but Mark can I know you don't really like Mark that much but I'm giving him this it's really hard and you can't do it that's a good way to mole it's kind of douchebag but it's kind of good way to manage those of volatiles anyway they see working with others as these volatiles as time-consuming and onerous they prefer to walk work in small autonomous teams they're kind of jerks they see working with others as time-consuming and they could care less how you feel now they don't actually not care how you feel it's just on the list of things they care about it's low they prioritize your feelings as number seven after all of these other things they're jerks if you go and take a volatile and you throw our little toaster test at them if you go through it's a little toaster items if you give them a choice between a $20 toaster or a $30 toaster what they usually choose is flying toasters sorry guys can't hear this in the other room there's this little march going on here but you can see what is going on here this is the how many of you know this piece of software excellent my people awesome I did this talk like a couple of months ago and no one raises their hand I'm like where am I what's going on okay what's going on here sometimes we want our toasters to fly don't we right this is absurd this is clearly a volatile at work this is clearly a volatile at work get stared at it for a while the company that did this was a company called after dark Berkeley system this is called after dark the company was called Berkeley systems and they made millions of dollars on this let's actually let's take it a different way Stu you're now a VC okay here we go Stu I'm gonna pitch you on something here all right here's the idea here's the pitch you ready don't I know it's awesome don't hold on so what I'm gonna do is I'm this idea for some software that we're gonna do here okay and it's software that's only going to be useful when you're not there wait hold on I know it's I know it's good right so when you're not there this really cool thing is gonna happen to your computer hold on wait for it these toasters are going to show up on your screen and they're gonna fly right I know awesome don't make the check yet hold on but there's more there's more there's going to be toasters and toast and you are giving me a preference where you can change the color of the toast like you want dark toast or light toast right so you want to invest in this idea is this amazing I know you do don't think you don't have to tell me they make millions of dollars on this this is a stupid idea they made millions of dollars on this they made millions of dollars on this on software which is there to save your screen which means you're not there yes you look at it and it's pretty or not but like take this apart for a second here take it's absurd this is absurd millions of dollars it's brilliant so as I was putting the other as I was putting together this talk I'm like I was I realized there's this toaster theme that was working into the talk and I realized flank toasters would fit in here nicely and I started to wonder I'm like hmm who was behind this brilliant absurd multi-million dollar idea and it turns out it's two folks named West Boyd and Joan Blaze what they did after Sierra Sierra systems bought Berkeley systems is they went on to do move on or if you don't know what this is it's a politically left technology action group they this is years ago this is very early internet they decided we're going to go change the course the discourse around politics via the web I don't know these folks I guarantee you they're volatiles there are some problems that we have with our archetypes here our volatiles and our stables there's some allergic reactions between these folks it is important to note that these guys and gals hate each other archetypes remember talking about archetypes they really hate each other the volatiles believe the stables are slow they're lazy they're political their workflow based their process creators their bureaucrats the stables believe the volatiles hold nothing sacred they do whatever the hell they want company team product be damned they have this intense knee negative knee jerk reaction about each other and here's the bad news everyone's right this reaction that they're having is because they have these totally different value systems right they're gonna fight these teams are gonna fight there's gonna be a healthy and sometimes unhealthy tension between these two archetypes second if you're going to build a company that is going to thrive you need to figure out how to get these two parties these two of all locker archetypes to actually work together a lot of companies I've watched them unintentionally kill their volatiles kill it's a big word there's this reward for shipping 1.0 and it's a bit of a curse and I want to give you a little cautionary tale Stu God I'm picking on you the entire time sorry Stu and I we do a startup and we get the 1.0 thing done just like other companies that I've worked at before we got a 1.0 done like Borland I was at Borland I was at Netscape and I was at Apple each of these companies had a 1.0 whether it was how many of you remember Borland Borland oh my god my people this is great Borland some of the they're 1.0 with these beautiful integrated development environments Turbo Pascal all of these wonderful 1.0 products the first one oh what Netscape obviously was the browser and then there was Apple which obviously was the Mac the Apple too and each of these companies and Stu and I we each had this idea that we're going to bring this new thing into the world and for each of these companies they did it and it was incredibly flippin hard they brought it out but what they did when they did that is the each of these have a company have a state of a volatile Borland flip con Netscape Mark Andres and Apple Steve Jobs obviously