myprasanna's posterous

Andrew Mason Interview

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57358912/the-real-deal-with-groupon/?pageNum=4&tag=contentMain;contentBody

Stahl: Can you name another CEO with a demo on YouTube in which you're sitting around in front of a Christmas tree in your skivvies doing yoga?

 

Mason: Umm... No. That's a huge problem.

 

Mason: I think if there's any difference between me and a traditional CEO, it's that I've been unwilling to change myself or shape my personality around what's expected.

 

Stahl: So here's a question that you hear a lot: "Is Andrew Mason ready to be a CEO?"

 

Mason: Am I as experienced or mature or smart as other CEOs?

 

Stahl: -- of big companies worth as much as yours.

 

Mason: Yeah. No, probably not. But there's something, I think, very useful about having a founder as the CEO.

 

Stahl: I saw you at Nasdaq, I guess it was, and there you were in this Armani kind of suit and a tie. Completely shaved.

 

Mason: What's an Armani type of suit?

 

Stahl: A really nice suit, an expensive suit. Was that the first tie you ever owned? Do you even own a tie? Did you rent a tie?

 

Mason: No. I own over four ties. Yeah.

 

Stahl: Did you think about showing up in a suit and tie for "60 Minutes"?

 

Mason: No, I asked if I should.

 

Stahl: And?

 

Mason: And they said I shouldn't. So maybe, you know what? Maybe I am changing. Cause I might've not asked before.

Work

During a late night coding session, the topic about one's identity came up. Is work my identity (or) is it your relationships? It's not such a clear question because both of them mix well, and you tend to make your best friends during work. There's still a large divide, when it comes to the girl. I don't pretend to have answers, but I came across this quote recently:

"Your work is to discover your work and with all your heart give yourself to it" -Buddha

Steve Jobs - "The lost interview"

Unrelated one, but interesting: ; This is not the one playing in the theaters: http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/17/the-lost-interview-steve-jobs-tells-us-what-really-matters/

Quotes that I remember:

Why computers?

"As a kid, I read an article in the Scientific American. It measured the efficiency of locomotion of various species on the planet. Bears. Chimpanzees. Raccoons. Birds. Fish. How many kilo-calories per kilometer did they spend to move? Humans were measured too. And the condor won. It was the most efficient. Humankind came in with an unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list. But somebody there had the brilliance to test a human riding a bicycle. We blew away the condor. Off the charts.

This really had an impact on me. Humans are tool builders. We build tools that can dramatically amplify our innate human abilities. We ran an ad for this once that the personal computer is the bicycle of the mind. I believe that with every bone in my body."

About Microsoft:

"The thing about Microsoft is that, these guys are opportunists, and I mean that in a good way. When they first entered the application space, lotus and others had the market. They launched office and it wasn't all that good, but they kept going at it, like the japanese soldiers, they never stop. And they finally won." [after this is the quote about taste]

Taste and Microsoft:

Jobs: Microsoft has no taste. The trouble is that, the people who buy products, don't have a great taste either. But you know, we as humans, need to take the best that we find, and give it to the whole species.
Interviewer: What are you going to do about that?
Jobs: I'm not doing anything about that. We're too small for that. I can't do anything about that.

Note that this was the time when he was working on NeXT, and they launched the computer, and the product failed. He was pivoting into a pure-software business, and was melancholic about the whole thing.

Hippie:

Interviewer: Do you consider yourself more of a nerd or a hippie?

Definitely more of a hippie, I think. And I think everyone I've worked with would say so too.

Interviewer: Why is that? Do you seek out hippies?

I was probably a kid, when this whole hippie movement took off, and it had some spirit to it. People took it to an extreme and went crazy and all that, but thinking about it.. There's something to life more than, you know, waking up, going to office everyday and having a career and getting married, having kids, getting a home and you know, that sort of a thing. Sometimes you are put in the cracks between this regular stuff, and you experience the void. Most people just want to move on with their lives, but a few people grab the experience. I think there is some life to that. It opens up your narrow spectrum into something more a full-view of things, you know. Does it make any sense?

Interviewer: Yes.

Emotional Products:

What causes people to be poets instead of bankers? When you put that into products people can sense that. And they love it.

Bricks and a company:

I was at my neighbors place when I was a kid, doing his lawn work I think for $20 or so. He took me to this drum and put a bunch of stones in there, and spun the drum with the machine you know. It started making lots of noise, and then I went there the next day. We opened the drum, and what we saw was incredibly beautiful. The rocks had been grinding themselves to get this perfect beautiful shape and I think now, that a great team is like that. You take a bunch of incredibly smart people and put them in a room. You get disagreements and a bit of fights, but they argue and fix each other's flaws, and what comes out after the whole process, is a great product, you know. Nothing much is really done by one person. I was the interface for the product to the world, but great things don't happen without a great team.

