From Tech Exec to Founder-Coach: Rohan Verma’s Journey of Grit, Growth & Giving Back

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[SPEAKER_00]: Hi there.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Aisha Ravintation and I'm a student at the UC Berkeley High School of Business.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I invite you to tune into the Berkeley Startup podcast where I will speak to Berkeley entrepreneurs about best practices that you can use to build a product, find product market fit, race funding, and launch your own company.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Together, I look forward to learning how to become a Berkeley entrepreneur.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to the Berkeley Starter Podcast.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They thrilled to speak to Rohan Warmuch today, who obtained his bachelor's degree from UC Berkeley and has a worth of ten plus years of experience in scaling some of the world's most popular consumer tech products and leadership and executive rules.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Today, he's the founder of Arbor Advisory and he has done thousands of formal paid one-on-one coaching hours with early-stage founders, senior leaders, execs, and emerging talent in both technical and go-to-market roles.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He has also worked with founders and leaders in tech, media and finance.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So let's hear from Rohan.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Rohan, we really appreciate your time and thank you for joining us today to start us off.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Could you tell us how did you choose to get into this particular business and why?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I had the pleasure, honor, privilege and honestly luck of being a foundational employee at consumer tech products that are used by billions of people literally every day.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And these are some of the most well known consumer products in the world like LinkedIn and Dropbox.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Actually, while I was in my fifth year at Berkeley as an undergrad, I started interning at LinkedIn.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I was employing number two, thirty-nine, and while I was taking my last year of classes, I would go to campus a couple of days a week and then go down to Mountain View and work at LinkedIn and ended up being at LinkedIn for a net of eleven years, rising through the ranks, I think probably to this day I was a youngest director in LinkedIn.
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[SPEAKER_01]: History and my old day job was strategic partnerships in M&A, but I rolled up in the product organization.
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[SPEAKER_01]: These are product partnerships and
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[SPEAKER_01]: I had a role at Dropbox prior to the IPO as well.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And one might think, given that trajectory relatively early on in my career, managing folks here in the US and globally in even managing non-GNA folks, managing some engineering folks in terms of developer relations that the end all be all from my career would be to join another early state startup from a couple hundred employees and run through the IPO like I did.
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[SPEAKER_01]: for both LinkedIn and Dropbox, but my true north is really around teaching coaching and mentorship.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And that really lays the foundation and insert your question, which is, why and how did I start the business that I'm in now?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I'll give a little bit more context on the origin story, and I'll give a very clear delineation of where I do spend my time, both as an executive coach and advisor to startups as well as founder of myself and an ed tech company.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But my true north, as I mentioned, was
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[SPEAKER_01]: teaching coaching and mentorship.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I was born in India.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I grew up early days in Canada and moved to the U.S.
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[SPEAKER_01]: actually nearby to the Berkeley campus only about fifteen minutes away when I was in high school.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And in India, my grandparents were teachers, my dad's three sisters and my boys were teachers and my dad had a corporate job and we lived in Canada before we moved to the U.S.
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[SPEAKER_01]: and became small business owners living out the American dream.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He taught on the side.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so as I hit some level of seniority in my career very early on,
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[SPEAKER_01]: If I had a whiteboard in our conversation, I would chart on one axis, where I think I'm good at, on the other axis, what I enjoy doing.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I realized the intersection point of those two things was not a full-time operating job in a product partnership or strategic partnerships or an M&A type of role.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It was around how can I, number one, pay it back in terms of the folks that took a chance on me, or coached me, or guided me.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That was a political science major I worked with.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I had no business being a product executive at
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[SPEAKER_01]: a multi-billion dollar company like Dan or like a drop-box or now, advising companies and working with folks who work at anthropic and open AI.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so I found it an executive coaching firm here in the Bay Area and New York, I split my time, about seventy-thirty between San Francisco and New York.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And there's three key pillars to what I do.
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[SPEAKER_01]: What half of my time is spent coaching leaders of one-on-one, kind of being their consiguary as they make transitions in their careers.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So a very common one that may be close to home for U.S.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Maria, which is, I am a senior, so I'm a senior self-reengineer.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I think the management track is right for me.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to become an EM.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Or an IMAEM, I'll become a director of Android, or a director of engineering.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm now ready for the VT slash CTO title, if I'm at an earlier stage startup.
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[SPEAKER_01]: What are some of the clinical soft skills of the power skills that I need to develop?
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[SPEAKER_01]: But half of my time has been coaching leaders.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And most of my work is with folks in the tech industry in technical roles, specifically product and engineering, directors and above.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But if that's the center of the bulls, I kind of the sweet spot in the middle, one concentric circle out into of the whom I work with,
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[SPEAKER_01]: are non-technical folks in tech companies.
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[SPEAKER_01]: One more concentric circle out are specializations in media, so I'm the head coach for the San Francisco Giants, as an example, the front office exec team.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I work with a lot of health care folks in terms of health care practitioners.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It will make sense when I talk about the second color very briefly and also finance, specifically venture capital giving
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[SPEAKER_01]: being here and being invested in myself.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And again, that's what I have for my time.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I work with each of the fan companies and early stage startups.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'm a recommended coach by Bestomer portfolio.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Bestomer venture partners for all its portfolio companies as an example.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But if they're in my time, this been facilitated in courses and teaching.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I would love to teach at Hoss or at GSB.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's my goal in life.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I've done some desktop to work at Berkeley, I've done some desktop to work at Columbia and the Leadership Development courses at both tech companies and not, for example, I'm running through a program now with the data science analytics team at eBay, down in San Jose, and we spend several weeks together on various topics.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And the final pillar just around it out.
