fireside

yesterday i attended a fireside chat with {Tech: Europe} hosting malte, the cto of Vercel. (i think i'd also make a splendid guest in one of those chats btw → future career)

while most of the interview questions were generic and the usual, i skipped the boring stuff and only paid attention to his specific use of language

when talking to people who are deep into a field, they speak in a certain code; something that encodes mental models and shows how they think about things. i call it the secret handshake. you know someone has experience by the way they’re talking about thing → a secret handshake

so here as well, i read between the lines, tried to get inside his head and tried to see, whether there were any interesting details. what words he uses and what words i use

btw, it's interesting to see that the more advanced you become, the less your practice is about your field, like software engineering, and more about excellence in general. a master level software engineer has more in common with a master level jiujitsu fighter, than with a junior engineer. at the highest level, it's only about the subtle details of consciousness, self-control, self-awareness and subtle changes in behaviour, and not so much about engineering anymore

what i got from malte was not a lot, but a few things stuck.

since he's cto i was most curious about how he thinks about teams, composition, incentives and work structure.

while the interview was a full hour, the only valuable things i picked up, were two small tangents

he was talking about google's culture (he spent a decade there) where you ask for forgiveness, not permission and has the incentives for you to run and build something, before anyone notices and then have something to show for.

when he joined vercel and the team was smaller, it had a similar culture, but lacked interchange between teams. teams not talking with each other, usually means there's a deeper issue, but in this case it was just an oversight. so he helped exchange and created a lot of value in the process → connection and communication are the foundation of good collaboration

the second detail i took from him, is that he doesn't believe in a/b testing and instead relies on user feedback wherever he can. he prefers to act on conviction because even at vercel scale the numbers are not big enough to really give you any confidence. whether it's in the platform, the v0 chat, anything people say or give feedback on is piped directly into a slack channel, that everyone is reading regularly

these two tiny tiny details: 1) his core-cultural value of building things first and demoing, before theorizing and 2) of tracking user feedback meticulously are going into my toolbox

btw my friend Dariush, who also attended has a great idea on how to stand out, to brand yourself, for later-in-the-night networking: which is to ask a question and include something unique about yourself, like dariush telling that he's an investor in kagi

till next time

nicolai ✌️