For many people who like me grow from being very good engineer to
becoming a leader. You have to remember that
leading orders is leading yourself first.
That means you need to add some point.
Really sit down and understand your own character.
How you regulate emotions would behaviors?
You have how you communicate this Behavior.
We will girls, how you handle difficult, conversation and
difficult decisions. That's a very big work of
self-awareness and you should always do that.
Hey everyone. My name is Henry Surya.
We Rollin. And you're listening to the tech
lead journal the show where I'll be bringing you the greatest
technical leaders practitioners and thought leaders in the
industry to discuss about their Journey ideas and practices that
we all can learn and apply to build a highly performing
technical team and to make an impact in your personal work.
So let's dive into our Journal. Hello and welcome to the very
first episode of the tie clip Journal.
I'm very, very excited to kick. Start the show with my very
first guest Jerome put of in Jerome is a respected friend of
mine and a great mentor for all his massive wisdom and
experiences, especially in the technology and startups.
He has been a Serial, CTO co-founding, multiple startups,
and he has had multiple successful exits in the past.
The last few years Jerome has been working at Google cloud and
Amazon AWS to help startups grow, and make the most of cloud
Technologies in this interview. I discussed with him, various
aspects of technical leadership, especially in the startup World
ranging, from his lessons, learned dealing with investors,
hiring and building great technical team, building vision
and Jerome's rule of 50%, which can be very insightful for those
of you who are building a start-up or product out there.
He also shared interesting anecdotes of his experience
working with different cultures around the world.
So let's get started with this episode and I hope that you all
enjoy it. Hi Jerome.
Thank you for being part of the technique Journal.
Jerome is one of my respected colleague.
He has over 30 years of Korea. Experience, has been a Serial
ctOS in multiple startups and successful exit.
He has worked in multiple countries.
Trees and culture. He's been traveling around the
region, which is interesting enough around Southeast Asian.
He has also been in the west Silicon Valley and in Europe,
and lately. He is working in multinational
Cloud companies, helping that up to grow and to be successful.
So, welcome, Jerome, Henry. Thanks for having me.
Always a pleasure to chat with you Jerome to start this
episode. Can you tell me a little bit
more about yourself and your experience right eye.
I kind of get a good into computers when I was very young,
like, many people, because I wanted to do video games, and I
got lucky because my parents couldn't really afford video
games. They could only afford a cheap
computer or so. I sort of had to build them.
And one thing I've told you there, I ended up taking a
computer science, graduated in Computer Engineering, and I've
started working in a few companies mostly large scale
companies. Like, I are both or Alcatel.
I got lucky. I got an opportunity to go to
the Silicon Valley, and I worked there for a few years.
I got bitten by the starter Berg.
And after I left the Silicon Valley 2000, I started creating
companies with friends and colleagues.
And even my own brother had some point.
I haven't really stopped. We got successful a couple of
times. And then also, after I decided
that startups were really good. I liked, I've been working
around startups for various and big cloud providers.
I've been also working in multiple countries in Asia.
I've been in Asia essentially, since 2000 in various countries
Wilson. So very interesting Journey.
Yeah, that's very interesting. I mean looking at your career,
there are so many things that you have seen.
You have experienced not only in terms of Technologies also
dealing with the people, right? So can you tell us a little bit
more about your highlights? What are the biggest highlights
that you have in your career? The biggest highlight.
The thing that lets me really the deepest impression, which is
why I sort of tried to replicate it multiple times with the
exhilarating time when you're creating your first company and
then you sort of hit. Bottom of the hockey stick and
then everything go crazy. You get this surge of adrenaline
all the time. All of this was very, very new.
I trust and catapulted into these positions that I didn't
really know anything about. So that was really exciting.
I don't think we handled it the best way it was possible.
But at least I learned a lot and this is actually what motivated
me to create more companies after that.
What about some lowlights? I did have one company with
actually a complete failure. We created a new Company around
an ID and very quickly decided he was killed by a very large
company. Basically provided the same
service for free. And I ended up having to cancel
the team. Tell the investors.
We were not going to proceed anymore because there was no
business model and managing the best.
