 So this is my first slush. It's pretty awesome. And my first time in Helsinki. Thank you all for having me. I'm so excited to take you through the journey that has been the past three years of my life. So when I joined Slack a little over three years ago, we didn't have an infrastructure engineering organization. And about two years ago, the original infrastructure that we designed, it started to break at the seams. We needed to really rethink the systems that we had in place if we were going to scale through that next phase of hyper growth. So the CTO, Cal Henderson, he's going to be on stage tomorrow. He comes to me and he says, Julia, we need you to build a new engineering organization at Slack to help us keep up with growth. So talk about pressure. Now, this was the type of job that I like to call no parachute. The room for error was incredibly small. I had to be successful. There was no room to fail. How many of you right now are in these high pressure no parachute types of jobs? I see a fair amount of hands. Awesome. I've been there. And I'll tell you my lessons. These are the lessons of that time. Now, before we dig into that, finally, your miles may vary. What I'm going to talk about is very specific to the types of culture and company that we were building. Take away what works for you. Leave behind if it doesn't make sense. Now, let's do it. The 10 lessons I learned of scale. First, when you're growing really, really rapidly, that means that there's going to be a lot of change. And hey, guess what? People do not often like rapid change. It kind of freaks them out. And so you as the leader, you really have to tell people again and again to prepare for this kind of change. When I started infrastructure, there were fewer than 10 people on the team. Today, there are over 100 people within my organization in three offices in the US and Canada. That is a lot of change. We're onboarding people all of the time. We're recruiting all the time. Organizational structures are changing all the time. So as the leader of the org, I really have to emphasize change, it's coming, and it's good. Now, a big part of messaging change, of telling people that things are always going to be in this state of flux, is being able to do sales. Now, I'm an engineer. Like, I studied math and computer science. I didn't study how to be a great salesperson, but that's a huge part of my job right now. Telling the story again and again of how we got here and where we're going. It takes a different style of leadership when your organization is rapidly growing. To tell folks, where are we going? All the people that have heard your message about the vision, hey, guess what? There's 20 new people that joined the company last week, and they haven't heard the message. So again, selling that. And all the sales that I do, it's mostly internally. It's to my team. It's to other teams in the organization. If you run an infrastructure organization, if things work well, nobody ever notices. It's a beautiful part of infrastructure. And so you constantly have to be telling the story of why your organization matters, of the people in your org doing great things. Now, another part of this sales job that I didn't realize I had signed up for is recruiting. So how do you build a hypergrowth organization? Well, there's a whole other much longer talk. I would love to give you all at some point about that. But what I will talk about here is in the early days of your startup, when you're scaling, you need generalists who can take you from zero to one, who can see the open green field, and they can build the scaffolding, that first house, so to speak, that you've planted. Now later, once you've scaled up, then you need people who can build cities who are taking you from one to 100. Those are often specialists. They're not generalists. And so the folks that you need in the beginning are often fundamentally different than the folks that you need later on. It's really hard to grow on that really, really rapid growth trajectory. So what you're looking for in the beginning is people who can wear tons of hats. And later you need people who can specialize as your problems become deeper and more sophisticated. Now one of the things that's so critical that every organization is, of course, the people. Now I'm gonna tell you a story from many, many years ago about my graduate school advisor. So I worked with a really, really incredible woman when I was doing my graduate studies who had had an incredible career beforehand. And she had this wonderful honor of receiving an award on stage. And I was invited to attend the award ceremony because she had been so pivotal in my career. And they brought up one of the women who she had worked with early on. This woman takes the stage and my mentor, Diane, is sitting there about to receive this award. So woman comes up and when she begins to talk about Diane, the first thing she says is, even though she was really important and she was this big wig in the organization, she always remembered my name. And so as your organization grows and scales, there's this tendency to forget who the people are, to treat them all as the same. But everyone in your org knows if you know their name. When you pass them in the halls as their leader, they notice if you remember what their spouse's name is or if they have kids or dogs or pets. So remember, people are people and they're not just resources. Speaking even more of people, I've