 Awesome, we're live on YouTube. Next one. Officially awesome, very exciting. Then I have my intro ready. Great, cool. Awesome, welcome, welcome guys. This is Stockton NCD. You are in our live recording of the product insider. So let me get started with today's show and also welcome our guest Rob Latham. How are you guys doing? Awesome. Hi. Cool. Hi Rob, great. So and now quick introduction regarding product insider and I'm your host Stockton NCD. So let's get started. Hey, this is Stockton NCD. I'm passionate about all things product, career girls and non-profit. I'm on a mission to help people record amazing product that impact millions of people's lives while getting the work-life balance they deserve. Welcome to Pratt Insider. Shall I wait from the real talk? No way. We're covering everything from impulsive syndrome, people management and barriers facing the park leaders of tomorrow. We're joined by fan-level park leaders to get run down on the hottest right now. And I'm your host, Stockton NCD. Moved to the US with $800 in my pocket and became a director product in four years. Now I run Pratt Manager accelerator, a course that make Pratt Management career available to everybody. Welcome to Pratt Insider. Okay. So, very excited to have our guest today, Robert Latham. And actually, it's such an honor to bring Rob on our show because Rob has a very amazing journey. He currently is a VP of product at Google and also park leader at Meta. Also started two successful product in the past. And Rob, how are you doing? Welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me. Doing really well. I've been enjoying some time, some vacation recently. And yeah, just really excited to share some thoughts with you and the audience here. Awesome. So Rob, let me ask you a quick question. What are your base right now? I'm in Austin, Texas. So this is the bay area for quite a while. Then actually moved to Boulder and moved back to the bay area. Then moved to Austin at the end of 2019. So I've been here for a few years now. This is awesome. I've actually moved before the booming of pandemic. Just before, yes. And was traveling back and forth to the bay area and had, you know, a desk in, at Facebook at the time had a desk in Menlo Park, had a desk in Austin. I got all my stuff back from Austin, by the way, when I left the company. I'm still waiting for my stuff from Menlo Park, finally. I see. Awesome. Cool. So Rob, so let's do this. Given you had such amazing journey in different company and also move across different places and making your own personal and career choice, do you want to give us a quick overview of your background? Sure. Yeah. Just going, going backwards, I've, you know, been in big tech companies the last six years. So the last two years with Google, working in the central privacy and security team. And then before that, I ran the product team for a group at Facebook, now Meta called Business Integrity. So it was protecting the commercial products. Most of that was ads, but, you know, we made sure that bad ads didn't get through. We followed up and sued bad actors. We, you know, we also built a bunch of transparency tools for political ads and all ads and so on, and also some ads privacy related work. And so that was, you know, those are kind of my first big tech company roles the last six years. And then before that started two different companies. One was actually an ad blocking company. We sold the technology before I joined Facebook. And then before that, built one of the largest ads API partners to companies like Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn. We started in display advertising, but then we pivoted to social media ads. We sold that business in 2013. But, you know, it worked at a few different places. I worked at LinkedIn for a little while, which is interesting in the very early days when we had like 40 people at the company. Wow. And like you, I also grew up, grew up and moved to the U.S., grew up overseas and moved to the U.S. And, you know, went to college in the U.S., et cetera. So, yeah, it's been a journey, but yeah, I'm very glad to be here. Awesome. Another immigrant story. So let me ask you, Rob, where are you original from? I grew up in South Africa. Yeah, my family, a lot of my family is still there. So going back, you know, the summer to go see, well, summer here, winter there, go see some folks. But yeah, get every year and a half to yours to go see, see people over there. But that's where I grew up. Wow, this is beautiful. It's always a place I want to visit. Actually, I have a student currently is in Nigeria and an answering in Kenya. It's like very global. It's amazing. Great to see lots of people just creating amazing career and cross cultures, cross companies as well. We're leading to our today's main topic regarding building trust in large and small different sizes of organizations because we believe that culture differences and also even within the large organization that different people from very different perspective that the trust is actually very important for part of managers to build. And actually I look up online actually 55% of the business owners feel like having trust is one of the most important core value of the success of their company. And it's crazy. And also from part of management's perspective we're also building trust among different stakeholders and therefore today I want to hear from your perspective regarding you have been working in like 40 people LinkedIn team when they started and also all the way to manage your own large organization in Google and matter as a VP of product. Can you share with us regarding why trust is so important in all sizes of companies from product perspective? Yeah, absolutely. I