I could, that was really a great moment in my life.
Wow. I'm sure that many people also
in the startups have experienced failure, but I think every
failure journey is unique and is there lessons learned that you
want to share with the audience? Here.
One of the things I tell everybody in my work today,
whichever mental state, you are in today as a CTO of startup.
I've been there before, even if you think you are failing, even
if you think things are going bad, I've been there.
I've also been lucky that it was successful.
Took me a little bit of time to pick the pieces up.
But then also I had a long list of ideas and I basically have a
mental checklist about all the things I should definitely make
sure all before I even start because honestly, this startup
Fail because I really wanted to start up.
I was in a hurry. I didn't really look at the
market. I didn't really look at
anything. I just thought a, it's a cool
idea. Let's do it.
And I was very ignorant. The next company.
We created, we explore the market and we did a lot more
research making sure that it was actually a very good
opportunity. Researching the market, finding
the right business model in a sense and maybe assessing the
Technologies. Yes.
Well, I mean we had been very lucky my first doctor with a
very talented team that counselor we You are a bit lucky
because none of us really knew the industry or knew the market.
We just had a good feeling that it was a good idea and we were
able to navigate the obstacles and at the end of the day the
startup that emerged after four years with very different from
the one we had envisioned to me. This is actually something I
very often tell people who are looking for funding, you will
talk to investors and they will evaluate the value of your idea
and maybe the value of your technology, but first of all,
they will evaluate your ability to Navigate the future because
they know that what you are showing them, the idea and also
the financial projections. The only thing you know is that
this is incorrect. This is not going to happen this
way. So your credibility as a person
is important, and having had failures before is actually
something that is also somehow playing in your favor.
Of course, if you were created the next Facebook wall of, this
is mood, but in fact, most startups do not end up being
Facebook most start. Ups and end up being not
multi-billion dollar businesses, but multi-million dollar
businesses. And in fact, this is actually
most likely what's going to happen to you.
And investors, don't always look at the next unicorn.
They also look at this sort of companies.
So your ability to evolve, the ability to Pivot your ability to
negotiate are very important when you talk to the investors,
how can you show this side of yours?
Like showing that you have credibility, you have learned
from your failure and show that you can deal with any of the
future uncertainty. These investors will ask you
questions. I've been in this situation when
you have to face investors, you are being evaluated.
But also one thing for me is you also evaluating the investor.
I tend to think that this is something investors should know.
So they will look at your profile.
They will ask have you created companies before?
Are you cereal founder? What if they will do their
homework on you? If they don't, it's usually not
a really good sign lately. One of my friends was going
through some fundraising but exactly This experience, he went
to see an investor or from a very reputable firm and it was
facing somebody with a don't want to see your slideshow.
Your PowerPoint will tell me about your team and he had to
jump to slide 12 or slide 6 in that case and we asked him about
something else. And we had to book go back to
slide 3. And then something else and yet,
no, slide. What they really wanted, was to
know the quality of his team. If he was prepared to handle
questions, and they did not really want to hear a prepared
speech and the prepared pitch. They just wanted To know how
deep we wanted them. Deep in you is stuff and how
prepare Lee was and how we could handle or discussions and how
his team of co-founder was structured.
And that was the mark of a really deep knowledgeable
investors. Most of the girls go.
Okay. I look at your page and do I
believe in your power point and it's actually not the best
investor. You can have by being who you
are. You can just show your
experience and you have to rely on the investor to sort of do
their homework on the outside. You cannot just go and see.
Let me tell you. You know, for one hour about
what kind of person I am before you judge my business idea,
right? You mentioned something about
the investors, assessing your team, right?
Like the quality or maybe The credibility behind the team.
And I know you have like a very good skill in hiring.
People hiring talented and good quality people.
Maybe you can share with us. What are some of the tips for
hiring, especially in a start-up, right?
What do you look for in terms of quality of a candidate may be
skill, set, or maybe Behavior. Other related stuffs.
First of all, I think being a start-up or not being a
start-up, you still try to hire the best quality.