each of them had this this 1.0 that they created and it was war and it was battle to get it actually out the door and what happens is once they get it out the door is this very interesting thing that happens after 1.0 gets out is volatile sometimes become these stable spokes the volatiles who win slowly become slit stables because they start protecting the crown jewels they say listen this is an important thing this is the cash cow these are the crown jewels we want to have this we want to protect this thing this is what happens after that is other volatiles show up in these companies and they get hired because they can smell the volatility that's going on they want to be part of something that's brand new and they start to do what volatiles do which is everything I just explained and it starts to piss off the established volatiles it starts to really annoy them because they're protecting the crown jewels and the ball they go to these new volatiles and they say hey stop doing that thing that you're doing we got a 1.0 here it's worth protecting I have the scars you don't want a piece of this 1.0 is awful this is a great way for companies to coast and to die is when they're sitting there no longer involved in investing in these volatiles who are jerks by the way it's really lots of reasons to get them out the door now I'm gonna say something you might be mad at me what a yard sale of mediocrity all right we'll call it a win we'll call it a win I did a conference once that IBM was sponsoring and I said that and it was silence my god this line normally kills what's going on here oh IBM and back what a yard sale of mediocrity now you cannot argue for a second these companies are amazingly successful you cannot argue for a second these are the market caps as of yesterday 181 billion 200 billion 70 billion but what's going on here my question to you is go look at these companies and tell me something that they've built that's inspired you something that you can point at and say wow Oracle that was amazing now they're successful businesses absolutely but I would say most of the volatiles of left MBAs are you in the room you snap no there's one right there the MBAs are running the show good luck that's awesome good job lots of numbers their spreadsheets it's great they're doing well but they're no lot they're definitely product companies but they're not inspired companies anymore and there's a hundreds of thousands of people working there who are incredibly happy and employed good job you go but you go back to here and you can see what happened in this case they were successful they made it through they had their 1.0 but then they kind of flatlined these companies most of these companies didn't make it only one did Borland they killed the volatile fleet con in Borland William Microsoft battle with Microsoft Microsoft won Borland still exists is this enterprise something something's thing but it's interesting fleet con you know what he did after Borland anyone know it's in your pocket invented a thing called a camera phone what did you know that that's a big he invented the camera phone he left here looked as well and then he invented that camera that's sitting on your phone right now that's the guy volatile Netscape got bought by AOL which is the fate worse than that they're gone although it's really interesting because there's this thing called Firefox which is based on a Mozilla which is you want to know who the volatile there's got named JWZ and he's the original one of the original volatiles and what you're seeing with Firefox is one person one volatile said screw this noise I'm gonna go do it somewhere else and then you have Apple which almost died they got rid of their volatile they fired him and they went in and they turned into one of those companies on the prior slide until they bought them back and they re-invigorated the company my question to you is really really simple my question to you is really simple do you or do you not want flying coasters I think you do let's go back to this plug so what happened here we had this plug it was this plug and then it became this plug it's small the new version is great you can plug it in either direction on one side works everywhere on the planet bonus unless you're in the UK in which case you actually need this converter see what's happening again so my question to you is when we had this moment we saw that these new plugs are showing up what was our actual issue with this why do we have this sort of this reaction like a new plug what have to buy everything again is a question Apple is a bunch of greedy bastards and they want us to buy a bunch of new stuff absolutely well sure they probably do I don't I don't think they're greedy bastards though the thing is they were making a choice they're making a very volatile choice and something that sort of surprised at the time and they've been doing it for a lot of years how many of you remember this guy right here yeah it's a sweet piece of hardware right stew stew you agree really Android guy no this is a beautiful piece of hardware on September 7th 2005 Steve Jobs got up on stage and he killed this product at the time this was the most successful consumer electronics device on the planet and he killed it it had been on the market for a year and a half we couldn't keep him in stock and he killed it what in the world was he doing the MBAs probably lost their flippin minds because the graph was up into the right could not sell them you couldn't get him in that you couldn't walk into a store before there were Apple stores or maybe it was I forget what you couldn't get him he killed it what the heck is it this is no sense added create a new one have both of them make more money that's not what he did he decided to kill it because because he's a volatile this is clearly not a stable at work because the stable decision would be