think the product manager has a pretty unique role and it's kind of like there's lots of different takes on how to be a good product manager and what it actually means but often you're kind of someone on my team once described it as you're the glue that's holding a lot of things together and so glue is something that you really have to trust or maybe it's zip ties or something else but it's something that kind of needs to bind things together and in itself people need to trust that you can help facilitate things. I think also there's a tendency sometimes I mean I think there's a lot of this old notion that the product manager is the CEO of the product like that and I think that's like not really the case and we can talk more about why I don't think that's the case but I think there's also a lot of misperception about the role of product management I think there's a lot of people who actually I actually used to see this when people would want to transfer to become a product manager from another discipline often their understanding of what a PM does was different than the reality and I think once they learn the reality some of them were like no I actually don't want to do that job I don't want to be meetings all day so I think trust is really important because like a lot of other things as well the product manager is facilitating a lot of things and so to be a good facilitator I think you need to be someone that is trustworthy and someone that can help bring people together Awesome so Rob I do want to dive deeper a little bit regarding the CEO of product you think you have a different opinion regarding the CEO of product so what's in reality what product manager is doing if we are not the CEO are we the COO or CMO so tell us more I've had some of these jobs but I think the one of the things I think of a product manager is doing is being responsive this again these are not my words but learning from others originally so a product manager is responsible for facilitating and is responsible for high quality of decisions that are made about the product so I think it's in some cases depending on the size of the team and the situation you're making some decisions or the way in which you're framing already is directing things a certain way but I think really often it's the case that there are other people who do way in have to help make decisions and you're essentially a facilitator to help make decisions so I see the in some ways a CEO a good CEO I think often is a facilitator but the difference with the CEO I think having been one is at the end of the day when someone has to make a decision you know no one else has made the decision you're making the decision you know the other way the other thing that happens is if you know your AWS instances go down at 2 a.m. in the morning you know you and maybe the CTO are the ones you know getting on the phone you know etc like you're the last line of whatever I think the PM sometimes has that role but really a lot a lot more it's like helping within the structure of whatever that organization facilitating decision making and making sure those decisions are of high quality I love it and so when you emphasize on the facilitating part I think at the lead to the challenges we're talking about regarding building trust can you tell us why it's so challenging and crucial we talk about crucial is important why it's so hard to actually building trust and facilitate and bring everyone on the same page as a product manager yeah I think a lot of times people are coming from different perspectives and different history with PMs I think it was Lenny Richesky recently was saying something about you know some people have experiences of PMs that aren't good PMs and so you know you may have different everyone's coming from a different background for perspective some people have been in organizations where there is no PM function so you know you have many people where they're at the other thing I've also seen is for example with a lot of you know smaller organizations you have engineering managers taking on that role of essentially some of the some of the things that a PM would do you know and there hasn't been a PM function you're creating one and then some of the things those things are things that an engineering manager wants to continue to do what they enjoy doing so you also depending on where your organization is you're actually like growing into certain things and you're defining roles and creating clarity and so you know you need to get to know and spend time on the relationships in order to be able to create that clarity in order to be able to also create swim lanes for people so they're not running into each other you know one of the things I find actually very useful in this is also to you know create leadership groups where it's multiple different functions that are sitting at the same table so you know because it can sometimes feel like PM is telling other functions what to do and in some cases it's kind of true but the reality is that it's much more it's much better if it's a collaborative atmosphere and people are sitting at the same table they're bringing different perspectives you know and they're kind of working together in that way this is awesome so Rob can you give up something juicy which is at Google or matter you can pick any of the large companies from their perspective what's in real life the challenges you guys facing you send a real life example we can remove anything confidential we just want to see from like leading tech perspective right because I I would imagine there's so many different teams in Google and it sounds easy to bring people on the same table but when you actually execute it you will face real life challenges can you give