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[SPEAKER_01]: is I do some startup advisory work.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So sitting as a fractional chief of staff or had a partnership to exchange for equity as an accredited angel investor and actually on my own at tech startup a two co-founders which we call gritty which is based on the work of Angela Duckworth who wrote a book called Great who basically said
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[SPEAKER_01]: Outcomes in one's career are more correlated with one's grit and hustle and personality, far more so than their SAT scores or if they went to Berkeley like us, and it's a cohort-based learning development program.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We have a proprietary learning and management system, a proprietary content.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And we're known our second going into our third year, likely to raise around a funding to build out our tech platform.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And we help to place students who want to break into entry-level roles and civil development and business development and enterprise software, pharmaceutical sales and medical devices.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And most of our students are underrepresented minorities.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They tend to be student athletes who are not afforded.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Some of the privileges of going to school like Berkeley, but want to break into careers.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We have formal partnerships with Johnson and Johnson and Stryker.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We place folks at companies like Databricks and many of the other larger enterprise player these days.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so that's a bit of a hybrid of my old operator experience in tech startups and
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[SPEAKER_01]: getting to actually be the executive coach that leads some of the facilitation.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So all that ties together, there's a flywheel effect, and it's meant to support the number one pillar of the business, which is why I quit my old day job as a full-time operating executive in tech to start a coaching practice.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so hopefully that gives you a bit of an arc on what it is that I do, but really the origin story behind it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There's so much to talk about, and I have so many questions.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Amazing wages, we're saying, and it's a lot of different areas you're working on, and that's just wonderful.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Could you tell us in your business, how do you really set yourself apart?
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[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, obviously your background is outstanding, and that raises eyebrows on its own, but there's a lot of coaches.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So how did you start off in the beginning?
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[SPEAKER_01]: There's a cottage industry out there of coaches.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Everybody in their mother can call themselves a coach.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I could go right now on Instagram and run a fairly sophisticated drip campaign of ads to propagate whatever wears that I have.
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[SPEAKER_01]: There's as a lot of vapor wear that's out there.
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[SPEAKER_01]: There's a whole spectrum.
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[SPEAKER_01]: On one end of it, we've got formal psychiatry, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And intervention and mental health issues.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They've got therapists.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So we're not exactly MDs, but they've got some training.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You've got life coaches that can help guides you on, do I have kids now?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Or should I maybe move away from where I grew up?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Or, and then you start to teeter more into the other end of the spectrum, which is, they're executive coaches out there.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And some executive coaches are very specifically working with startup founders
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[SPEAKER_01]: and all of the trials and tribulations that started Founders tend to deal with.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And then as you go a little bit more on the right, you get a little bit of Lucie Goosey.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so the number one differentiator and this three key differentiators that I had as a thesis to what would be the thin edge of the wet should eventually go their business.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I think that thesis has played out, although we always want to maintain a growth mindset to make sure that we are also challenging our own assumptions.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The differentiator number one is that I was actually an executive at one point in a particular industry with domain expertise and it made a conscious choice to move over into more of an executive coaching and an advisory role.
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[SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot of executive coaches out there that have never been an executive.
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[SPEAKER_01]: There are a lot of executive coaches out there that have never managed folks and or don't have specific domain expertise.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Some of those coaches are incredible.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They may be a better fit for a particular client than even I.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This is the number one was there was a specific point of escape velocity in my career and just given what was going on in my life that I realized this is the right time to build what I hope to be a foundational business for the remainder of my career and actually my wife worked at so source or all my wife has been there.
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[SPEAKER_01]: For ten years, my sister in law works there as well.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And once my wife had some level of seniority and comforted, it gave a little bit of an anchor to roll the dice and take a bit on yourself as an entrepreneur.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Probably maybe it was the most fiscally irresponsible decision I could have ever made in my life to quit my specific job at the time.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Golden handcuffs and the equity packages, but that wasn't the true North here, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: So, differentiator number one is that I have some requisite level of experience, and specifically in the tech world, but as I mentioned at the beginning of our call, only about sixty percent of my coaching work is with tech, I've worked with Sesame Street, I'm doing some stuff with the government district down in Santa Clara.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I've done a ton of work with Stanford and Warby Parker, but the original thesis to get the ball off the ground to prove product market fit for myself in terms of the services that provide, I need to have some requisite level of industry expertise.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Number two is, and it was very deliberate about having this as part of my value proposition, which is, I don't do this on the side.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's not like I have my old-vage job at LinkedIn on the product exact team.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I do some coaching because it's fun or it's invigorating or I need a little bit of extra cash.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I took the rigor and intensity of my old day job and brought it to the coaching world.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And with that comes a certain style of personality that I tend to mesh with and I work with people that
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[SPEAKER_01]: come from maybe more touchy feeling company cultures and I've worked with the Amazon and the Ubers of the world a lot of investment bankers you know very very direct link in early days in particular was you're in the crucible and there's very little air time from missing words with folks and very direct but I'm very deliberately made the decision to do this full time and that's why there's kind of three specific pillars to the business
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[SPEAKER_01]: All of which hopefully make me better coach.
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[SPEAKER_01]: If I'm advising a startup founder that needs advisor and how to do a partnership with Stripe on a new set of Stripe APIs, I still have some skin in the game.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I don't let my operating skills atrophy and I'm still managing some folks.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So that's pillow number three.
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[SPEAKER_01]: which is why carve out a fifteen to twenty percent of my time on a net effective basis every year to do really it's consulting is not really coaching work right it's project based work or for example there's a creator economy start up in the city their near two hundred billion dollar AR
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[SPEAKER_01]: and they need to completely revamp the tech stock and higher bunch of engineers and QA folks and data science folks.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And the cultural implications are bringing in the wrong team.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It can be exceptionally costly in fact it could be company killer.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so because I am invested in helping to recruit folks for that particular company and build out more of an offerment operations perspective, the HR function, that will only make me a better coach next time I'm talking to
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[SPEAKER_01]: the human example in EM at meta.
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[SPEAKER_01]: When they're dealing with very similar issues, I'll be at a much later stage.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I can still have some fluency in terms of kind of the day-to-day in running a business.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Many coaches out there and for better or worse, I think it's just my differentiator.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I don't want to knock on any other coaches.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They haven't worked on the company for like fifteen, twenty years.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And with that,
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[SPEAKER_01]: comes a slightly more isoteric, hypothetical, and a series of coaching that neighbors all revolve around platitudes versus maybe more kind of practical, pragmatic and nice.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You definitely make sense.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You define this unique selling proposition of yours and define your brand around it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That allowed you to uniquely establish the values that you store for.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Could you tell us a bit more?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Given your background, you could have gone and completely invested your time in starting a company.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And you decided to prioritize the coaching part of it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So it sounded like a lot of it was driven by your values.
