 Hey, hey everyone, this is Carlos and the founder and CEO at product school today. I'm here today. I'm here. No CEO A company called core. His name is Nimrod Pio. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me I always enjoy having product CEOs on the show people who work in product before and Eventually started to build product in a different capacity We're definitely covering all of that like I also want to get Wait, so I was talking your LinkedIn and I saw that your first job was in the military So yeah, what about that and how does someone who starts working in the military as a developer ends up breaking into product? Sure. So yeah, I started out my career more than 20 years ago in Israel military services mandatory like much of Israeli tech I started one of the computer units and in software engineering But they actually worked slightly after that I started working in machine learning long before it was, you know AI and LLMs. It was still called machine learning and LLP and around Somewhere like just over 10 years ago I started a product role after the company that I worked for was acquired by Facebook and at Facebook I basically Ran the small subsidiary We had a couple of apps in the app store and in the play store and an internal tool That was it's almost like B2B because it was an internal tool that was used by thousands of employees a month Lots of others PMs and data scientists It was mainly aimed at the product leadership to kind of go and take a look Quantitatively understand different markets understand how apps are used around the world by all kinds of people and make Kind of you know, their business case and hypothesis using that tool and when I left five years later, so that that takes us to like 2018 I started advising product people and teams at my friend's companies So again sort of a lot of Israeli tech started from People who whose career started in these military units and they were friends of mine But they started companies that ended up becoming multi-billion dollar companies or public companies in some cases And that not by any means through my advice but I was there long for the for the journey just great companies and helping them kind of Learn the playbook that Facebook had for how PMs work That I think is nowadays a bit more kind of widely spread and well-known through things like the product school But also, you know other communities other blogs and podcasts about product But if you look back just you know, five six years ago that knowledge was pretty rare Like it was pretty hard to find you didn't have a clear sense of you know kind of Okay ours and the discovery journey and like the different Roles that a PM carries in a company people still thought PM was project manager really Yeah, and so it was kind of Did that with them? There's a lot of learnings there a lot of interesting things just looking at different companies doing this And then finally took the plunge and kind of started my own company that that also our main client is other PMs and so I have the Kind of true joy and benefit of just working with like my my people all the time just PMs of other companies again big and small And helping them make their products better through using our RSV gate Where are you based now? So I'm in London now. I'm originally from Israel as you mentioned, but I Lived in New York and studied and worked there for a couple years one of the startups then moved to London 10 years ago Yeah, so Clearly there's no straight path into product or into starting a company Your case is very interesting restarted in the military and then I saw that you start first working as a Software engineer you mentioned that that company that you were working at as a software engineer got acquired by Facebook. Yes, so How did Facebook? find about a Company that is building something Outside, you know, you're used to a Silicon Valley or New York and decides to acquire that team Yeah, I think look M&A is is a fascinating topic and I'm actually not fully privy to all the like Conversations that happened or how exactly did they know? We were a Sequoia backed company and Obviously Facebook is a bad company. There might have been some Through that we're clients of ours so a lot of acquisitions often happens through Some strategic lines that are already kind of loving the product loving the team and in our case that was We also, you know, kind of that company was in the market intelligence Sort of market so companies like comscore or Nielsen where, you know, pms might go to look for Kind of quantitative data about The the market they work in right if they want to see like how many you know How much traffic their competitors get or just kind of understand the market they want to go to So we were part of that but for apps kind of like an app any and we had again sort of the kind of nice very enjoyable experience for me personally of working with the product and and the executive teams of The top apps in the app store back in the time So some of these apps don't exist anymore, right? But we we did have a Facebook and Google and Zynga and Disney and in all kinds of Companies like that as clients and we got to kind of work with them partner with them show them how to use the data and so on Mm-hmm, and I see that you first joined Facebook post acquisition Not as a PM, but it's a research scientist manager, right? Yeah, I like to say About like what was your understanding of product at that point? Yeah, I you know, I kind of I like to say that somehow in my career. I tried to Catch them all I tried to like play every role conceivable in in tech so I started as an engineer at some point again kind of moving to machine learning and in That company in a novel I was actually a data scientist and so when we were acquired and actually throughout my time at Facebook, I did two roles I managed this team of research scientists people Mostly with PhDs and postdocs that dealt with like kind of deep data analysis and statistics and so on and more a bit more than half my time was Devoted to building these internal apps and it's funny. Some people who meet me from back then Know me as Nimrod the PM of one avo and others know me as Nimrod the research manager of this core data science team And it just kind of just went for it and did these two things before we had kids and stuff And I just work all day and held these two roles I hear you and you mentioned that I would be you