You can inform what you really want when you are hiring for a
small tea. You want to hire somebody with a
bit multi-talented. Somebody you're going to be
working very closely. So you need to have a
personality fit. You also want to hire somebody
with not just because they are great at the technology you need
right now. Just fill a technology Gap, but
you want to hire people when you feel are going.
Be able to grow with you and grow with the company and bring
additional knowledge with. So that actually is very hard.
This is true. Regardless of whether you're in
a start-up or not. I think the idea tional features
you need for somebody is that they're able to carry their
weight individually without very much supervision and you want
them to be passionate some point.
If your company grows, you're going to start having to handle
people who might be a lot less passionate about the product,
and you start hiring people for whom Umm, this is just a job and
I want to highlight that even people who do a job because it's
a job can be extremely good and productive but they might not be
as motivated as you are. And also actually they will be
unmotivated, very easily by things.
You don't even consider important.
So to give you an example many years ago, in my first startup,
we hide some really, really good people at the beginning, and one
of the person was pretty like, the family and they had to pick
up the kids. At some point.
They had to Even six regardless. And for one of my co-founder was
very much obsessed by this company.
You always was a little girl. So I had to do a lot of
negotiation to make him an exam was normal, but on the other
hand one day this employee came up and we had forgotten to pay
one of his expenses. And the reason why we forgot to
pay one of these expensive was because the company was very
going through some hard time and we are still, like didn't even
know if we are going to make it the next five months, right?
So we were so worried. I was handling the bear all the
expenses. Fences everything, we couldn't
afford an accountant. I forgot to read to pay this
expands and I'm talking about $10 and the guy came in, in a
meeting and say, you haven't paid my $10.
Wow, and I was very dismissive and I said, come on.
It's just inbox, right? We are talking about important
stuff. That was really, really the
wrong thing to say. Because yeah, for me, the
company's my baby and I'm talking about the survival of
the company for him. It's the fact that they need.
Elected to do what I promised that was very important and then
ten dogs and I was very dismissive and was like, Hey,
you know, I'm doing important stuff and you're not and for
him, ten bucks was important. I completely forgot to look at
this, from this point of view. It took me an entire month, get
him on the positive side because it was so upset because I was
treating him very dismissively. And for me, it was just like in
the Heat of the Moment. So you have to be very, very
careful. So you need to have people who
are at some point when you grow the company, you will have
people. However, slightly different
outlook on the company as you. But when you hire your first
employee is you have to have them be passionate and willing
to make some sacrifices. So how can you actually like
when you do the interviews, right?
Or when you talk to this person, how can you assess whether their
passion and their personality actually fit with what you find
and what the company is all about.
Really? This is a lot like dating or,
you know, at some point you see, if you click on the human level
and which means that very often when I All you people for my
early roles. I would really go through a
formal set of interviews. But I also, after the interview
sat with, with them four coffees that with them, make them stay
over lunch, talk about life. And you try to gauge the
personality. Also, let them talk about their
past, let them talk about. How would they like, in the
management culture of the hard talk about their own experience?
And I think in the, in a relaxed sitting people tell you a lot
more than in the formal interview, sir.
Seeing for me. I basically very often did this
for the early early days or you hire people, you know, my third
startup. I actually poached a number of
developers, but I had worked before with and then and you
know, I already knew we shared a lot of values.
Make sense. There is no magic formula,
right? It really is a very personal
thing. Yeah.
So this hiring one person is one aspect and one challenge, right?
But in talking about hiring a team right where you have
multiple people with their different characteristics, their
way of working. So how do you ensure that?
You can build a solid and effective engineering team that
can work with each other? I think you need to have a clear
culture. So I used To very quickly, very
early in the process. First of all, I used to have
always all my engineering when your startup or five people
having all the engineering and interview.
Somebody is very easy, but I would say, the team that going
to work with this person should be in charge of hiring the
person even though you have the final say, so, first of all, I
would cover the basics about culture.
Also very fun. I would do an interview where I
would like to see you with the like, in management culture, how
they like to work with result. Mate, I would be like to work
with management because they wouldn't be managing them.