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[SPEAKER_00]: How did you go about really discovering those were your values?
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[SPEAKER_01]: A lot of it's due to my upbringing, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: I mentioned the origin story from India and then the steps that my parents took to come to the U.S.
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[SPEAKER_01]: on my two-time immigrant to this country thought you may not be able to see it if you're not recording this on video, but my wife made me this, it's a wooden placard basically.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I got my U.S.
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[SPEAKER_01]: citizenship a year and a half ago and I've lived in this country since I was fourteen years old and I'm thirty-eight now, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: We can do the
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[SPEAKER_01]: the math, but it shows the American flag, the Indian flag, the Canadian flag, and the middle.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so there's a little bit of the outbreak in terms of the cast of characters when I've been surrounded with it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I also have too much younger siblings.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Once a decade younger, he's also a Berkeley grad.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And my other sibling is about five years younger.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And they'd always asked for, and I'm sure you get this as well from people in your network, your family members potentially just given the trajectory of your career.
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[SPEAKER_01]: What does it take to get into Berkeley?
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'm on the engineering track, should I get an MBA?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so I started to do a little bit of this informal advisor.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You get people who hit you up on LinkedIn all the time and I do it with friends and colleagues and folks on the job.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I got more enjoyment from helping somebody see through a transition in their life and in their career.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Whether it's helping them prep for an interview and breaking through it or their dream company as an example, I had a client on the career coaching side who was at Adobe for about fifteen years.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And she's incredible.
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[SPEAKER_01]: but was not able to advocate for herself and hit a glass ceiling and she's a woman of color who happens to work and was a technical-ish person working at one of the big four consultancies, but really wanted to work at a very, very well-known tech company in the graphic design space.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I was a dream company.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I get more enjoyment from helping that person crack
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[SPEAKER_01]: that job, then I ever did at LinkedIn, and I've worked on some very material partnerships for LinkedIn, the stuff of which you probably see, even if you log into LinkedIn today, the third party content ecosystem is built, being ecosystem of partnerships that I worked on.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so the more and more I, like, hey, you know what, there's some intrinsic and extrinsic value that I get from these types of coaching conversations.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And then I got an executive coach at LinkedIn, and she was great.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And she had worked with all, you know, I had some level of seniority in my twenties.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She was awesome.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She worked with a bunch of the executives team.
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[SPEAKER_01]: People far more senior than I am at LinkedIn.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But never worked a day in her life at a company.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And later in her life after a career in something else got a PhD and decided to become a coach.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I was like, huh, maybe there's a there there for someone with
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[SPEAKER_01]: the operating background and the true love of coaching and mentorship.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So I live in the real world and that world happens to be in the Bay Area and there happens to be a certain level of income that we need to live and survive in the life that we want to live.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so I had to make a very deliberate strategic choice of trying to figure out is there this aside project.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I just be a mentor on the job.
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[SPEAKER_01]: or a formal coach on the job at LinkedIn or do I kind of dive in at first, but the more I would continue in my role and whether it was approaching the the B word that shall not be named in tech burnout or whether they were diminishing returns in the learning that I was doing on the job or
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[SPEAKER_01]: There was each work item, whether it's negotiating a partnership or working on an integrated acquisition for LinkedIn.
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[SPEAKER_01]: If each of those were diluted to my energy versus a creative, all those things kind of happened at once right at the cost of the pandemic.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so it was a bit of a slow roll.
17:52.584 --> 17:59.326
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was, again, great to learn how I tried to launch it, where we talked about the unique selling proposition in the beginning.
17:59.346 --> 18:01.087
[SPEAKER_01]: And I iterated many, many, many times.
18:01.167 --> 18:09.130
[SPEAKER_01]: And what was the original, our blue prints of the business that were set up have vastly shifted, which we can talk about if it's of interest.
18:09.910 --> 18:12.692
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it was really more around vibes, right?
18:12.853 --> 18:22.240
[SPEAKER_01]: It was, I know it's turned into a real meaningful business, but the impetus was listening to myself and where I thought I found intrinsic God where I could give it as well.
18:22.300 --> 18:25.042
[SPEAKER_01]: And it certainly played out that case, hopefully so with my clients.
18:25.062 --> 18:25.863
[SPEAKER_01]: I hopefully they would agree.
18:26.362 --> 18:26.542
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
18:27.403 --> 18:32.950
[SPEAKER_00]: You have a really unique background in the sense that you're working with a lot of different domains, right?
18:33.411 --> 18:37.436
[SPEAKER_00]: So you're working with San Francisco Giants, you're working with Paramount.
18:37.957 --> 18:43.884
[SPEAKER_00]: And I remember seeing your poster and I was just amazed by how you've become a gnostic of domains.
18:44.865 --> 18:46.886
[SPEAKER_00]: How does one develop that sort of skill?
18:46.966 --> 18:51.889
[SPEAKER_00]: Because the world that we live in functions by putting people into different boxes.
18:52.709 --> 18:57.052
[SPEAKER_00]: And people often succeed by saying, I'm really good in this niche space.
18:57.952 --> 19:04.956
[SPEAKER_00]: And at least at the time frame that we live in, genderless are not very appreciated in most spaces.
19:05.436 --> 19:07.677
[SPEAKER_00]: So what's your thought on that?
19:08.818 --> 19:15.100
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a very opt-up observation in terms of the bucketization of one's profile.
19:15.140 --> 19:25.084
[SPEAKER_01]: Especially if there's, I would imagine very shortly some of your classmates will be looking for jobs and the ship they're making a career pivot and the fish ships they're not engineered by training.
19:25.104 --> 19:26.164
[SPEAKER_01]: They're going to be generalists.
19:26.304 --> 19:37.408
[SPEAKER_01]: If you've got an MBA these days, that will only deepen your position in that bucket as a bit of a generalist if you don't come from a specialized background, whether you did management consulting, investment banking, engineering,
19:37.888 --> 19:46.717
[SPEAKER_01]: If you're a PM and you're a technical PM versus a generalist, but what's scared me is that I would be one note in terms of my industry experience.