join a larger organization like Facebook especially such an incredible product led organization you you also acquire some of the best practices and and That gave you then the opportunity to apply some of that Outside Facebook think and I resonate with you because when I started my company. That's cool I've been also fortunate to work in different places before and and see how some incredible Professionalism build data products, but that knowledge seemed to be encapsulated in companies and now seem more probably just like yourself were Building who are also spreading that knowledge. I think it's helping the entire industry to be a little bit more Standardize there's certain playbooks and certain good practices that now can be applied Regardless of your company. Obviously you want to adjust to your specific context But tell me a little bit more about what are some of those best practices that that you acquire there Your time working as a team at Facebook. Yeah, I I fully agree. I think you know kind of Nimrod the advisor kind of Figured out found out after a couple years that actually I just can't continue kind of Doing the advisory work because all of the knowledge is out there and I feel bad Taking kind of money to tell people just go to like, you know Product school or reforge or Lenny's, you know newsletter and once that stuff really kind of kicked into gear and was becoming prevalent and so on it was kind of You know, there's no longer a unique knowledge and I don't think I Really invented anything big there's here and there's some stuff that I think I kind of crystallized really well And I can put my name behind it But mostly I'm just a very good sponge of other people's kinds of frameworks and ideas and As a PM there was a long list of advice that was shared around from a specific legendary PM There was very early on at Facebook. It was a messenger at the time that I joined That like 60 or so tips They were passed along like the sort of you know, that was the Bible of how to PM and Facebook and some of them were very very specific like they were kind of teaching you how to like present a Ideas, you know kind of like the today people talk a lot about the Minto pyramid or bang consulting groups so the kind of ideas on how to Create presentations how to write so some of them were about that just communication Which is like a very basic tenet of being a very good PM, right is a clear communication There's a way that I really liked To turn every decision, you know as PMs like a lot of what we do is just decision making you know, there's like this Uncertainty, there's like a few paths to go down a few features Maybe we like to implement what should we prioritize etc. And we had this way to like turn it into a table simple table with like You know kind of consistent the decision criteria You'd always make the color green for good and red for bad and you'd like sort the columns the decision Criteria by the importance so the most important one is the first column then the second column and so on and the options were in rows and it kind of like as You do this it force the point is to force you to think This way about the problem and to think thoroughly and you almost get to the to the solution the discussion Like almost doesn't need to happen because you sorted it and organize it this way It's very clear that like the top row has the most green stuff on the the left-hand side It's really a presentation of information that pulls out the right answer out of it But the discussion is suddenly very structured so it range from like these kind of very I don't know like specific ideas to some more kind of mental frameworks and structures and processes and like, you know ideas like the fact that Negotiation whenever you have a negotiation as it was another party or kind of within You know two orgs that are trying to find a solution to work together The real job in negotiation is not how to Kind of wrestle someone with your words and get him to like agree But it's actually just finding a BATNA a best alternative to a negotiated agreement just finding a You know all the options that you have and that is the work And then everything else is like less important because once you've found all these options You just you arrive at the at the kind of maximum that you can achieve there I resonate with with that and I remember when I was studying my career as a product manager a lot of the things I was trying to learn were mostly tactical like the hard skills to Create a roadmap to Define the right metrics to create a prototype to interview customers to get their input like a lot of these different things that are critical But as I also grew in my career as a people leader I realized that biggest problems or opportunities are actually people related more than product related and means when you mention around like Negotiating or communicating with others and really creating that type of connection It's critical and I went to business school and I had so many other classes there but in reality I think I wasn't paying enough attention I wasn't mentally ready to Acquire this type of knowledge and there's something magical that happens when you are in a situation where you actually have to figure it out There's no way around it like you need to find these type of agreements with your peers in order to move forward so I Also want to learn more about like how were you able to continue? Learning like you acquired a playbook some guidance some of them were some didn't but like was there any Mentor advice or training or something that you were also doing to to help you grow Yeah, I think I was lucky to find a whole lot of people along the way and kind of Pickup stuff from everyone the list is so long But I was just I think you know, I talked with a lot of people interviewing people asking them why they left their companies and stuff like that and I think it's kind of a Bit of a coin toss. It's really hard to tell whether you'll have a good manager or a bad manager and I think I I like lucked out with the coin toss and You know pretty much have had just great managers in my entire career And some of them, you know went on to be great successes. There were founders of companies who again got acquired and now are like You know very senior people at Facebook and so on and I I was kind of Just there to soak up what I could from them and then later was investors, right? So again as a CEO