So I wanted to understand Zelda aspect of their personality, but
when it comes to, then the rest of the team and the competencies
and the technical fit, I would have my engineering team
interview. Then there are two reasons for
that first of all, because I didn't always have all the time.
The other part is you making the engineering team by hiring the
people themselves, but they have the responsibility to make it
work without wise. It's too easy to blame the bus.
We hide this process on. I don't know.
Why, because he, or she doesn't do this X, Y and Z, but it's not
my problem. So actually by making them in
charge of the hiring, you actually Empower them to take
the people who are fit you as a manager should still keep veto.
Because I found in my experience that engineer's, the team will
not look at it with management. I and you as a manager are
really watching out for, is this person going to grow?
What is person going to bring? Beyond immediate ability to
write this code or design this system and I did veto my team's
decision a few times. Right?
Because I felt that the candidate overall didn't have
the potential to evolve beyond what was just being a skull that
specific position, right? So speaking about the team right
after the hiring obviously you have a bunch of people working
as part of the team. How do you ensure that they go
towards the same direction? We're working towards the same
vision of the company, building a great product, with good
quality. Any tips about that.
First of all, for me, the very early when I always had it in
all. The companies.
Who is they onboarding process? Right?
It sounds silly. But I actually did have an
onboarding process. Even if it's just say, because
Jimmy and is going to be your body and ask him any question,
but I always had the process because mean talk about Yells
Rock developers. They need to know how the system
works the need to understand what has already been built.
They need to understand the process.
You will be surprised but I have had candidates that I was
interviewing for four positions and they asked me, do I get a
laptop and I was like, what do you mean you don't get it?
Of course, to give you that top and giving you the tools to work
why I asked you, do you ask this question and they told me and my
previous employer expecting me to use my own laptop and they
expected me to buy my own office.
This software, I found this ridiculous, but apparently it
still happens. And so for me, it's part of it.
Here's your machine. Here's your tools.
Here is how you compile code. Here is, are you you go?
I am I would have them spend time with developers in order to
get to know the whole tool set the whole process.
And I will usually have a discussion with them about how
we have one-on-ones on a regular basis and trying to explain to
them some of the philosophy of why we doing this.
What is the company of With, with problem, we are solving and
trying to sell the vision really leadership.
Process Management. Leaders are instilling the
vision to the team. And to be, there are some pretty
to the clients. But really, for me it was really
just about getting them to understand where you come from
because now, okay, they, you know, they say they're going to
do this school work and write code.
We've all these good people and having fun with this fancy
technology, but beyond that, they have to really understand
who the Clients are, what problem you're solving be able
to think in their shoes. And this only comes if they are
very familiar with the problem. So really having a structured
onboarding even when you all five people team and having
regular sessions of hey, you know, let's play.
Let's imagine your client. This is what problem we are
solving for you. Okay, so like simulating a
customer problem and asking the team how to handle those kind of
things. Yes, for example, but also
really Once a month, when I was a small company, we would spend
a Friday afternoon just brainstorming about situation or
reviewing feedback from customers and trying to
understand the scenarios and trying to see in the greater
scheme of thing. How this was really a problem
for such and such person. Lot of this was the I like
role-playing. So it was kind of fun.
We did this by pretending. We have our client and trying to
understand what motivates them going over.
Some discussions, we had going over.
Okay, I would very often comment.
Say a team. I talked to this customer and
this is what they told me. Now, let's hash out some
potential discussion. We will usually end up by
saying. Okay.
So this is the answer. We want to be able to give how
can we then build the product features in order to be able to
give that answer, right? But I found it was very
interesting way to evolve the products and it would get people
to reading, by in nowadays. It's very fashionable and it's
not a bad idea. You don't lose fashionable.
Did you know in the bad science? But people talk about
storytelling lat and that was actually maybe our early sort of
informal way of doing storytelling.
Yeah, and also I find that kind of exercise.
Sometimes, give you another perspective or in terms of
ideas, especially from the people who build the product.
Maybe they find a new ways of using the products, even like in
New interactions of how user customer can use the product.
Sometimes those kind of things can come out of this
brainstorming. Activities.
Exactly a little bit. I've been into your
presentations talking about building a startup engineering
product. This presentation talks about
from zero skill to planet-scale, right?