would be to add a new product line make more money but the thing is you go when you look at the introduction from the introduction of the iPod mini to when it was released this very interesting thing happened which was if you go look at the competition when they started it was all this disaster and by after a year and a half they all started to kind of look like the this one right here he did not want to give the competition time to catch up so he changed the game he says I am going to out-innovate you by getting it out there faster and faster again clearly not a stable at work they did the same thing with the battery business the battery business we guys remember that 17-inch MacBook Pro we call it the pizza box right huge it's great the they release I believe is a 17-inch MacBook Pro where you couldn't remove the battery and we nerds lost our flippin minds right because we're like whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa I might be on a 17-hour plane flight and I'm gonna need to actually be able to swap this I need to preserve this optionality I need optionality I gotta be able to do it they said no we're gonna give you a battery it's gonna last you just about any use case but more importantly they got rid of million million dollars millions of millions of dollar business because they said embedded batteries was gonna be a better model for them which is interesting because a couple years later they put a lot of battery into a little small case they were actually investing they were researching how to figure out how to do these cloth based batteries inside of the iPhone but more importantly the thing that's really important is Apple doesn't want to become stable they don't want it to like become normal you can look at the watch and see that they're still trying to do this I don't become stable by the way either you need both of these constituencies in your company in your team in your product team you need the stables there to remind you about reality to define process whereby large groups of people can be coordinated actually get work done this guy is not a designer he was an engineer but he's incredibly stable and he's running the show now they gave him the keys to the whole damn thing a stable that's very interesting why because he's really good at operations he's really good at making sure that when that thing is out it's you can you can get it tomorrow worldwide stables bring predictability credibility and repeatability to your execution and you need to figure out how to build a world where they can thrive volatiles are there to remind you that nothing lasts forever which is sad they consider that they consider their mission in life to replace that which is inefficient boring and uninspired you need to create a corner of the building where these two groups we need to create a recording where this group in particular can disrupt and everyone everyone is clear about the value of this disruption you need to figure out how to build a world where they can both thrive and it starts with what I'm doing right now which is for us to at least have an appreciation of the other side of the fence I like I imagine it like this I imagine a stable volatile walking over to a stables office or cube and looking in the stables cube and going like wow so tidy everything is everything has a place and there's this pencil jar it's just so clean this is amazing how do you think in here it's just so tidy and the stable goes over to the volatiles cube looks in goes what a fucking mess this is a disaster this I can't even think in here this is everything's every this is nuts is that a flying toaster when Steve came back to Apple he built the Beatles is what this is the story he bought in everyone he bought in stables he bought in volatiles and he figured out how to make them work the thing you have to be able to do is you have to be willing to throw things away that you cherish we get really attached to our 1.0s because they were our success they are the reason the money's coming in and we love them and we protect them and we get stable about them have to be willing to at least consider throwing away something that you cherish if you want to continue to innovate nature abhors a vacuum you want to figure out some way in your company to distribute blank slates at Apple when Steve came back he got rid of sabbaticals because he knew what probably one else knows is like what happens with sabbaticals with people tend to say okay I get my sabbatical I'm gonna go and I'm gonna leave for three months I'm gonna come back and I'm gonna quit it's an extended quitting program she's like I don't want to quit so we're not gonna let him go so let's get rid of that you have to figure out but it's an important time you've been working for three years you've been listening to rands and ran says that three years people are at risk and I had a list at Palantir I got a mail six months out from everyone getting in three years like oh Dan gonna go check in on Dan see how he's doing right so what are you gonna do can't give him a sabbatical got to think some other way to give them a blank slate Palantir we called it the blitz a blitz was someone's getting up to their three-year mark ish we give them three months or a month depending on the situation to do anything they wanted and then gather some friends to do it as well it's like kind of like 20% time except a month two months three months go do whatever you want stew go do flying toasters right we did not tell them what to do at all over the three or four blitzes that I was looking over we got two product lines out of that now they could have gone and built in angry birds they could have done that they were fine well like great whatever you want to do but at Palantir we were creating lines of business with no direction from letting teams go and choose what they want to do within the context of