founder, I work a lot with my investors Some of them have started multi-billion dollar businesses Some of them are like just well-known VCs that are sitting in the boards of some of the, you know Bigger well-known public companies, you know, we've index a very lucky young hammer is our investor also invested in Revolut and Robin Hood and Product board, you know, and some excellent companies and he's Sharing all the advice from there. The list is very long. We can end I can do credits and thank yous for the rest of the patterns that I identify here one is Sure, you might have been lacking some coin tosses, but you were there, you know You were flipping the coin like I think you put yourself in a position to at least have the opportunity and you work hard And I think there is no replacement for it Might still not be lucky, but like you are maximizing your chances Then the other piece and it's kind of the evolution after being a PM at Facebook I see you were an advisor and as well as an investor It's something powerful I always say that teaching is the ultimate learning so when you need to be in a position to help others An official instructor or advisor or mentor however we want to call it But like you need to know what you are talking about and if you are even going to put your money where your mouth is and also be an investor You are also need to fully understand what you are doing So I can imagine that those two experiences like I want to learn more about like how that that also helped you Become a better Product CEO or leader? Yeah, so I think it goes back to something that you started asking and I kind of started answering and then I kind of moved on to something else But like I I always had this hunger this kind of Internal sense that like oh, I'm an engineer. I'm actually building the you know the software the product But but what are what are these guys doing all day long? Like what what is going on in the like product discussions or CEO discussions and and at some point against sort of data science and then kind of really wanted to be a PM and kind of Leaped on the opportunity to do it kind of just was there and saying yes whenever I could and the one thing You know, I could take credit for is like yeah, I worked hard. I always did a couple things at once. I Worked full-time throughout my bachelor's. I worked full-time throughout my master's degree. I Then at Facebook had this two roles Now that's no longer the case and just like a startup Founder and a dad. That's it. I can't that's the content Yeah, it's a lot of work as you know, but but basically always and and I think through see CEO kind of gave me the real Sort of sense of like okay Well as a CEO just have to you have to like learn from your marketer learn from your sales person because I never I never did sales But we do B2B sales now They learned it all on the job from advisors like that. So I'm really happy with that. I feel like wow I'm like learning. I'm learning. What do admins do, you know And they like have a very complicated job learning finance stuff like that through that because I didn't do MBA But the investing stuff came about because a friend started a startup and we were very close he was Also a PM at Facebook that I learned a ton from and I really appreciate also successful founder that existed and started new A new startup and he said look I'm gathering some friends. You want to You know put in some money and I never did this before never thought of it as a thing that I could do And I told my wife this is like a very very expensive tuition I'm doing this because maybe one day I want to start a startup and this will give me like the front ticket seats And how it starts, you know and so I did this but after I did it it kind of You sort of once you start doing an angel investment you you get to talk to all the other kind of angel investors And you suddenly get invited into more deals because you were an angel investor in this deal So maybe you should you know, maybe you're you're up for investing in and let's just say it's a very expensive hobby the Kind of I was again sort of very fortunate and I could Managed to do it because of the successes at Facebook Put us in a very good place But it was, you know, just very happy and excited to support all kinds of founders first-time founders coming from like You know not coming from tech not coming really from this industry some of them We saw the company to Miro's the whiteboard company two years ago You know great success and so suddenly Once you kind of see the whole journey you feel a bit more comfortable So I'm not actively angel investing like I don't have time for this. I'm mostly focusing on on cord But I but I have done, you know sort of 12 or 15 kind of deals over the last five six years But let's talk about cord That's more about what you what what are you building? Sure, so yeah, so look very shortly because I don't want to make this into a sales pitch or anything what we do is you know a lot of products like notion and figma and It can get a lot of other examples that folks here obviously Love because they're the modern sort of productivity stack What characterizes them what made them very successful with the figma story? It's just fascinating. They grew from like 8% of the market to 58% of the market from a 40 billion dollar market that had like Very stable incumbents that people knew like sketch and envision Mainly through becoming multiplayer through through having collaboration as a sort of first-class kind of feature in the app And we believe that that's where the world is going that most apps will have Collaboration in context because it's just better than command tabbing into slack and copying and pasting screenshots and links and whatever And we provide the features the the infrastructure and the components that you can put in your app And so from apps like our you know products from companies like Monday dot com or bill dot com or Thought spot, which is a big bi tool that some people here might use in their companies We're adding the the commenting features are powered by cord It's all kinds of examples in crypto and little big apps finance tools all kinds of stuff So give me one of those examples. So when you talk about Commenting like what is a use case for a product manager? Yeah, so look as a product manager for a B2B sass you might want to add commenting to your B2B sass tool because your users would