us some insider secret regarding like using Google or matter as an example what does it look like to work with others any kind of pushback you had when you implement the building trust strategies yeah for sure I mean I think building trust it's not just within the focus or problem directly it's also when in any of these companies when you're trying to solve a problem you're in some cases you create other problems or you you learn that there's other confounding issues so I spent a lot of time working on the integrity or trust and safety space at meta specifically and so there there's always these concerns where you're like okay we're going to you know implement this policy change that's going to that's meant to stop this particular thing what we think is bad but obviously the detection of things is not perfect at these concentric circles of you know other folks who are impacted so what ends up happening is it's customers getting impacted but it's also other teams getting impacted so they may not be able to ship something you know they may have to work to you know they may have to work with partners to implement new you know new things that again create like these these other effects I think there's always these tradeoffs that you have to help manage across different teams so it's not just across functions working on your thing that's one aspect of this kind of cross-functional leadership and value that you're helping to create but it's also across different teams who are seeing different sides of the same the same thing other things we like to do I know it for example at meta one of the things we would try to do is you know gain alignment for example through sharing metrics so we'd say okay this team is going to ship this thing and we want to set up some guardrail so let's make sure that this particular metric that we agree on it doesn't go outside of this range if it does then let's have a discussion etc so a lot of times that those things are pretty you know manual hands-on like okay we're like looking at the data every day and we're having reviews and whatever or every every month we might have a review about it but then you know as you kind of instrument those things in your product you can actually make it more automated so it's just really like not really a problem until you get some notifications like okay the you know this particular rate is dropping below this threshold let's you know go and have a discussion about it so I think you know one thing is like different teams and different functions of different incentives and so acknowledging that coming up with things that cut across those and perhaps allow you to have metrics being one way of potentially doing that turn out to be pretty useful because then also it takes some of the it takes some of that personal you know adversarial nature of it away because this is a we've agreed in advance on this metric the metric goes south we'll we'll talk about it it's not really about you know you say this or I say that exactly so no wonder so like all the big tech companies and more tours we are data driven company and even for people currently interviewing was matter or when they were hiring interviewing was matter they asked lots of like prime metrics questions so basically you guys are using metric drive the alignment was in different teams Rob I do have something real life challenge maybe you can help me out and regarding building trust in the remote environment I also have my team my team is everywhere like UK have people working for you like in from UK working for me like in Asia in the US all over the world we frequently find out those kind of trust it's harder when it's in a remote environment when we are in persons easy to have some coffee and I think it's it's more easier to build as a human dynamic mom nowadays is remote do you have specific strategies to build trust and alignment in a remote environment in both like larger companies more companies yeah so so many many years ago more than a decade ago we had this thing where we had a bunch of so my company was like 40 people and we had a bunch of people who remote in Chicago New York and other places so we were mainly in the Bay Area what I did is I said okay for this whole hands we're all gonna dial in from our computers this was way before COVID and everyone was used to like you know zoom and things like that like people looked at me like I was really crazy because I was like I want everyone to be on an equal footing to dial into the discussion and so because it's the dynamics will be different so we did that one time with a people were like okay this is kind of weird but I do think you need to kind of think about ways in which to put people on an equal footing in these remote settings you know you know a couple things I've done with various teams is like move things around or have like a you know depending where your teams are if they're in Europe and teams in Europe and Asia like it's pretty challenging to get something that works for everyone so alternating different times for things you know recording meetings things like that so people can catch up on their own schedule those are all like useful things sometimes not obvious but useful things for remote work and I think that the next layer is like also you know again for bigger companies if you're designing setting up teams you know having something that a team can own more fully if they're in a remote location is useful so that way they don't have isn't like high coordination costs and you know very expensive kind of cross time zone bandwidth stuff what do you mean what do you mean have people like high cross footing can you elaborate more so yeah so like as an example if you know let's say that I have a product and