Palantir it's the power of a blank slate giving people choice you need to figure out how to get equal representation and investment in both the stables and the volatiles both of these machine piece parts of the machine are essential if you just have stables a whole lot gets done but it's kind of vanilla if you just have volatile nothing gets done it's just craziness but you have to figure out that balance between the two to a builder to folks who build things stagnation is death volatiles would walk into Oracle or HP or these other companies and they'd walk in they'd be like what's that smell oh that's nothing ever getting done because there's always meetings and there's all of this infrastructure things like no it's become it's become its stagnation to the builder stagnation is death humans are bad at making decisions individually this is the end result of uncorrelated decision-making over just you know decades and decades obviously this is where stables rule in the volatiles bell I'm not saying that a volatile can all solve this problem maybe he or she could but there's a problem to be solved here there's clearly a design flaw and I think builders wherever they might be on the planet our unique position to change the world your job is to figure out how you can get these two groups to work together to make sure that they're represented on your team so you have someone there to coordinate the decision-making these very different people because I am 100% certain that we need more flying toasters thank you very much and I can't work you know oh and blew the ending too that's something we gotta do it hold on oh wait for it thank you very much any questions yes how do you expect a small company or a small team that's very stable and hasn't it volatile in there and does it does not has a volatile but doesn't have the ability to let that volatile expand because it's not the time and resources doesn't have the time to let them expand because of time and resources you're stable aren't you are you really okay it sounds like a stable question I think the question is how do you let a kind of free phrase it a volatile evolve in a small sort of world you don't actually have to worry about them they're good it's gonna go do it because they do what they want right so like this idea like putting process around them is kind of silly you know I'm saying it's like these fall that's what they do is they kind of I just wrote about this recently I call it the wolf they just kind of go choose their own path right and so like like saying like hey we're gonna point them in that direction or her in that direction good luck have fun trying to do that so I know it's a kind of a try to answer but it's like they're gonna a real volatile is gonna just kind of they're gonna define their own path sorry way in the back I like the idea of the the blank slate but how would you apply that to a company of 15 where engineering is say seven people yeah it's it's more of a thing that I think when you have a little bit more folks there we can absorb the cost of someone being offline I turn it into something a little bit smaller a little less costly like the hack we concept is another good way to do this but commit to it right don't call it a hack day like we're doing this we're doing this at Pinterest surprise Pinterest if you're listening it was we're modeling after what we did at Palantir is like really a full week of the entire team doing this start on a Friday start with the weekend have a whole week next weekend so that's really two weeks and the weekend to let people again same model do whatever the hell you want but like that's something which is not as a large of an effort but I think this is a sort I think at any size taking that time to switch contacts to step back go build stuff think about something else incredibly healthy for the organism and it's not just a stable volatile thing it's just a cadence and like letting folks take a deep breath right yeah are you more inspired by Watson or the Apple watch am I inspired by Watson or the Apple watch asked by the NBA I might add Apple watch wow that's a timely question I haven't really seriously I hate puns no that wasn't I didn't mean to do that oh my god I hate puns I work at this company called Pinterest and they're really into puns and everything's really interesting the thing about the watch I think it's the watch and here's why for Apple products I'm an Apple fanboy clearly you got to be able to touch it and actually that's the thing is you can see it online and go God that's beautiful but truly the moment is when you pick it up and go like holy crap that's just an amazing weight or how it feels in my hand or what the way it's and it's like have this feeling that there's this moment coming when actually like get a see one of these or touch one of these watches all the holy crap now as a big data guy Watson a fascinating concept but what has it done like I mean it's like come to the story of like what value is that not the watch is adding a huge value tell them what time it is and does amazing other things but that's my initial reaction anyway other questions over tell me when to stop by the way over here somewhere over here hi so when you have when you get to 1.0 and you've got the volatiles that built 1.0 and they start getting all crusty and the other volatiles come in and start chewing on their leg and then they're kicking them the metaphors and then you know and then they quit yeah because that sucks yeah how do you get them not quit stay on the team yeah shock them back to life and get them excited to sort of reger and join you gotta it's the blank slate thing you've got to take them and put them on something and again it's a small company it's hard to do this but you gotta go and put them on something else they're these black teams or secret teams at Apple and shockingly they were usually