benefit from it the benefit from it because what happens is if they Have to rely on either slack or email So sometimes it's lack if it's a team working together in a product like figma or notion But sometimes some products bring in multiple parties together to work inside of this, you know sass tool so for example, one of our clients trumpet is a It's a like a tool for salespeople to build Micro-sites so instead of sending a deck they send this like micro site to their prospects And so the salesperson the prospect can talk about the offer and the details of the you know Kind of solution that they're selling on this site and this is way better than email Hey, it's like you can do all the things that we're just used to doing from the modern kind of communication tools like what's up and and You know slack and so on like we can add to mention people drag and drop files inside use markdown edit and delete messages See whether a person saw the message or not just like the real live typing indicators all that rich Functionality that people just come to expect from chat Is you can add it to any product right? So that's very useful for all kinds of products and the reasons useful for products Because it's useful for the users useful for the users just like in fig band Google Docs You never take screenshots and copy and paste links commenting in line in context on a specific line or we have Clients that are video editing tools And so you want to comment on a specific kind of time stamp in the video and have the when you click the comment It scrolls the video to the right place all that stuff that lets the comments stay in Context enrich the the thing that they're talking about let everyone reply there But still get notifications and email and slack and so on a lot of work to build yourself And just like you don't build your login yourself you use like off-zero or any of the other kind of sort of solutions for login We believe that commenting is a waste of time to build yourself and you should just kind of go to the best in class solutions Similar to how we were discussing that there are playbooks out there specific frameworks and and tools that People can repurpose. I think these that these particular use cases can also be repurposed across Across companies across products like there's no need as you mentioned like to reinvent the wheel now And if you are trying to build a new website Figure out how to create a new login system. There's a block That exists and then similar to a Lego Yeah, I think of these these are products in a way as Lego puzzles where there are some unique pieces that you still want to build Hopefully those are the pieces that add the differentiating value But then there are other pieces that are more standard that can save you a lot of time And don't really add much more differentiating values. It's probably better to buy than to build and I've seen this evolution happen where software engineers would roll out their sleeves and say no, no Everything is unique. So we need to build everything from scratch I am now an engineer. There's all kinds of frameworks libraries and repositories that allow engineers to move faster So curious to know how did you figure out that this Lego block that you are building in a way like this is collaborating Platform is going to become a standard for Other other products of there So I'll tell you what instead of talking about cord I'll give a different example a story that I just like and it just it analogizes and it connects to cord But I think it'll be more interesting for everyone will answer the question regardless So the story is a story of the like button so the like reaction the light button that we see everywhere We you know, I hope that people still know this was like invented at Facebook But by now it's like so common. It's everywhere. You sort of forget where it started and the reason it started at Facebook was There there used to be you used to post that there wasn't a feed you would post things to your wall and people's walls that was the post and then there were comments below and A lot of the comment a lot of people would post like I don't know life updates or whatever And a lot of the comments were people trying to like, you know affirm what they did and sort of go Oh cool awesome great to hear, you know, what happens with that is that you get lots of comments, but They're mostly boring. They're mostly just like kind of, you know, just affirmation That's not really interesting and it's hard to fish out what the interesting content is like if someone had a reply That's meaningful. It's like buried under a lot of like thank yous plus ones, whatever and the other thing that's hard is like Kind of when you want to comment on something like you keep seeing these posts And you keep having to come up with new ways to just say awesome. Awesome Otherwise, you're like the awesome guy just copies and paste awesome everywhere, right? So you kind of it's it makes it harder for me even if I want to like give you credit for something you did it makes it harder for me to do it and That was the key realization that led to developing the like button and one of Kind of the person who's close to us advises before Person named Soleil Cuervo was a designer who came up with the idea for the like button in Facebook It was very counterintuitive because it tanks a lot of the metrics right like you had a lot of comments And they're all gonna go away because they're gonna be replaced with people clicking the like button but it actually helps because people can see more interesting comments rather than being stuck on that like moment that has a lot of mental kind of You know friction mental load of coming up with a new way to express the idea of You know Confirmation and so they launched this and it goes ballistic right and a ton of likes everywhere and everyone uses it And then Facebook was actually a huge laggard and took them a long time to develop a broader Sway of reaction. So everyone took this comment this like idea, but You know fast forward a few different abstract like a like unlike mechanism and then I think Slack was actually the first one that I remember. Maybe people know this differently That came up with this like, okay You know what it doesn't doesn't have to be just the like it could be a whole set of emojis And then actually Facebook did the whole like smile, you know, there's five emojis I think Facebook