I have a team in London and I have a team in area and they have to talk they have to like talk about different specs like several times a day like there's only so much of a window where that's easy however if it's something where they for like two weeks and do a sprint and you know then come back and then you know they don't have to like align and chat necessarily every single day like I think they can more fully own a particular feature or something like that that's that's helpful but I see your point I don't think there's really any way to get around you just have to meet people in person from time to time so you know very targeted summits where you're telling for a few days can be very useful you know there is a downside of some of this stuff which is like I've also instances where people aren't super sensitive like again like also it's not just about in your area like if say you're coordinating with people in Europe and they tend to take vacation you know at a certain time a lot of locations yeah yeah but you have to just be sensitive to those things because actually you know in trying to make things better you're gonna make things worse because people will will say oh well they're out of touch with the way things are done over here etc but you know I think even just more people being somewhat local to each other or like within a few hours of each other maybe even in the same time zone of being remote I mean that's also you still need to spend time getting to know each other in person in those settings too so I think that's really important and then just you know always listening and creating opportunities for feedback just understanding how people are feeling I think there's a lot that people that leaders you know we create these opportunities to try to listen to feedback but I think sometimes you know we can do even more than that to hear what people are saying and to you know meet them like I said meet them where they're at I love the hey Rob I do you want to discuss in in depth regarding the feedback systems so currently I know for like different conflicts on Amazon has 360 feedback I heard it's very stressful you have people under you like everybody needs to like you or you're in danger or in other big tech company they have like annual performance review so in my company I implement a new strategy which is we have monthly feedback session it's not me giving other feedback is that hey everyone working in my company can you give me feedback regarding how I manage you how the company is growing is any directions not aligned do you have any specific tips regarding how the feedback system is can be implemented within your team and also cross functionally I personally believe that if we implement cross functionally you didn't know how to say it better because their interests are not aligned for some cases so can you shine some lights on that yeah so I think the p0 on feedback I think is people need to see that you take action on feedback so I think the quality of feedback goes up the more in my opinion in my experience the more people see that it actually makes a difference and it's not just we heard your feedback about X but like if X is never going to change that's not great so I think that's the main thing to start with but you have to kind of ask the question in lots of different ways you can't also just assume hey I did the survey once or twice a year and now this is the full set of feedback there's always stuff that isn't said I'm a big fan of so I guess when I was at Facebook there was you could give feedback in an attributed way or anonymously in like even performance or other cases again this may have changed since then this was a few years ago I always so I actually had an edge partner who was like I always give anonymous feedback because I don't want to feel like I'm holding back on feedback and I took the opposite approach I said I always wanted to be attributed because I don't ever want it to be the case that you hear about something in anonymous feedback or secondhand or something that I haven't said to you directly so I try to give people feedback you know again if this is more performance oriented directly and then also write it you know have it be written down you know I think it's I think it's very this is a very difficult area right so there's no you know ultimately right or wrong answer here but I do think that I prefer when people put stuff in wrong they provide written feedback I'm okay with anonymous feedback as well I think there's some some folks you just feel more comfortable doing that I know some companies don't like anonymous feedback for various reasons I generally think you have to facilitate mechanisms for this people are going to talk and going to say stuff regardless and so I think you just need to give them ways to do it in such a way that you're at least aware of these things but again I come back to what I said before is like you need to figure out what you can make the experience for people better I think ultimately a lot of these companies you know as knowledge workers you know your employees and your team is your biggest asset and you really have to figure out how to you know happier more efficient and again to the thing you said earlier at the top which was you know give them the ability to have balance in their lives so that they actually are excited to do the work that they're working on. Exactly so specifically how would you filter the feedback that's not active. For example in our last episode I talked to the senior director of product growth at Stash and Maria so Maria mentioned something very interesting she said she is open to feedback but sometimes the feedback is hard to implement or she doesn't know how exactly to change it