19:46.777 --> 19:47.878
[SPEAKER_01]: I keep this mine.
19:47.938 --> 19:55.926
[SPEAKER_01]: I started at LinkedIn when I was like nineteen years old and I was there for all my twenties and the beginning of my thirties and I left LinkedIn when I was thirty four years old.
19:56.486 --> 19:58.808
[SPEAKER_01]: My only other clinical corporate experience was a Dropbox.
19:58.868 --> 20:01.291
[SPEAKER_01]: And yes, my family, we have family business.
20:01.351 --> 20:03.973
[SPEAKER_01]: We have franchises of the UPS store all over the Bay Area.
20:04.033 --> 20:07.957
[SPEAKER_01]: Actually, we have two stores in Berkeley where I've worked every day when I was at Berkeley Student in undergrad.
20:08.637 --> 20:18.927
[SPEAKER_01]: And one of the things that I would look out right in my early thirties, if I was forty, fifty, you know, hopefully you can retire somewhere around then well before the age of sixty five.
20:19.664 --> 20:24.591
[SPEAKER_01]: I realize and I really need to uplevel my knowledge of other industries and genuinely interested, right?
20:24.671 --> 20:32.002
[SPEAKER_01]: At some colleagues, every boss that ever had, by the way, was a former management consultant or an investment banker, even though we all worked in tech.
20:32.700 --> 20:36.581
[SPEAKER_01]: And they had coverage of like the oil and gas industry and consumer package goods and all these things.
20:36.641 --> 20:51.005
[SPEAKER_01]: And I didn't want to only have deep domain expertise on a LinkedIn or be the recruitment space or see the enterprise task because LinkedIn makes most of its money via an enterprise piece of software.
20:51.045 --> 20:54.886
[SPEAKER_01]: It's nothing really to do with how you and I where you do you've linked in on the front end.
20:55.386 --> 20:56.787
[SPEAKER_01]: in terms of the maturity of the business.
20:57.367 --> 21:21.999
[SPEAKER_01]: And so the way I thread that needle now is, and I'm glad I appreciate you asking this question, because it is actually foundational to this being a good business versus just a side hustle, which is the line share of my business, whether from volume of clients or revenue or where I spend my time, energy, focus, staying up to speed is definitively in consumer and enterprise tech.
21:22.479 --> 21:32.117
[SPEAKER_01]: because I can speak with some level of fluency, especially in the creator economy, HR tech and fin tech, where I've worked on those areas for LinkedIn.
21:32.912 --> 21:38.255
[SPEAKER_01]: but finding a way to map that relatively deep domain expertise.
21:38.735 --> 21:55.363
[SPEAKER_01]: And by the way, like one of the biggest domains in the Gen AI, like nobody really yet is an expert, but as every month and every year goes by, people are starting to build the trenches of deep expertise, especially engineers who are using Gen AI, Dan and Diat to ship products, kind of everyone else is on the periphery.
21:56.083 --> 21:58.284
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, threading the needle for me is,
21:59.925 --> 22:09.253
[SPEAKER_01]: My pitch is mostly to folks that are in debt kind of just like yourself, like an EM or an upwardly mobile EM at a large-scale company.
22:09.873 --> 22:17.519
[SPEAKER_01]: However, the commonalities of what somebody might be facing give you a really great example with the SF giant.
22:17.539 --> 22:19.961
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, I have a plate baseball growing up, right?
22:20.021 --> 22:22.684
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, with the heck do I know about professional sports?
22:22.984 --> 22:27.507
[SPEAKER_01]: But when you start to unpack what are some of the key business problems that the company needs to solve,
22:28.528 --> 22:36.312
[SPEAKER_01]: And the specific leaders at the forefront of solving these, you start to be able to draw a constellation of what would be, quote, unquote, my tech experience.
22:36.372 --> 22:40.033
[SPEAKER_01]: And the giants have a digital transformation they're undergoing.
22:40.613 --> 22:45.495
[SPEAKER_01]: They are competing for eyeballs and audience, just like any other consumer media tech company.
22:46.016 --> 22:48.517
[SPEAKER_01]: And I've worked with leaders at Snap, at TikTok.
22:48.897 --> 22:52.298
[SPEAKER_01]: I helped to build a lot of LinkedIn's quote unquote media assets.
22:52.619 --> 22:54.199
[SPEAKER_01]: We're a constantly competing with eyeballs.
22:54.239 --> 22:55.800
[SPEAKER_01]: They're happening to compete with
22:56.180 --> 23:09.969
[SPEAKER_01]: Streaming services are people going to spend twenty bucks to watch something on Amazon Prime pre-release so they're going to spend a hundred bucks to go out to the game and cultural transformation in terms of the giants are undergoing organizational shift because they're scaling in their own way.
23:10.469 --> 23:17.354
[SPEAKER_01]: Then all of a sudden there are a lot of commonalities in some of the lived experiences that I have both as an operator and now as an executive coach.
23:17.754 --> 23:19.635
[SPEAKER_01]: for wildly wildly different industries.
23:20.135 --> 23:24.898
[SPEAKER_01]: You start to build up pockets of expertise with gritty, my two co-founders.
23:25.298 --> 23:32.082
[SPEAKER_01]: One of them is a very senior medical device sales rat, and most of our work right now is actually with the large farmer companies.
23:32.643 --> 23:40.267
[SPEAKER_01]: But you can build a level of fluency very quickly, right now, we are being embedded at gritty and a white labeling, some of the learning and development
23:40.787 --> 23:43.411
[SPEAKER_01]: workflows for all of their sales team.
23:43.912 --> 23:56.851
[SPEAKER_01]: And so it is staying true to your core using that as a means to drive the lion share at the business, but where you can find, building some level of fluency, I don't want to paint with a broad
23:57.171 --> 23:59.712
[SPEAKER_01]: brush, I'm not a coach for everyone for anything.
23:59.732 --> 24:11.874
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's some coaches out there that are kind of completely agnostic, but I would never frame myself, like, yeah, even though it's fun, as I'll be mentioned in a priori or a call and thought, a toddler, I work with Sesame Street.