It's okay and you share us a little bit about this.
I find it super interesting for people to relate to the story.
We are you right? I've talked about this subject
many times, actually, for me. The whole idea is that you need
to keep an eye. On the question of what you're
focusing on the means you are mobilizing.
In the effort you are putting. So, for example, today, you're
bombarded by messages about technology.
Yes. So search for Content,
programming method is the best you are nothing.
If you are not using this programming language, or this
kind of database is the future. And if you are using an older
kind of database, then, you know, you're dead in the water
before you even start. It's a very strong messaging and
very often people tend to select a collection of Technologies
even before Actually trying to understand if they are really
useful for that. So my message is always did not
get distracted because when you are a company, you are not
building a technology, most of the time, you are actually
building a business and technology is actually just
supporting your business. Unless right?
You are building the technology and if you are building the next
running language, yeah. Okay, sure.
But if you are having something well said technology is very
strong component like an e-commerce shop or maybe some
software that will read X. Is and be able to interpret, it
better than a human technology is very strong component.
But what you are really selling is medical diagnosis.
What you are really saying. If you have an e-commerce shop
is not the ability to click on the button and pay by credit
card board. You are enabling people is to
basically create shop from their home, or you are enabling
sellers to make money, and you take a cut.
You are really just not building a very powerful database for
articles. All right, so you have to be
very conscious of that. Very often I can see that
earlier. Founders and co-founders, really
focus too much on picking technologies that they are not
comfortable with or just because they read that, it's the cool
thing. My first message is when you
start a company, the best technology you should pick is
the one you are comfortable with right?
Not believe the Sirens of whichever programming language,
do whatever you are comfortable with today's programming
languages. Today's databases are largely
enough rig, Less of their maximum capacity.
You are actually going to not be there at all.
So anything you master is enough, when you reach a few
million to a few million users of then, you know, you'll be the
hit the limits of what you originally did.
But for your first 200,000 to few million users, really being
in your comfort zone, is what matters.
And what about the scale? Obviously, when you starting up
your scale is kind of small and you will grow in terms of number
of users number of traffic to your application.
To your website, right? And for a startup team.
How do you solve this scaling problem?
Do you start by solving for a small scale first or you build a
design in such a way that it can handle a large scale in the life
of your topic? You always have five factors
that you have to balance. You have cost, you have
reliability. You have performance, you have
scale or how we manage the scalability, and what I call
Operations, which is the ability of making releases very From the
ICD having automatic testing and not all of these factors are
always important at the same time.
So for example, if you are very young starter.
Typically, you're very worried about costs and you're going to
focus on reliability because you typically want to have your
first results have a good experience and I don't think
really should care about scaling and performance and that's job
selling performance. But typically it's not really a
big concern at some point when you start growing, but you Going
to have to focus on different factors, for example, if you
have now funding cost is much less a concern and you start
having users to reliability and performance are now important
and scale starts to show in Tim Burton's, and when you are
really much bigger, operation is important.
Performance is key cost will be managed differently.
So every time you have to go through one of these steps and
you have to bring in something in Focus, you will have to make
new technical decisions. You will have to bring New
products, you will have to make your architectural more
complicated, you know, you're going to have to rebuild your
technology multiple times and every time you will build it for
the next level, of course, but if you are very experienced,
like I've been in this for a long time, so maybe for me.
Well done it a few times. It's easier to architect from
the 04. Something that will be able to
scale into tens of millions of users.
Every time you make this architectural decisions.
You actually usually involve a few more Moving parts.
So you have to maintain them. We typically I would build this.
Okay. I need to deal with from zero to
let's say 100,000 users. But when I reach 50,000 users, I
will rebuild for 100,000 to 1 million.
When I reach 500,000. I will rebuild for 10 million
and every time you add a little bit more info so you have to
really really fit the effort and what your software can do to
where you are targeting for the next six months to a year.
I used to call this the Jerome's rule of 50%.
You plan in multiple stages and every time you reach half of
your capacity, you reveal for the next stage, which is usually
ten times what you were planning.