because one feedback she received is that you're too straightforward Maria whatever you say say to others face that's too straightforward or sometimes will be like hey Maria your sentence structure too long so she came from Latin America so the way Spanish the words construction it's just longer than English so she just felt like it's me speaking directly it's my personality how do I actually change who I am so there's like balance out there so what do you think and regarding implementing those feedback and some feedback may not be as constructed as you wish yeah I mean I think sometimes it's not right so sometimes you just have to kind of take some of that into into account one other thing I found useful is like sometimes you need help from folks to gather feedback about you or about things you could do better so a great example was my first manager at Facebook you know she gathered a bunch of a bunch of feedback from my directs and skip levels and like she was able to get some insights that I wouldn't have gotten if I try to ask them directly and then I was able to act on on those things and again you're always going to hear sometimes things where it's like oh this you know like you said something non-constructive that you can't really address or it's like or something that you think is actually just part of you know who you are so not all feedback is needs to be acted on I think that's the other thing to take into account is like yeah sometimes people are upset or you know they have had certain experiences or so on you need to kind of take everything with and sometimes it's really good to like bounce the feedback off of other people so I find a peer have a mentor be like look I heard this thing I feel like this is valid I feel like this I'm not so sure about this you know what do you think and then also sometimes playing the feedback back to people you know other people gives them permission to give you the feedback as well so you'll learn some new things because something you use as a tool and you kind of then also like anything I think it's content that you can use in different ways and again obviously not necessarily like saying hey John said this thing about me because maybe it's inappropriate to say who said it but I said you could go back to someone and say I heard this thing from a couple people on my team do you think how do you think I could address what have you done have you seen examples especially if it's a mentor or someone you trust who's going to be very open and frank with you I think that's also great you can use the feedback in different ways yeah exactly I love this actually I have a failure story myself I'm open to share because the product insider a failure story we're going to feedback when I start hiring people for my company and there was a time one of my best hire in my company and one day I think it was in two weeks in the company I really like her and she sent me a message saying that Nancy you gave me too much work if you do not fix this and this this I'm going to quit I was like I just onboarded you two weeks ago you're my best hire I interviewed vigorously to find you now it's threatened to quit within two weeks you're like I don't even need the money Nancy those two weeks don't even need to give me money but you had to fix the problem for me to stay and I was like oh cool I'm glad people have a boss to stand out to me to their boss and I don't even need your money but I want you to fix the problem and that was so legit her feedback was so legit which is true so basically it's more like resource allocation within the company and based on her feedback I immediately hired two other people to grow the team to build hierarchy help each other out and now so that everyone can reduce stress and I do believe that those kind of feedback are very critical one last question to you Rob regarding feedback how often the frequency you mentioned earlier that some company do it like annually or quarterly whatever what do you think is the best way to open the door in terms of the frequency to receive feedback how often do you do that it depends like what situation you are to the point you made earlier which is like sometimes people who are new to a team are more willing and open to give feedback I had one person on my team like a 100 day report of how things were going it was really useful there were some really useful insights I think it really depends on kind of where the team and where you're at at one point I did a thing where a lot of these companies like Facebook and Google and others pulse kind of things that they do it's like an annual or bi-annual survey that they do across the company and so actually we were growing very quickly my team at Facebook meta and I felt like there were some things were going well some things weren't so I actually created like a mini monthly pulse survey that I just sent out I asked people to comment anonymously or not and that was actually really useful but it had a short life though because we kind of moved through those issues it didn't feel like we needed to keep doing that sometimes you know it'll feel burdensome we've all been in these situations where we're like keep getting asked to give feedback and it gets like a bit much and then it kind of annoys you so you kind of operate it carefully and sometimes when things are you know in a more nascent or uncertain state you may want more feedback but you also may choose for it incidentally so it doesn't seem like you know you're overly worried about stuff again like we said tricky but I think you're going to have to look at it as different times and places for different ways of gathering information about what's going well and what's not working yeah true thanks Rob and also