started by wait for it volatiles right it's like hey let's figure it up and get this OS running on Intel like you know we do that this weekend yeah sure totally right so it's good it's a blank slate concept of like you need to get them the new volatiles the ones chewing on the leg love the image that's interesting they're gonna be cool working on that existing platform or whatever it is the other ones go give them something else to go do actually don't you don't give it to them they're probably just gonna go do it allow them to like hey go explore other spaces that's my initial reaction another question in the back over there hi yeah so you had a slide there on flatter organizations and so that means lots of different things lots of different people yeah there's a lot of experiments going on now with radically flat organizations and this whole like kind of decentralized mindset and so I was wrong yeah yeah so there's Zappos valve treehouse you know a lot of them are really really experimenting and going going to extreme so I was wondering what you felt about that and how that how that really really plays into the archetypes so let's talk about so holocracy is this no management thing and I'm mediums doing it I don't know if a valve aspires to use that word but it's the same thing let's talk about valve really quickly because they're kind of similar to Google in that there are these there's these vents in the ceiling it valve like right here and out comes money just pours out of these vents so all of this money is just pouring out of events the same thing at Google the money's is pouring out it's like well this is great this money that's piling up over here on the floor covers up for a lot of management sin right it's there's a lot of you can get a lot of value out of having infinite money you don't have to be very disciplined you can do lots of experiments you can do all these and that's the thing that I haven't zappos is the one I'm really interested because they're the ones I think we're large enough and are like have a crazy enough culture to want to like do this but like medium too small that's still a flat company valve infinite money Google infinite money so these places not that Google doesn't have managers but it's in these places where they there's they don't have a necessarily a drive to need to have that structure bureaucracy management whatever the hell I never I haven't seen it work yet zappos let's talk about zappos in a year let's get a report card from zappos in a year after they have tried this and is it really actually something that works it's fascinating I love the ideas and engineer to everyone including stew here is just empowered to do whatever they need to do but there needs to be some whether it's project managers managers leaders whatever the hell it is there needs to be some connective tissue to allow us to communicate and get things done and this I have I I'd love to see it not work in some other way I haven't actually seen it yet anyone wants to disagree with me I would love to hear about it other questions so this is probably a broad question but agile claims to value a process are people over process yeah I'm just curious if you find that there's particular value for stables or volatiles or both in an agile methodology first off agile great scrum awesome but the way that I usually let my teams choose as I let them choose they can do whatever the hell they want in terms of as long as they are getting the thing done that we agreed we're going to go and do so I am sort of ambivalent I mean I'm it's I if you read my stuff I focus on the people that's like the job I don't have people I have exactly no job right that's my entire problem so the process is as interesting to me is empowering the engineers a team the product folks with the right tools whatever the processes that they need so but it is in service of the people not in service of the process which is the fundamental difference between one of the fundamental difference between MBAs sorry and I think good engineering leaders my opinion other questions so in a lot of companies you end up with stables ended up ending up being the engineering managers run in the show yeah yeah how do you fight that well you go give talks at conferences I've been I've been worrying about this quite a bit I've been trying to find a really good I've been trying to crack this problem that you're describing managers tend to actually be stables because they'd be good at transferring information they tend to be not as risky they tend to get things done they tend to be stable you have to there has to be another career track and this is a good final question thank you for asking this there has to be another career track and by the way volatiles we even hate that phrasing which is for these folks and it puts them without the management title and the response going it but it puts them in significant in real positions to influence the company and by the way managers like try to build this the volatiles were run it's managed if it smells at all like a management thing the volatiles like screw this thing we have to figure out some way to create a growth path for them whether it's moving them around and there's more that we can be doing here because and not just for volatiles just for engineers in general in terms of like really establishing a clear career track for someone who doesn't want to be a manager but does want to be a leader right and does want to do that and that's something that we haven't done a good job at because the managers are in charge and we're working with HR about the process and the promo thing and the blah blah blah and it's just right we have to figure out some other way to actually do that it's something I'm working on at Pinterest right now and it's a fascinating problem thank you very much I'll be around for a while thank you very much