seen a lot of startups. I've started a company before I was at Slack. And there's this tendency in very engineering-centric organizations to solve every single problem that you have with engineering. Now, I've done this myself. Users aren't signing up. Let's write our technology in a different language. Struggling with sales? Let's tweak that sign-in page. Now, there are very few problems in the world that are truly very hard engineering problems. For the rest, hire people who are great at those other functions. Let them worry about marketing and sales and product, incredibly, incredibly important things. I've seen engineering organizations where two people didn't get along so they would only talk over an API boundary. That's not ideal. Now, I've had a lot of great, great failures in my career. And often when you fail, you're very introspective. You think, what did I do wrong? Where did I screw up? How could I prevent it again? But when you succeed, people often think you've succeeded because you're so smart. Of course, because you're just so great at what you do. But the problem is, most of the time, we don't know why we've been successful. So how do you put this into practice? So when I interview people, and I sometimes interview up to 10 people a week, so I have a really tight feedback loop of good interview questions. Happy to share more of those later. I have some really good ones. I always dig into failure because when people talk about when they've been successful, you often get a lot of platitudes. Oh, I was just really good at it. You know, I made this series of great decisions, but people often don't know, but when you fail, that's when you can have a real conversation about what went wrong and what went right. Should I also ask people about the biggest challenges they face, the biggest mistakes they've made? You would be very surprised at how many people I interview who say that they have never made any mistakes. It's a very eye-opening, when people do that, it's quite eye-opening about their level of self-awareness. Talking about failure, so all of us as humans, we have a lot of strengths and weaknesses. And let's talk a little bit about my advisor Diane, who I had mentioned earlier in the talk. So when I was headed off to Silicon Valley 12 years ago to go work at an awesome company, I asked her, you know, you've been really successful. What's your secret to success? And she said, look at the leaders of your organization. The strengths and weaknesses of those leaders, those strengths will be rewarded in the organization. So if your organization is led by extroverts, extroverts are more likely to promote other extroverts. We like people very similar to ourselves. And so think about your own organizations. Think about the ways in which you maybe on purpose and accidentally reward people like you. I often really dig in when I interview people about what their strengths are and what their weaknesses are because you need that level of self-awareness if you're gonna run a really large organization, especially if you wanna build a diverse and inclusive organization, you have to know yourself incredibly well. So as I mentioned before, my organization has grown substantially in the past couple of years. And in the early days, in an early in my career, I used to think that the job of a leader is to just tell people what to do. Now, I learned that I was incredibly wrong early on when I took on a role as a product manager. So how many of you all are product managers in the audience? A few, awesome. So product management is an incredibly difficult job because you have to influence people who do not directly report to you. You have to help them and guide them, engineers, designers, on what to build when you do not control the three things that matter most to people. What their title is, what their compensation is, and where their desk is, potentially the most important. And so now at Slack, when I run a large org, I spend a lot of time asking questions, influencing the direction, setting long-term vision, but not being prescriptive about how we get there. I am so far from the front lines, I shouldn't be dictating how we do things. I should be talking about the future, where we are in five to 10 years, and then allowing the team to fill in all of those details. But that's incredibly, incredibly hard to do that, and learning how to influence people, that has taken me many, many years to do. Now finally, I will leave you with one last parable about the road to success, or to trying to achieve success. So, I used to think that there would be one day when I'd wake up, and everything would suddenly, everything would make sense. We would achieve all of our goals, and then we'd be done, right? Like we'd just like, all right, kick back, time to relax, and that's never ever the case. So, throughout my whole career, and especially in hyper growth organizations, as soon as you get to one place, the place you thought would have been that marker of success, suddenly a new competitor arises, suddenly there's a new challenge to tackle. Everything is always under construction. There's a great phrase I really love that's called evolve or die. You must constantly be changing how you adapt, how you evolve, especially in a hyper competitive landscape. So, with that, I wanna thank all of you. Thank you for coming to my 15 minute speed round. It was awesome to hang out, and I hope you all have a great slush. Thanks. Good.