So you go from a hundred thousand to a million, to 10
million to 100 million like this.
And every time a fifty thousand five million, five hundred
thousand five million. You rebuilt.
That's very insightful. Jerome's 50% rule.
Is that correct? Yes, the rule of 50%.
That's correct. Okay, and it's very hard.
I mean as a ticket You will understand that maybe better the
people who you have to really celebrate Cel this Vision to, I
usually the CEO and the investors because they don't
understand exactly how the technology works.
So your CEO is going to say, but Jerome, it works Confucius like
62 little bit and make it better.
And as you take here, usually understand that.
It only holds because the foundations are able to support
a certain amount of load. But in order to be beyond that,
you need to rebuild Foundation, but this is really something
that comes. We have deep understanding of
technology and that is. Where are you as a city?
You usually I'm going to company, grows.
Your leadership, role goes into not just hiring a team and
making sure you know, the system works and they have the proper
onboarding and team culture and there's a lot to talk about
there. But also you still end up having
to manage a ports. You'll see you and your
investors. And to me, it was also equally
equally challenging when I started.
My own companies, I discovered the not only, I had to manage my
employees by an to manage. A lot of other people that I
never really thought. I would have to manage.
And that actually is also something that is very worth
discussing. About, when you get into
leadership position. You have to learn how to pace
yourself, how to explain why you're doing, what you're doing
to people who do not fundamentally, understand
technology, and for room, maybe would you do looks mysterious
and not needed. Also, you have to understand,
you have to pace yourself. You have to build a roadmap
where you going to paste it a certain way with investors in
mind. Clients in mind new products in
mind. All of these size of the
company, which is very different from when you are just an
engineer and your job is to make sure that your eye this code
before the end of next week with no bugs.
I also find a lot of times as the CTO or engineering manager
or head of engineering, right? There are Times that we all
understand in a start-up. We all want to do things in a
fast way, do things as soon as possible.
Maybe tomorrow. I want to release that and give
it to the users. Right by the same time.
Obviously, looking from the engineering perspective.
There are things that cannot be done.
Just like what you mentioned? Stakeholder management or
investor management is also one key area of a CTO.
You have any good tips? Like, how actually should you
explain this kind of, you know, Paradox, should I say between
engineering and business? I think the number one thing is
you should always, you should learn to not say no.
Mhm. So never say, no, it can't be
done. Just say, yes, it will be done
and maybe in a different way, than what you thought.
What I learned is also that as Engineers we have this idea of
perfection. There are very often ways to
pitch what you're doing in a positive way.
So if you are going to rebuild the system and is going to delay
something by a few weeks, your it is you're not going to
explain that. You are redoing the system.
Your point is, you're going to sell the dream of the next
feature. You're going to be able to build
with that rewrite. You are not doing okay?
And, you know, redesigning, this core part of the system.
What you are doing is we are enabling a, i driven something
in the system and very often. This is what you are doing
except that you cannot explain it in technical terms.
You have to rephrase it in a functional way that people who
are not Technically inclined can understand.
And this is actually a big part of it.
The hardest part is you have to grow out of the engineer
mindset. You have to learn to sell and
you have to learn also to explain to talking to maybe more
financial terms and salesy terms.
And for many engineer. This is a hard thing to do.
So really, let me rephrase it. When you have this sort of
situation don't talk about tech. You are actually doing it for a
reason which is business reason and you cannot go and say we are
really factoring this Because we don't have the right performance
in technical terms. You have to say, we are enabling
this part of the roadmap, which is why.
For me, one of the things I learned very quickly was to
always have a roadmap and always refer to the roadmap.
And in fact, also, I done to Pace myself and keep a few
innovation in my back pocket. Even if I had ideas.
I will not always put them in a roadmap or I would phrase my
work plan, in terms of roadmap, and in terms of features that
can be understood by the board. Remember all the first time,
many, many, many years ago. My manager was on leave.
I will start within the team and the project manager was on
leave. And so, I was kind of the second
guy in charge, and they asked me to go to the monthly business
review of the whole company to present what my team with doing.