I did redeem myself my best employee stayed and hired two other best employees I always love those stories where it's like I mean I think a lot of relationships are like that it starts out it's kind of like tricky but if people are committed to it and work through the issues on both sides I think those can be some of the best relationships work or otherwise that we have yeah exactly and she became my advocate with the company helped me to facilitate conversation with other employees as well yeah yeah exactly I think this is like true definition of leaders understanding how to fix the problem actually own your mistakes as well and I bet you have gone through a lot of this when you run your startups and bigger companies as well so Rob let's ask more strategy plus strategy question and we talk about people like feedback and trust and organizing different teams now as we all know the tech industry has been interrupted by AI we all know this and so do you think and also like being is the number one most recent download search engine recently because chat GBT integration different things do you think the future of Google is going to get impacted by the rise of chat GBT and being and it will eventually get replaced by them what's your thought yeah look I think I think everyone is gonna have to Google included as to take pay attention to this stuff and I think you know many ways Google is an AI first company and has been working on these things for a long time so I'm sure they have a role to play in this I think you'll also see lots of new companies open AI and others to enter this space and to figure out how to make this stuff work I think there's also I mean if you've seen the chat GBT plugins I think there's also a role for other companies to play where they're bringing new integrations ways to use information I also think like there's gonna be a ton of just unknowns and things that go wrong and automation run amok kind of thing you know like I know you can use the chat GBT plugin for example to like queue up emails and you know I just saw a funny cartoon yesterday I tweeted it yesterday what was like you know where someone was like oh I can just take this one bullet and turn it into a whole email thanks to AI and the other person was well I can take this whole email and condense it to one bullet point so that I can pretend like I read it so I think you're just gonna see some really interesting overlaps in how this stuff works and how people use it but ultimately I think these things are tools they're gonna have a lot of disruption in certain areas certain parts of certain industries in certain parts of the business you know I still think there's a lot of things where you will not be able to condense the answer down to like you know a nice paragraph or two of text you're gonna have to search and iterate and go through and look at stuff and take multiple sources into account so you know I assume that these companies will figure out ways to create different experiences around these tools whether that's a different new search experience or you know different ways of interacting with other tools like email or other things yeah exactly so do you think the trend of the industry in the AI space is going to be like similar to the original booming of WebSeries like there's a foundation of like Ethereum network and there's so many different kind of like chance people building on top of Ethereum and now this like downside of downturn of the WebSeries industry was because people realize that not all the protocols are very necessary and do you think this will be similar trend to the AI space right now we're on the rise people building different apps on top of AI do you think eventually we'll sort of settle down using only one best model could be chat GBT or different things oh by the way Google has its own BART like AI thing for BART do you think eventually we'll settle down on one best model that will just synchronize the whole world as a foundation and then you build small things on top of that or there will be several like BART chat GBT and AI engine different things running in parallel so what's your prediction of the industry yeah I'm sure I think there'll be a few like I don't think there's going to be thousands there'll be like lots of like sub models and enhancements plugins and things on all of these but I do think that it's probably going to be a bunch of network effects and probably a small number of folks who run the underlying models but you know I think it's hard to predict how this stuff is going to go I've been playing around a lot especially with chat GBT and it's really interesting and it's got it's gotten a lot better in the last few months and so I'm sure we're going to see a ton of stuff happen here I had a lot of experience as I mentioned before working as an API partner with some of these big companies so if I put that lens on things I think the hard thing here is figuring out how to you know build a successful scale that business on top of someone else's models and tech technology so I think you're going to have to look at things like well do we have like unique training data that we have a version that builds on top of the stuff and whatever that's going to be very rare but I think there will be those cases I think there's going to be people who monetize stuff in a very special way there's going to be people and companies who are able to bring things into real world applications that require bits and add together so I think there's going to be interesting stuff we can't even really conceive of yet but I do think there is this question of are you just an API partner of one of these models and one of these companies are you actually creating durable value yourself and you