today has already switched to like any reaction and some of their products at least messenger for sure And so the thing that's interesting in this is that there was this like innovation and product that became just Changed like the world of product for everyone like outside the company that it was made up and it was copied over and now It's just a part and parcel of how we kind of look at You know commenting there must be a reaction to save us time from saying awesome or whatever So I know we have to wrap up. I'll just finish with this. I Just noticed that there's there's these patterns around Communication, you know, the best in class communication looks like WhatsApp And if you implement it or telegram or Slack, whatever your favorite kind of cutting edge Messaging tool is but they all share a very broad Sway of capabilities And if you implement it from scratch That's a ton of work and you end up with something that's so backwards that people don't want to use it So that was the realization that there's this pattern here. This is something that is just Everyone will want to have it as good as you know, figure my notion and and and what's up and so on And that was what we crystallized Thank you. Love this story and brought me Back to the days when I was literally picking the like button and that's kind of the evolution of the emojis today And then stickers and a bunch of other ways to express emotions while still ensuring the quality of the comments You made me think about now how Slack or other communication tools in the workplace Could potentially evolve into providing those conversations With the context. It was like a lot of these conversations you mentioned happen outside your current company You need to collaborate with other partners vendors clients You name it and you're going back to email sounds a little bit like old school not very productive so moving forward putting them both in the context of like the product or the Whatever they are trying to discuss allows them to not just chat or express emojis But to actually interact and and do more in more things beyond just text Yes, fully agree. I think you know we talk about Kind of communication versus collaboration so like imagine trying to build them a piece of Ikea furniture But over the phone, right? So you don't see your friend You have to like give them the instructions and you can only talk to them over the phone This is like it's it's it's just very very hard like you want to be there and be able to point at stuff And this is what communication in context Let's us do it lets us like highlight a piece of text highlight the point on a chart highlight, you know Kind of frame in a video and say well this should be more well lit or whatever it is, right? And so we have all of these use cases and they you know kind of there's all kinds of innovations I could talk about it for hours. I don't want to turn this again sort of Glimpse into the future It's like maybe People can say well when we have a video call over zoom or any other tool, but this time share the screen I know it's not the most collaborative experience because you can't still build a lot of things on top of that Screenshare, but you know, it's a it's step forward So if you were to think in terms of Collaboration next three years like what is that next frontier? Yeah, I think look in three years time I think there's still a lot of catch-up for a lot of tools to do because most of You know, except if you're like a very small set I used to speak to investors about this and I said Okay, you know investors basically live their days in email and and Google Docs And or word and so they don't really have a sense of kind of the tools that most people use But if you're a DevOps engineer, you might be using Grafana and like some AWS kind of You know consoles and and maybe some other logging tools and None of these have collaboration like you end up having to go back to something like slack to Kind of follow along on an incident or share the info So I think it would be amazing if we have the world where all of these tools and same goes for marketers, you know even the modern kind of Marketing tools that most people use to create newsletters or whatever you actually can't collaborate inside them You can't kind of again to work together, but you do need all of these people you need feedback approval Passing on the baton, you know from the like content copywriter to the designer to kind of add in the images and then Maybe someone approves it or someone does the links or Whatever your workflow is it very likely involves a few people And that's that's where the gap is if we have to jump so in a three-year time frame I'm just imagining all of these tools getting collaboration at the level of like Figma which involves a lot of details and notifications on kind of Being able to follow someone along and so on if you ask me about a longer time frame. I'm kind of excited about where the next Leap in interfaces will be and If if I learned anything from the last 20 years is that you look at consumer tech first And that's where that's where business tech will go. So, you know stuff that was thought of as like wild like Not using chat and not email and work was completely wild in like 2005. It's like you couldn't imagine It's it just it was like chat was icq was for kids, you know or using even You know emojis in like just using emojis in like a business or like in a professional correspondence was like weird And and using lights and using, you know, and now I have business chats on WhatsApp, you know and Things that we've seen, you know Like loom has opened up this idea of taking a video of ourselves and sending it over Which again, it's kind of people were used to it from the WhatsApp experience from there like B2C experiences from stuff like snapchat and it takes a few years it lags But then it gets into work. So I think we will see the stuff that we see in B2C today And maybe it's streaming and maybe it's Stuff like VR That you know kind of today is very cumbersome and hard to imagine But I think if you look 10 years ahead it might be that it'll be Amazingly exciting to build the collaboration layer for that So we'll see Nimrod, it was a pleasure to learn more about your experience Growing as a product leader as well as your experience now as a CEO building the future of collaboration Thank you so much for your time. Thank you Carlos. Thanks for having me