24:12.155 --> 24:23.637
[SPEAKER_01]: And there'd probably be a bunch of business transformation things that if you squint a little bit closely, like they're kind of familiar with some of the tech company, even though the Sesame Street is a hybrid for profit, non-profit.
24:24.057 --> 24:26.558
[SPEAKER_01]: And so you don't want to lose sight of the core value,
24:27.298 --> 24:31.921
[SPEAKER_01]: Because otherwise, you'll just beat that looted in the CEO of all the coaches that are out there.
24:31.941 --> 24:35.344
[SPEAKER_01]: And in some cases, I've lost, quote, unquote, lost pitches.
24:35.764 --> 24:42.048
[SPEAKER_01]: Most of mine work is through word of mouth and through relationships with VCs and other operators and other incubators.
24:42.448 --> 24:47.672
[SPEAKER_01]: I've lost in situations where somebody had this very specific role, like in very specific instance.
24:47.712 --> 24:48.933
[SPEAKER_01]: Someone was an EN.
24:49.453 --> 24:49.633
[SPEAKER_01]: Right?
24:49.693 --> 24:51.194
[SPEAKER_01]: And now they're an executive coach.
24:51.674 --> 24:54.395
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's a large enough pie for everyone.
24:54.455 --> 25:17.703
[SPEAKER_01]: So you don't want to fain or obfuscate or embellish, but some of the best coaches can flex and draw those constellations between their lived experience and what the basis is going through, also by the way, by some of the company cultures that I grown up at for better or worse, are very attractive for other companies that are maybe not as tightly run or well run.
25:18.350 --> 25:27.471
[SPEAKER_01]: or what are the strong of a business as LinkedIn or Dropbox and just bringing that cultural injection right the foreign organism coming in is actually a selling point versus a detractor.
25:27.970 --> 25:28.591
[SPEAKER_00]: That makes sense.
25:29.131 --> 25:33.354
[SPEAKER_00]: So how is coaching for a team, different from coaching for an individual?
25:33.495 --> 25:39.940
[SPEAKER_00]: And what are the sorts of aspects that you deal with, especially around team dynamics when you're coaching a team?
25:40.220 --> 25:49.808
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I'm sure at some point in your life cycle at the Brooklyn MBA, you'll come across a work from Patrick and Cioni, the five dysfunctions of a team.
25:50.708 --> 25:57.410
[SPEAKER_01]: And a lot of team coaching is really related to interpersonal dynamics, but the sounds kind of soft.
25:57.470 --> 25:58.591
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not like group therapy.
25:58.851 --> 26:10.855
[SPEAKER_01]: In some cases it might be, but it's really around if there's a particular business problem to solve that a especially a multivariate cross functional team is working on aka very common in tech.
26:11.755 --> 26:12.335
[SPEAKER_01]: PDE, right?
26:12.395 --> 26:19.017
[SPEAKER_01]: Product design engineering, and then you've got your go-to-market counterparts kind of on the fringes, the product marketing team, sales team, maybe.
26:19.418 --> 26:24.139
[SPEAKER_01]: But when you're watching products are not involved, too too much, you've got a business development team or a strategic partnerships team.
26:24.799 --> 26:40.845
[SPEAKER_01]: When people come from wildly different lived experiences in the company, different skill sets, if there are observed lockers for the team working well together to achieve a particular business outcome, you often bring in what I would call a good coach is an intellectual sparring partner and an objective
26:41.125 --> 27:10.008
[SPEAKER_01]: third party that cares a lot but is a dispassionate outside observer that's not kind of mired in a lot of team dynamics and so team and group coaching often takes the form of we've observed based on a pattern of engagement with a team some particular issues whether it's trust and accountability whether it's theirs as just as an example blurry swim lanes between who does what and we need someone to clarify that
27:10.708 --> 27:14.071
[SPEAKER_01]: or the other kind of situation would be a brand new team work together.
27:14.572 --> 27:22.598
[SPEAKER_01]: Recently, I spent a few hours with the product teams at Broadcom and VMware as Broadcom acquired VMware.
27:23.902 --> 27:28.865
[SPEAKER_01]: that basically brought two sets of product managers and product directors together.
27:28.885 --> 27:33.567
[SPEAKER_01]: We met never worked together before and they were expected to gel very quickly.
27:34.228 --> 27:41.792
[SPEAKER_01]: And over the course of the acquisition integration, launch a new series of products that would help to prove out one of these is that that position.
27:41.812 --> 27:45.714
[SPEAKER_01]: Basically people have to get together and work really fast, really quickly to ship out new stuff.
27:46.034 --> 27:47.274
[SPEAKER_01]: And they never spent time with each other.
27:47.315 --> 27:50.036
[SPEAKER_01]: And so they brought an executive coach in that situation.
27:50.688 --> 27:58.794
[SPEAKER_01]: Often times a set of kind of group coaching will have at the outset in the middle or even at the end, but it's mostly the outset.
27:59.215 --> 28:01.757
[SPEAKER_01]: Some kind of psychometric analyses that's done.
28:02.357 --> 28:07.501
[SPEAKER_01]: There's all sorts of assessments that are out there, whether it's Hogan assessment or the leadership circle profile.
28:07.921 --> 28:10.623
[SPEAKER_01]: These are three, sixty assessments.
28:11.084 --> 28:13.946
[SPEAKER_01]: They're generally anonymous at both quantitative and qualitative.
28:14.346 --> 28:33.478
[SPEAKER_01]: They can help to calibrate and diagnose whether there may be deficiencies in the DNA, the operating DNA between team members, and you often are brought in for a relatively long period of time, but sometimes you can do these one day, two day workshops, for example, my good broad common VMware.
28:34.218 --> 28:40.600
[SPEAKER_01]: with executive coaching of one-on-one coaching, and this is going to sound like a dumb answer, like, duh.
28:41.060 --> 28:48.681
[SPEAKER_01]: It is far more attuned to individual growth and development areas, could be related to how you show up in a team environment, it could be not.
28:49.242 --> 28:53.843
[SPEAKER_01]: Generally executive and leadership coaching is not remedial, meaning I'm on a trip, right?