know frankly like this is difficult like a lot of companies in the space I was in and it kind of adds API business they try it and we're not able to build their own long term sustainable business on top of someone else's stuff so I think it will be challenging it's very difficult to build long term sustainability business on top of other people's stuff was because you're lacking the unique training data to create something unique am I right that's the main trigger not able to do it right that's one thing so like in the ads example I'll give you a specific example so for my company so we built this integration where you could we worked with Getty where you could pull in stock images to run to using your ads and you'd pay Getty like $1.50 or something for each one of these images and so we did this integration it was really great like we went to the Getty images partner summit all this other stuff but then you know Facebook went we were an API partner Facebook and so we had this and you could essentially get this value but then Facebook they were then offering these images to advertisers for free so you could get stock images for free so now it's like okay well they're doing a better job of integrating it themselves and it's free and they have more scale and so you know API partners can do a lot of things and can innovate but then often the things that they do can be itself who may have many more resources like oh this is really interesting we should bring this closer to our core feature set and then become something that for a small company to differentiate on and own because the underlying company can just replicate it and you know use it as a see them getting some success with it and then kind of redo it themselves now again I don't think a lot of this is malicious to be clear but I do think that this is kind of the way there's like stuff that is initially kind of an add-on often then over time becomes a core part of the platform exactly useful and it can also then be even better once the core part of the platform so my real question with a lot of these things is like what's going to be core what's going to be stuff that people can create value with how can those companies realize the value and so you know there's tons of these AI companies I think a lot of it is going to end up being a nothing because you know it's not going to work out but I do think that it's a really exciting time to be working on this stuff and trying to figure those questions out perfect so Rob one of the most asked question today is that how can people become an AI product manager so what's your advice to them because it's so hot right now so what's your advice yeah that's a good question I mean you know teams I've worked on have done a lot of AI stuff you know kind of machine learning computer vision related stuff image recognition so on so I think you know working on some of those kinds of basics and things that are like you know I like in general I like the I guess I would say I like the unsexy side of sexy technology so specific example you know we were competing for you know PhDs in ML and AI related disciplines when we were doing kind of image recognition for figuring out if you know people are trying to put porn in ads we were competing with people trying to you wanted to build filters for snapchat or facebook or whatever you know you know real-time computer vision applications and so I think again like if you're you know if you're thinking about some of that stuff I'd say look at some of the things side or the fundamentals of the baseline the basics and learn those that's always a good thing to you know to you know that's one way to kind of get up to speed on something in a way that maybe isn't as might be harder less hard to get into then if you're trying to go work at the hottest new start-up that's doing some of the stuff again you should try that too but the reality is a lot of these fundamentals I think will stand people in good stead if they learn them and they understand them deeply exactly all come from the foundations and fundamentals and then you can move on to be the larger tech, smaller tech and totally up to your career choice which lead into a very interesting disruptive I think nasty comment online by Andrew Chan and he said something interesting saying that for people select their career choices as we know so you have experience with start-up all the way to very large one of the most popular tech companies in the world so Andrew Chan said something very interesting and he was talking about hey for companies like Google, Meta all the big tech like fan companies and when they need employees they bring employees into the new company and then once the most talented employees join the company they hope that dreams get killed there because they're working on something not very passionate and the interview is very difficult once you get into working on something small and once there's a layoff you're the first one to go you just your dream get killed so therefore he's totally anti-join big tech company so what's your reaction to it do you agree disagree is there any truth to it well I think look I think it's both something that he's saying that's in his interest to say right as someone who works at a prominent VC fund that want people to join these other companies and there's some truth to it because you know you're going to have a slower pace of innovation you're going to work you may work on a project that gets killed you may work on something that's not core to the business there's definitely lots of things that get better at least more you know at least in the short term now if you work at a start-up that turns out to be you know 10,000 X whatever it is you know you're going to make