So, I went there. And when it was my turn to
speak, I started explaining some database issue in deeply
technical term. The see, you looked at me and
said after I was done, he said, okay, so now Now, can you say
that in English? And ultimately I was okay.
So it's going to still going to take three weeks and it was
like, okay and I was very deep in the weeds of explaining
intricate programming Concepts and it was like, so how long is
going to take? And this was I realized I was
very young. I was in my late twenties at the
time of this is when I realized that.
Yeah. Universe to have had the
question. Message for example.
Another thing is you're going to talk to your investors and
you're not going to tell them. We are using the cloud.
You're going to tell them instead of having Capital
expense. We are using operational
expense. So I don't buy computers, but I
buy capacity by the minute. So this is actually an Opex,
right? Yep, many little, many little
tricks like this, right? So, switching a little bit into
your career Journey, right? You've been a start-up
architect, a number of years lately, having In a lot of
startups within this region in Southeast Asia, how do you
compare between startups from Asian?
And also Western do you see any difference?
First of all, let me pick you up or anything.
I don't think it's fair to say Western versus Asia.
Okay, because there is as much difference between somebody who
lives in Indonesia and somebody will lives in Vietnam as there
is somebody with who lived between, you know, France and
the west coast of America. They are very Unconscious.
So to put them as Western and Asian is actually a really not
accurate. There's vast cultural
differences, but even in the west, like, for example, for me
moving from France to the US, when I moved to the Silicon
Valley, there was a very vast difference and then I found when
I moved to different parts of Asia, that sometimes things are
more similar to Western Europe was in things were more and more
similar to North America while things rather than just purely
local. So I can Give you a bit of
anecdote. For example, the French are very
famous for arguing all the time. So, in the work culture or their
everybody has an advice on everything all the time.
And even while you are executing a project, even when decisions
have been made, we are still debating about the decision,
right? Would have been made.
Alright, rise in America in general and I of course, it's
always simplified when I was in the u.s.
In general decisions are made faster and people stick to the
plan a lot more. It's a lot more about having
execution. Mmm, so less people are going to
debate about decision. We should have been made while
you are actually executing. The plan.
On the other hand. I've told the plan is daughter
after you reach a milestone - 34, all you, can debate would
find the wrong word. Didn't go, what went well, but I
also found that is very similar on between France and many Asian
countries, France, and Asian countries have a lot of power
distance. In the sense that there was very
strong sense of hierarchy and power distance is the concept
that was defined by a psychologist, but Basically, it
is how people relate to Authority, and how they react in
front of authority. And that is very cultural in
Asia very often. There's a very strong power
distance in France, as well. Also, there's a very strong
power distance. So this is one of the
similarities we have. But that basically means that,
if you're the manager, actual the bus, if you work the
authority, people will not contradict you.
They will be afraid to speak up. They will be quiet.
So you have this meeting rooms while you say something, and you
ask, is there any question and everybody?
He's very site on because nobody dares to speak up.
As a manager of this, is not something you want.
You want to have hit back because you're in the dark.
You don't know what's happening on the ground.
You need information and they will not give it to you.
So it's really hard. The way I dealt with originally
was to try to educate people. So we my first experience of
that. I picked a leader.
I actually found somebody who was educated in the west but
local and so I may learn the person would speak up for the
others little by little they say So that you know, it was okay to
tell me things. It was okay.
Don't contradict me. I was not going to override.
Sometimes I would say that's a good idea.
I didn't think about it and little by little, they felt very
free. It took many weeks, several
months before I got to go to that.
Right. Another thing.
I did was to learn the local language because everybody said
that you know, you have to learn the local language.
And in fact, it didn't work out at all because in that
particular account for every cent it's very frightening
because the Use the local language as a safe space.
They could be talking to each other and I didn't understand
the defect is safe. But then, you know, I started to
be able to answer understand the cosecant only.
Well, I completely lost it was really, really disturbing for
them and it actually made it even harder for them to adapt to
me. So it was quite a few products.
Interesting. So the other thing is that the
ability to admit that you don't know.
So in many cultures, it has different forms.
And in Asia, where I found very often, is that people find it
very, very hard. And they can't say, I don't
know, so they will make one sells.