28:53.963 --> 28:59.144
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm a performance improvement plan, or my performance has been waiting, and I'm being given a coach to
28:59.904 --> 29:01.044
[SPEAKER_01]: Go help me fix my stuff.
29:01.104 --> 29:04.225
[SPEAKER_01]: It's generally the opposite, which is you've got rising stars.
29:04.245 --> 29:06.405
[SPEAKER_01]: Someone who's leaning into a new leadership role.
29:06.445 --> 29:09.786
[SPEAKER_01]: They're first time manager or they're a true executive or a founder.
29:09.806 --> 29:12.086
[SPEAKER_01]: And they've been leaning teams for a long time.
29:12.507 --> 29:16.787
[SPEAKER_01]: But they may have a ton of blind spots and saboteurs to help them become more effective.
29:17.067 --> 29:19.448
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's our often coaching specialization comes in.
29:19.868 --> 29:24.589
[SPEAKER_01]: Because of my deep experience in speech and debate, I was a nationally ranked
29:24.989 --> 29:28.630
[SPEAKER_01]: Speaking to be a champion in high school, I was on Berkeley's mock trial team.
29:28.650 --> 29:36.352
[SPEAKER_01]: We won nationals a few of the years that I was at Cal Executive Presence and Communications happens to be a specific area of expertise.
29:36.412 --> 29:43.754
[SPEAKER_01]: And so if there's a particular founder who knows maybe how to run teams or knows how to hold themselves accountable, but can't communicate well.
29:44.135 --> 29:46.495
[SPEAKER_01]: That's often where true specialization comes in.
29:46.915 --> 29:49.716
[SPEAKER_01]: And then those situations you also have some kind of assessment.
29:49.736 --> 29:52.077
[SPEAKER_01]: You can't fix something if you can't measure it, right?
29:52.657 --> 30:01.780
[SPEAKER_01]: Probably, that speaks to you as an engineer, I try to bring that approach as well as to me to do some level of calibration quantitatively qualitatively, but then also measure what success looks like, right?
30:02.060 --> 30:15.183
[SPEAKER_01]: For an individual, the ROI of working with the coach is going to be wildly different than with the particular team, often with the team it takes a little bit longer with an individual depending on the topic and depending on how good the coach is, you can make some more near-term transformation.
30:15.263 --> 30:18.044
[SPEAKER_01]: So there is kind of a lot of similarity in the approach.
30:18.504 --> 30:21.265
[SPEAKER_01]: However, group and team coaching often involves
30:21.872 --> 30:32.644
[SPEAKER_01]: someone being an impartial outside of it was already kind of taking multiple data points and synthesize what they believe are the dynamics amongst the team and providing the top-down view and more structured way.
30:33.085 --> 30:41.174
[SPEAKER_01]: Often therapists and psychiatrists by training are often very, very good for kind of group coaching and sometimes an executive coach will have to bring in.
30:41.887 --> 30:48.851
[SPEAKER_01]: mental health professional like that because they can start to really deep deep dive into interpersonal dynamics versus individual leadership development.
30:48.871 --> 30:52.233
[SPEAKER_01]: Although I do a lot of group coaching with founders here in the Bay and in New York.
30:52.913 --> 30:58.837
[SPEAKER_00]: And Rohan and your experience, what is the number one thing that people actually need coaching on?
30:59.561 --> 31:04.386
[SPEAKER_01]: The multivariate nature of the business will lead me to give you and multivariate answer.
31:04.446 --> 31:06.788
[SPEAKER_01]: Like somebody who's, again, working at a Sesame Street at the S.S.
31:06.828 --> 31:11.012
[SPEAKER_01]: of Giants, is going to look quite a bit different than giving an example.
31:11.032 --> 31:16.917
[SPEAKER_01]: Like someone is working in the product org, working at Snap is a client of mine as an example.
31:17.578 --> 31:21.722
[SPEAKER_01]: But funnily enough, despite there being lots of different industries, which I work with,
31:22.247 --> 31:24.127
[SPEAKER_01]: and both technical and non-technical roles.
31:24.187 --> 31:30.069
[SPEAKER_01]: And in some cases, non-managers and non-leaders as well, we're put a lot of earlier talent, post MBA grads, right?
31:30.129 --> 31:32.509
[SPEAKER_01]: I was graduating there in BA program or undergrad.
31:32.769 --> 31:34.269
[SPEAKER_01]: There are a few commonalities.
31:34.990 --> 31:50.093
[SPEAKER_01]: Commonality number one, by far, as you realize, how to have difficult conversations in a way that you are not shine away from giving or receiving feedback, or you are not too vitriolic, right?
31:51.404 --> 31:56.449
[SPEAKER_01]: teetering on criticizing someone like an ad helmet and metacin who are you holding back.
31:56.889 --> 32:02.595
[SPEAKER_01]: So how to really navigate through delivering and receiving hard conversations.
32:03.132 --> 32:04.593
[SPEAKER_01]: It's common across the US of giants.
32:05.013 --> 32:12.818
[SPEAKER_01]: People need, even if they're good at it, a sparring partner to help them up level being extremely clear and direct.
32:12.898 --> 32:22.685
[SPEAKER_01]: Renee Brown, who's a prolific thought leader in learning development, talks about how being clear what somebody's actually being kind, often, especially in certain company cultures, especially in California.
32:23.125 --> 32:24.406
[SPEAKER_01]: We're not given the full truth.
32:24.546 --> 32:27.008
[SPEAKER_01]: We think we're being nice to somebody by not telling it.
32:27.448 --> 32:32.233
[SPEAKER_01]: straight, but then when it comes to perform much of your season, your surprise and your boss gives you shitty rating.
32:32.433 --> 32:40.922
[SPEAKER_01]: Or when it comes time to hire somebody, you realize a candidate renegs on your offer because you showed up in a certain way during the interview.
32:40.942 --> 32:45.767
[SPEAKER_01]: So like those conversations are still needing to happen in the underneath, but people are not equipped.
32:46.358 --> 32:49.720
[SPEAKER_01]: The second is strategic thinking and prioritization.