Macintosh and love:

We were on a mission from god to save apple. It was a deeply emotional product. When have you heard about people, falling in love with a product? It doesn't happen that often. You don't love your telephone. People who worked on it, say it was the most intense work they have ever done their whole life. I think everyone of them would cherish it.

Reading

Each and everyone of this blog is absolute gem: http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com

Chance I is completely impersonal; you can't influence it.

Chance II favors those who have a persistent curiosity about many things coupled with an energetic willingness to experiment and explore.

Chance III favors those who have a sufficient background of sound knowledge plus special abilities in observing, remembering, recalling, and quickly forming significant new associations.

Chance IV favors those with distinctive, if not eccentric hobbies, personal lifestyles, and motor behaviors.

http://web.archive.org/web/20071015040635/http://www.startupboy.com/journal/2007/8/8/the-aging-entrepreneur.html


http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/age-and-the-entrepreneur-part-1-some-data
http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/?page=22

http://web.archive.org/web/20071015040635/http://www.startupboy.com/journal/2007/8/8/the-aging-entrepreneur.html

http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/age-and-the-entrepreneur-part-1-some-data

Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

About me: I worked at Microsoft Bing back in 2008 and I’ve seen it at the peak of it’s power. I was working on a team reporting to Gaurav Sareen, and my room mate was indirectly reporting to Rohit Wad - the two founders of Bing. I moved to the valley about a 18 months ago, and tried a long list of failed ideas. I'm now the co-founder of a fast growing viral startup -- likealittle.com; We are hiring some of the finest in the world, and the team is technical at heart. We ship code, we really do - all day all night. Please write to me if you are interested: myprasanna@gmail.com


This story is about an amazing group of technologists, who were on a task of solving the hardest problem in the world - Attacking Google at it's home territory. Let me say that again: Attacking a market incumbent on an area of it's core strength - It's hardest in technology companies. Time and again people have tried doing it and failed, and it's not just about the money. Quoting Paul Graham:

[2] The "next Google" is unlikely to be a search engine, however, just as the "next Microsoft" was not a desktop software company. I used competing directly with Google as an example of a problem with maximum difficulty, not maximum payoff. Maximum payoff is more likely to come from making Google irrelevant than from replacing it. How exactly? I have no more than vague ideas about that. I wouldn't expect to be able to figure out the right answer, just as I wouldn't have expected anyone to figure out in 1990 what would make Microsoft irrelevant.

As another comparison of the difficulty, Microsoft exerted so much market power to overthrow Netscape, and they detected & fought it from the very beginning. Even then, it took "Bill gates" himself to focus on it . (and still shell considerable amounts of resources.) They totally din't see Google as a threat, till it had a huge market cap. (Don't be evil, was a joke?)

Long story short: It was an informal project inside of Microsoft started by Rohit Wad, who recruited Gaurav Sareen and started writing the first pieces of code for MSN search along with Michael Burrows. You heard that right, Michael fucking Burrows. They hired some of the finest technologists in the world, and really shook the ground. Bing was growing faster than expected, beats market forecasts and after several years of work, the quality (NDCG) was getting closer and closer to Google -- They were narrowing it down endlessly. Then, the "grown ups" came in, brought in process and discipline, and everyone who knew something, left. Not surprising is it? It's not a new story. This shit happens all the time.

Hiring

I'm writing this to appreciate the breakthroughs that the early bing team made (and more so about Gaurav, since he hired me and I worked in his team of 40). They were informal and they broke rules. Microsoft has specific directions for teams in the US to not hire in other countries competing with the local branch offices. Gaurav, went to India and hired some of the best hackers right off school, ignoring Microsoft's directions. Back then, no body really offered positions in the US right off indian schools. This was totally new in the market.

Microsoft also had limits on the amounts you can pay for a particular position. Bing was extremely lavish in compensation, making offers to the best hackers for $90K/year when the adjacent teams were making $75K/year offers. This was the time when Google was making $80K/year offers. They were hiring folks as if everyone in the team was promoted right when they are hired, which was a crazy bet: that economics would still make sense.

Going one level further, when the rest of Microsoft is complaining about talent scarcity in the US, bing would open an office right across the border in Vancouver getting people to drive into seattle every 3 days (it takes only 2 hours). It was an international hiring hub. (I chose bing over google because of visa problems, and all my management was based at Seattle.)

Process

Microsoft's DNA is: slow release cycles and building "solid" products. To the contrary, Gaurav is notorious for saying, "you ship or you suck", taking the emphasis away from the framework builders. Your promotion was solely dependent on the amount of stuff you ship and the impact you make. (that's not too much news to web startups?) They had weekly release cycles - faster than Google back then. The rule on the ground was if code breaks or does not ship in time, the engineer is held responsible, No - not the test, not the project manager. Engineer should drive everything.