more money but the point is and a lot of people again to be clear on doing this for money but look I think there's always reality to and you should always do your on the team the company the org I think there's many more questions when you go to a big company it's like okay well you know how are these organizations going to change over time and like there's you know there's a high degree I would say there's a high degree between how good different organizations are at these big companies and how and good maybe is too objective a term how matched they are going to be are to your career aspirations into you know the things you want to learn so for me I think a lot of it's about what do I feel like I can learn stuff here and then the reality is for anyone who's worked in start-up sometimes you just kind of need to you need something a bit more stable and again with tech layoffs maybe things aren't stable but you may need something where the dynamics of the trade-offs of you know high risk reward variance is lower and you know just stability is because you can't just kind of be going on and on and on for years and years and years I think a lot of I mean I you know I found when I was working in start-ups it was you know it was taking a lot less money for many years you know again we had a good exit to my first start-up and it was it was good but still I probably would have made more money if I'd been a product manager at one of these other big companies right when you when you add it all up at the end of the day so I think again it's a it's another one of these things that's a trade-off I would just suggest people do they do the due diligence talk to pms talk to other functions talk to folks at these companies you know do the research again take the stuff you read online with a grain of salt other platforms like some of that stuff is actually really interesting some of its you know a bit vitriolic but again do your do your diligence and talk to more people than you would otherwise yeah exactly and we actually I think the foundation for people is to really design the career path and with more information and continue to invest in themselves learning different AI technology or any new technology or any new skill set so they can always be on public gain in the market and so one last question to you Rob is that what's your opinion regarding investing like gross mindset investing in themselves and I think it's kind of new concept lots of people think about investing in stock market or buying some Bitcoin different things what's your opinion regarding investing in themselves and having a gross mindset do you think is a foundation most important thing compared with investing in stock market and real estate so what's your opinion on that yeah I think it's really important I mean I think that there is time for like networking and meeting other people outside of the core role I'm like you know you kind of need to do that like you need to find you know your work or people that you trust you can bounce things off of I think you need to be taking courses you need to be up leveling your skills I think if we take about your AI questions like some of the parts like if you're really great at writing emails and that's like your core superpower I'm like I'm sorry but you're gonna have to develop other skills and again I've worked with some of the best email writers I think on the planet some PMs are really great at communicating I think that will still be a valuable skill however like it can't be the only thing I think there's like definitely this you know folks get comfortable with the things that they're good at I think you need to get out of your comfort zone and learn new skills and you need to talk to get out of your comfort zone also we're talking to people that maybe you wouldn't talk to otherwise and learn things from them as well so I think it's a good mindset. This is amazing Rob thank you so much for sharing with us all like golden neck and everything you just shared with us so if the audience have a lot of questions where would they find you? Yeah so my DMs are open on LinkedIn and on Twitter so people can hit me up on either of those spots and you know always happy to help make connections to other folks as well who can maybe be helpful so yeah feel free to hit me up on either of those platforms This is awesome so we're going to link Rob's Twitter in the description of the show note is very popular he's like posting amazing stuff on Twitter so I'm very excited to have you join us here with us today and everyone make sure to follow Rob on Twitter and continue to like and like, subscribe and comment on our show so that I can bring more amazing speakers on our product insider podcast Awesome, thank you for joining us Rob and thank you for everyone who joined us and submitting all your questions through the back end, that's amazing, awesome Thank you guys, see you Rob Thank you for joining us, awesome, great, cool Alright, so Okay so now everybody who is with us live whoever RSVP to ask Rob live Q&A you should already receive a zoom link from my team Okay so Rob and I are going to jump to the zoom link right now and feel free to submit your questions on the zoom link as we're switching to a different platform Okay we're going to see you live and for people who didn't get a zoom link if you don't know how to get a zoom link you should email my team so my team like basically sent out emails we're going to join our inner circle for you to get a zoom link, if you missed this time we'll make sure we send you the recordings and also invite you to our next Q&A with our next amazing speakers this is awesome, okay great Thank you guys, so Rob we can just drop and click the link join the zoom on the others