32:50.261 --> 33:02.229
[SPEAKER_01]: This is not necessarily true with the cadre of folks that are management consultants by training, but kind of for everybody else who don't have an MBA who are not trained in being long-range and systems level thinkers.
33:02.896 --> 33:04.918
[SPEAKER_01]: What does it mean for your roles, right?
33:05.258 --> 33:16.468
[SPEAKER_01]: Someone who is running the ticket sales office at the SF Giants versus somebody, another kind of mind, runs supply chain for prime two day shipping and Amazon.
33:16.948 --> 33:23.554
[SPEAKER_01]: They need to be Coca-Cola strategic in their job and what often holds so many folks back in their roles is getting feedback around.
33:23.574 --> 33:26.577
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, you're not being strategic enough for your two tactical or your two short sided.
33:27.144 --> 33:31.766
[SPEAKER_01]: What does it mean to be a strategic thinker and layering that into your day-to-day?
33:31.786 --> 33:42.571
[SPEAKER_01]: The third one is executive presence and strong communication skills, which is going to be paramount in every kind of role, especially for technical leaders as they get more and more senior.
33:43.187 --> 34:01.498
[SPEAKER_01]: The work in some cases can speak for itself, but if you are responsible for special managing multiple engineering teams, where there's cross-cutting OKRs with product teams, or you're dependent on design, and it's not just for engineering leaders being able to, and it's not just public speaking, by the way.
34:01.518 --> 34:04.180
[SPEAKER_01]: That may be a component of it, but a lot of my companies are like,
34:04.560 --> 34:05.741
[SPEAKER_01]: that I work with, like, twenty people.
34:05.781 --> 34:08.402
[SPEAKER_01]: There's no public speaking involved in a twenty-person company.
34:08.943 --> 34:19.008
[SPEAKER_01]: But can you communicate clearly both written asynchronously via slot or non-slot written format for those that still do meaningful communication or email is one thing?
34:19.428 --> 34:23.230
[SPEAKER_01]: How can you galvanize people around a vision, especially if you're a founder?
34:23.691 --> 34:27.533
[SPEAKER_01]: How can you convince and persuade investors and potential customers to
34:28.133 --> 34:31.176
[SPEAKER_01]: Invest in their company or buy their stuff if you're an early stage founder.
34:31.536 --> 34:37.460
[SPEAKER_01]: And even if you're very, very, very, really entry-level employee, it's very important to have strong managing up skills.
34:37.500 --> 34:40.283
[SPEAKER_01]: And so the bucking up breath reads executive presence and communication.
34:40.783 --> 34:49.570
[SPEAKER_01]: There's all sorts of edge cases, but those tend to be eighty-twenty rule, maybe eighty percent of the engagements that I work on tend to cover these three topics in some way, shape, or form.
34:50.080 --> 34:59.764
[SPEAKER_00]: So essentially how to have difficult conversations, thinking strategically and executive presents, definitely makes sense because it's hard to acquire these skills.
35:00.485 --> 35:04.287
[SPEAKER_00]: So you need some deliberate effort on the side to get better at it.
35:04.387 --> 35:13.111
[SPEAKER_01]: Neither repetitions and like repetitions by themselves may not help and repetitions might exacerbate bad habits or blind spots.
35:13.171 --> 35:13.771
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that's why
35:14.231 --> 35:15.254
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like a bell curve, right?
35:15.274 --> 35:23.235
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot of coaching work that happens with folks that are very, very junior in their careers because they've never really worked out a company and for the very first time
35:23.702 --> 35:46.730
[SPEAKER_01]: they become a tech lead if they're not on the management track and they're like responsible for the work product of an engineer a few engineers and then like the other part of the bell curve is as you get more senior because you kind of know the basics you may be entrenched in certain bad habits where especially that sparring partner piece comes in because commanding credibility and respect
35:47.218 --> 35:50.341
[SPEAKER_01]: And a good working relationship as a coach with a very, very senior leader.
35:50.401 --> 35:59.749
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm on thirty eight, but I started managing folks in a meaningful way at LinkedIn in my early twenties, but still many of my clients are a decade older than me, plus.
36:00.210 --> 36:01.351
[SPEAKER_01]: And so how do you command respect?
36:01.671 --> 36:02.292
[SPEAKER_01]: I was recently
36:02.888 --> 36:07.211
[SPEAKER_01]: speaking what the executive team of a publicly traded medical device company based down in St.
36:07.231 --> 36:12.355
[SPEAKER_01]: Carlos presenting at their executive off-site for four days and all the exact team are MDs.
36:12.415 --> 36:13.156
[SPEAKER_01]: They're their doctors.
36:13.176 --> 36:14.317
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a surgical implant.
36:14.737 --> 36:15.538
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not a doctor.
36:16.799 --> 36:25.085
[SPEAKER_01]: No, we're near the age or tenure of some of these folks, but they haven't opened this in understanding that they need someone coming from the outside to help them see
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[SPEAKER_01]: and maybe a different way of doing things and hopefully it's a better way, kind of paradoxical or either.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I've never seen it before, I've seen it so many times, but in all cases, for certain types of individuals, coaching might help you get coaching from your manager as well, but sometimes a third party that's completely divorced and removed from this situation can be the most impactful thing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So if a student at Berkeley came to a year and they were trying to understand, would it be better for them to start a company?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Was it going to a traditional career track?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_00]: What would you suggest that they do to figure it out?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Depends of all what the company is of bullshit startups that are out there no offense to.
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[SPEAKER_01]: your classmates who may have a bullshit idea.
37:07.200 --> 37:08.901
[SPEAKER_01]: And when I say bullshit, there's no idea it's bad.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But is there a potential going to be traction for it?
37:11.083 --> 37:21.432
[SPEAKER_01]: So like assuming controlling for like you think you've got a good idea, it's novel tech, solving a big problem or there's some level of product market fit or it's a big enough problem to solve it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Being of tam like you've done all that sizing work which you'll get a great training at Berkeley and how to do so.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So the bias that I have here is too full and I'll actually give you the answer.
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[SPEAKER_01]: know that most of my corporate career spent at two companies, right?