They had awfully broken infrastructure. Build systems can take hours. They did not fix it, not because they din't know how to. They spent their time shipping code to end users instead, because that's what would matter in your performance review. This was all phenomenal. The laws of the web working at a gigantic company, as big as Microsoft. WTF.


Growth

These guys were extremely hungry to succeed, and were really smart. I guess, that's what happens when you pick a young guy down the chain, who is smart and give him a low budget to work on something he loves. He will go out there and with his passion, convince the smartest guys he knows to join him. They will be young and unproven because the budget can't pay a legend. The key ingredients: Smart guys, love for the product, hunger to succeed, triggers some kind of an explosive growth. For a long time the early teams will hate the word, work-life balance. When the rest of Microsoft is sleeping, Bing-ers were checking in code.

7 years later, both Gaurav and Rohit would be made "Partners" at Microsoft, one of the fastest career growth trajectories in Microsoft corp's history. The business is making waves and expectations are built. Steve Ballmer declares search as his top priority.

Grown Ups

As ballmers ambitions build up, he makes some of the big corporate re-orgs. Harry Schum who was head of Microsoft Research, China would take over bing as it's new leader. They decide to spend $100M in marketing and rebrand live.com to bing.com, and purchase powerset for $100M to bring in some of the finest search architects world has ever seen. There was an inorganic infusion of people at the top, including Chad Walters., etc.

And then something somewhere went wrong. Things were not working, and I'm not knowledgeable enough to understand why. (My best guesses follow.)

When you hire people from outside and assign them top ranks, it takes time for them to gain respect within the team. Meanwhile, the odds of the hire "failing" pose a significant risk to the team morale. Also the rich and accomplished come to Microsoft to settle down, and lack the "hunger" (in steve job's words).

There was interference to bring in "professional managers", a part of whom were non technical. There were push from the top to add more project managers and testers and it was hard to any longer isolate the blame to a failure. Meetings became longer and more parties got involved. Evenings looked emptier than before. Oops.


Fast Forward

In technology, it takes very little time to go irrelevant. My manager has moved to Zynga. Everyone whom I rated "good" in my team have left Microsoft now. The best ones whom I'm in touch with are looking forward to leave. Hell, even Rohit and Michael have left to Google. Gaurav is still in the team and well respected, but he works on extremely different stuff now. I have a feeling he would be the next one to flee, although he is the very passionate about the empire he created. Who knows, he might sign up to be the last man, standing on the sinking ship.

As for the quality, the team's offers have been "standardized" and they pay far below market rates now. Companies like Facebook and Zynga have opened Seattle offices and will scavenge the remaining good parts of Bing. Bing is in no race to compete in hiring quality anyways.

Ambition and Pain

You might enjoy the marshmallow test. The idea is: to be successful you have to learn to delay gratification. My theory is that, the kids who din't touch the marshmallow, over time, learnt to develop a whole new wiring scheme in their heads, that rewarded them to do so. They denied self-indulgence, so that they could shock (and mock) their peers. They gained respect because they learnt to win others at a game, whose results everyone valued. As they grew up, it grew with them.

My dad was one of those reverse wired people. Never for the past 20 years, have I seen him want a material object. For the most part of his adult life, he never wore slippers, and his foot looks harder than a typical villager, because he walked on cities (and hence roads). He practiced the self-restraint of a saint. One can't do that, unless you genuinely transformed to enjoy it. He was thirsty for success, and worked very hard most of the early twenties. Back then you needed a (much more) diverse set of skills to succeed, and hence sheer force of will was required to learn every one of them. The toolkits he built were no minor either. Wake up without alarms or when someone just pronounces your name. Remember the phone numbers and addresses without ever noting down. Why? He really found the process exciting, I suppose.

My case was a hybrid, and I doubt someone could have seen this transformation as closely as I had experienced. He was trying to teach me how to practice some of the toolkits (tons of practice), and I rebelled. I did not see the point of doing it, and since it was expected of me, I sure did not enjoy it. But as I grew up, I understood how powerful some of those values were. It was a shocking observation, that I was just much better at handling pain than my peers. The desire to prove my superiority, kept polishing the practice of self-denial.

They say, great things don't come without pain. I think, great things don't come with pain, either. The trick is, for the performer to be able to stand it for a while, he shouldn't think it's pain. In fact, if it's quite a while, he should believe it is not. If it might take forever, it needs to feel like play. Ambition probably is born when he respects what he likes to play.

Most of the greats, were just naturally good at it. Bill Gates, dated Melinda long distance for a long time before they eventually decided to marry. Carnegie and Warren Buffet, were adamant advocates of cheap lifestyle even without a necessity for it. I think a good proportion of folks who were extremely competitive learnt to not like "stuff"; After a point it becomes not a question of whether this is required to get something done. Self-sacrifices start to fall in line with pride. A symbol of expression, to tell the world that something is burning inside of you.

As they start testing the limits of delaying gratification, they begin to build belief systems, and their own view of the world (much the way, crazy people, live in their own world). I think a fairly common trait I've seen, is people run the strong emotions of, how amazing (long term) wins, might look. Movies are shot, scripts are written, and it is replayed fairly often in their heads, to taste a part of the gratification. As the mirage gets stronger and stronger, their ability to get others on that world rises. A cult is born.

The Startup Programmer

I recently got a smart dude and a great friend of mine to intern with us for a week. He has been working at a big company for several years. It made me realize how much I have personally changed in my programming values. I used to think, real engineers program in C++ - you know that sort of a guy. I cared about performance and learnt to be very good at it. For the past one year of my startup life I had to unlearn all that.

For a bit of background: I was ranked #1 in India at TopCoder while I was at college. I submitted a patch that made the bing.com crawler 3x faster, when I worked at Microsoft. I moved to the silicon valley a year ago, hoping to figure out the next big thing. I currently run likealittle.com a super viral-startup that we started a month ago and today doing millions of page views everyday.

What has changed?
Startups are described as a bunch of founders who have a deep desire for getting some sleep. "There's a lot to do", is an understatement. Human time is the most valuable asset. Code stability, Site up-time are less important than moving fast and getting more users. Any given line of code has 90% chance that it will be removed after 3 months.

Startups define and influence the work culture for the next big wave of companies. Ours was largely defined by facebook - break but move fast. Everyday we hope to be more agile (and fragile) than they have been when they started. Being a startup founder you get a close look at most of the emerging trends that others who work at big companies don't realize. After all that's what you are paid to do. I think there's a big shift in engineering going on, and somethings are going to change forever.

The new engineering paradigm

Big design takes time, that startups can't afford. Having the whole system in mind is expensive wrt human resources. We program in a very reactive environment, mostly write everything up and test them all in one shot. We write scripts that evolve into a big product, the same way as startups evolve into big companies. We move forward with a mind-set that everything is fine and when it breaks - we aggressively fix it. Taking the metaphor one level further, even compiling is a hindrance. It by definition adds redundancy. 

I believe strongly that 10 years from now: C++ and other compiled languages that are used in most big companies right now, will see a 90% reduction in people who code directly in that language. Most of them will be working on interpreted languages with which you can get any feature's v1 up fast. Anything that gets in the way of producing a product - even a single line of code, a single configuration option that requires planning will disappear. For example, here's the biggest one that I'm fairly confident of: Private class variables will be dead. Everything will be public.

Non imposing patterns

For a programming language to win in this environment, it must be able to provide a pattern. Patterns reduce the amount of thought a programmer has to put in. But no patterns are perfect, and in the cases when the thing you want to do, doesn't fit in quite nicely, you must able to easily break the pattern and go your way. The emphasis is on the amount of thought programmer has to put designing things. (Take rails for example, you can technically beat the MVC by not using models and putting all your code in the views like a traditional php page. You take the MVC route because of ease of use, not because of constraints. There is zero cost to breaking that pattern.)

The game

Welcome to the new world. It's where products get much cheaper to make, grow much faster and the winner takes almost the whole pot, than it was ever possible before. Competition is intense. Are you game? Because if you finish second, you go home with next to nothing.

Break, but move fast.

Letter to my ex-Manager at Microsoft. A real nice guy.
---

How are you doing these days? We've just launched an iPad app called Apollo, and it's been awesome so far. We have tons using it everyday, and we are actively iterating in a highly competitive market. I came across these and thought this might interest you. A couple of articles about the culture change that's going on in the fast moving mobile and internet space.

http://paulgraham.com/yahoo.html

> After joining, I was most surprised to find that Facebook’s motto of “Move fast and break things” is real.

Users are getting more resilient to breakages, and the way companies compete, is by optimizing speed over reliability, even down-time. Of-course I'm biased to this view, because that's what I'm involved in everyday. It's a huge shift in thinking. Now the employees are busy all the time, instead of safely thinking through every possible case that can happen. When you have a high quality team of people willing to put in their 100%, breaking seems OK. There's always a fix to everything. Shipping fast is more important, because you have to work on this next thing, and it can't wait.

It's interesting to see, how far beyond startups it can permeate.

-Prasanna

PS: I mean in the worst-case what's going to happen right. Big example of twitter screwing up:

They repeat the tweets, twice or thrice :) World din't end.

Also found it interesting to compare with gate's early days.

in a world where there was very little room for errors. Once shipped it's very costly to change.