37:34.095 --> 37:38.517
[SPEAKER_01]: And I started at one in my teens through my early thirties that one being linked in.
37:39.077 --> 37:46.580
[SPEAKER_01]: However, I had five different tours of duty at LinkedIn, arguably six across completely different functions.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I was a boomerang.
37:48.461 --> 37:51.122
[SPEAKER_01]: I left LinkedIn and they came back after I went to Dropbox.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so there's notion of being able to reinvent myself and upskilling was absolutely critical to not being one note.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so depending on what your long-term goal may be, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: If eventually you want to found the next billion dollar or a deck of corn or a ten billion dollar plus business, if you feel as if there's certain skill sets that you need to build, then you can do so quickly in a meaningful way from really fucking smart people.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And that will until you're going into a corporate, quote unquote corporate job.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Then great.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We'll be very mindful about what some of the skills are that you need to develop if you're an engineer and you want to be the CEO of a company.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Then like, yeah, maybe spend some time at a big company and understand how decisions are made when there is insane opportunity costs involved from a technical perspective on what we should be shipping, what we should be building and ultimately shipping versus not.
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[SPEAKER_01]: If you can get those repetitions at a startup, that's great.
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[SPEAKER_01]: If you're a business person who needs some technical chops, then yeah, maybe you spend a couple of years as a technical implementation consultant at Deloitte or Accenture or something like that's probably going to get you a little bit of technical expertise and then go
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[SPEAKER_01]: recruit a CTO or validate and vet-wine and engineering manager is scoping the work and you think they're full of crap.
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[SPEAKER_01]: If there's a specific set of skills that you can build quickly in a corporate world or the really important thing is working with really, really, really talented people.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And doesn't mean people who've been in the industry for a long time, we take a look at OpenAI and drop-ake and other companies on the cutting edge.
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[SPEAKER_01]: These are many of the folks are sub-thirty.
39:25.836 --> 39:30.177
[SPEAKER_01]: When you're sub-thirty, that means you've had less than ten years in a corporate job
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[SPEAKER_01]: And most of them have been at those companies for like three or four years at the senior folks.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So that means like you haven't been in industry for that long, but like you are the bleeding edge of potentially some of those valuable companies in the future.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so when I say my work really great people is people that you can learn from people that you respect admire and that
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[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe we're willing to take the time to provide you with some guidance.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so, yeah, let's say controlling for like you've got some idea that's not a hair marine scheme.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And you're at the cusp, you know, the other thing is the funding, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: The climate for funding in the particular ecosystem.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's easy to get a pre-seed route, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: To go improve product market fit.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But if you're looking for a series A, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: The expectations are much higher in terms of traction on what the investor might want to see.
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[SPEAKER_01]: However, what I will say is
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I guide my younger siblings like this, and a lot of our new college grads from Threaty in particular are looking to work at larger companies unless it would completely tank your company that you want to start because you're going to miss a market window where you're going to lose a wonderful technical or other co-founder because they're going to go off and do something, getting high repetitions at a larger company might help.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's at some level of scale because you're going to see a lot
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[SPEAKER_01]: very, very quickly, then you're going to be able to learn.
40:48.208 --> 41:08.174
[SPEAKER_01]: So, I know I'm speaking out of both sides of my mouth intentionally, but on balance, unless it is a massively unique idea, or you will miss an opportunity by building it now and getting traction so that you can grow in scale, and maybe worth to give yourself like a corncoat mini on the job MBA, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: That may be in no offense to Berkeley and B. I love all MBA programs.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe even more practical than some of the skills that you are getting in academia.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I really love that answer because there definitely needs to be a tension between the two so that you can actually thoughtfully decide what to do.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There is no clear cut answer and I appreciate you articulating that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I know we are close to time.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Are there any closing thoughts that you have?
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[SPEAKER_01]: One thing that's actually kind of top of mind for me, only because I was interviewed by CNBC last week and I posted about this on LinkedIn about overall AI readiness, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And what does it mean to get ready for AI?
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[SPEAKER_01]: AI is kind of being rolled out of larger companies.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In the case of Shopify, it was an edit, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: The Shopify CEO basically said, for your next headcount planning, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: You make a business case for hiring this many engineers.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This many pms.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We're not going to review or had count estimations until you can prove why he can't do this.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Basically, give me folks a mandate, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I spoke to how basically rolling out AI readiness from a leadership development perspective, it's probably not well served by just giving people an editor mandate and not serving them up with the tool.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's been a lot of time.
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[SPEAKER_01]: coaching leaders that get help to help with the rollout of copilot, right Microsoft's copilot, and there's a whole host of training and development internally.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'd get up even for non-technical folks to help them understand how they can meet and get leverage out of their own job in the world of AI versus just being scared about AI automating you out.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So one thing I would leave a focus with is I spent a lot of time
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[SPEAKER_01]: cultural transformation wise in the career coaching wise, actually more pronounced in non-tech companies, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: What does AI meet?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so just being very deliberate and mindful about staying up to speed on as much as you can, the various developments in AI and constantly thinking about how could it kind of make me more efficient or better in my job?
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[SPEAKER_01]: I think about it as an executive coach versus kind of covering in fear, but that's the one thing, there's a recent advice here into what I would share.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But especially for graduating students, you're going to be graduating at the time when OpenAI and Thropic and some of the other larger players, like Gemini has been form were sophisticated in its solution set across the Google suite when your classmate will likely graduate.
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[SPEAKER_01]: These are going to start to get relatively sophisticated and started to get mainstream adoption at even non-technical companies.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so just being generally up to speed and aware and constantly thinking about how I could provide you leverage, we don't get caught, flatfooted, it would be the upshot of the advice.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for showing that Rohan be appreciate all the things that you're shared today in the podcast and truly appreciate your time.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Wonderful to meet you, Australia, and thank you again for your time.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for tuning in to the Berkeley Startup podcast.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Be sure to hit the subscribe button and wait us.
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[SPEAKER_00]: To find more content, sign us at hoss.ca.org or wherever you get your podcast.
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[SPEAKER_00]: No someone who would love this episode, please share it with them.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Until next time, this is I Shwarya of Incaction.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Keep tinkering and see you soon.