Well, very evasive. We don't necessarily answer the
question but I always correct. So I always make a joke, you
know, if you ask this question and you say, is this program
working and the guy looks at you and say today the sky is rather
blue. It has no annual ignore, Elation
with the question and he looks at you and say yeah, but it is
correct today. The sky is indeed blue.
So you can't fault me for that. And so I used to get very angry
and then I realize that this is a way to tell me in a very
awkward. Bleak polite manner.
That I don't know, I won't be able to give you an answer on.
You have to stop being upset and being direct and say, okay,
let's circumnavigate around this and go like that.
It's very hard to admit, you're wrong.
You meet, French people equate being correct with looking
smart. So, in my culture, we also find
it very hard to say. I don't know, but we will not do
like this. We will say your question is
stupid. Let's and, and we will fight,
which is kind of fun, because frankly would like to argue all
the time, but we like to Argue very strongly and very
passionately. So it will terrified many
Outsiders and at the end of the meeting, we say, oh, you know, a
good conversation. We should do that more often and
the other girls are like, how come you didn't kill each other.
All, you know, we were about to call for help and I know it was
fun right now. We had a great, great time to
add power distance, you know, the fact that you're the boss
and the fact that you say I'm wrong, you know, this can be
very, very, very challenging in Asia.
You can step on a lot of toes. You can help a lot of
sensitivities. I also think there is a little
bit that is linked to the education system, where many
countries are brought up where the system of thinking is you
learn in the book and then you have the correct answer and in
Europe and in the west it's varies, but it's usually not
judged upon. Like, for example, I never had a
multiple choice question in any of my exam until I was in third
year of University. You always write essays and
statement of facts. You never had four books to
check who is kind of very Three different way.
We basically end up saying, I don't know the answer.
I don't even want to voice search.
If there is an answer. I'm just going to shoot from the
hip and improvise something which can be also very
disturbing for one looker. The last thing for me is really
vocabulary. We all speak English, right?
So we think because actually we speak our English which is
usually a translation of our own native language and sometimes
you might be making big errors without any intentions of my
favorite example. That is the French when they
discuss about ideas, and they think that another idea is not
valid. They would very easily.
Say this is a stupid idea. Hmm.
Because in French, when you are in this context, the world
stupid is not altered as strong as English in this context.
The world. Stupid just means that it's a
little silly, silly, totally irrelevant.
It won't work. It's the nice little enduring
world. It is not at all.
The this is stupid. And by extension your stupid is
It's not at all confrontational. You have to be very careful when
I was in the u.s. I could see my French colleagues
coming for business trips and standing up in front of American
colleague on the your stupid. It is stupid that I could see
the American having a little bit of a hard time.
So I also did this in Asia and I could see people getting really,
really, really upset. So, at the end of the day, you
know, what do you do? Because when you are in a
country like Singapore, you don't even have to just adapt to
one culture. You have teams that come from
all over the world, so you can Have something that is just
fitting. Everybody's culture.
So, the only solution I found is you create your own culture.
This is something I'm already mentioned.
The culture in. Your company is super important.
This is the summer for the behavior of this is, what is
correct. What is not correct?
So you really have to build something where people with the
new joiners will come in and say, oh, I see, this is the
standard and I can confirm to it.
This is how it is done in this company and that will help me
free up my own limitations or, you know, goo Rock on my own
desires. If I don't like it, there is a
feedback mechanism for you to actually say it, but you need to
build this into your company because you need to be sensitive
that people need these standards and they don't necessarily have
them. And I don't really have a
perfect country or building recipe where I can tell you is
this is really fun and you will have some real times, you will
laugh afterwards, but we know it's going to be very very
challenging and entertaining at the same time.
Interesting interesting. So what are some of the Maybe
interesting stuffs, you have seen in the startup scene lately
around the region. I generally think that the liver
of technical ability is rising but amazingly and I know I sound
like maybe can be taken bad. But I really I've been here. 14
years in Singapore. And before that.
I was in Asia for seven or eight years in multiple countries, and
I do know that my first startup in Asia, I had a hard time.
Recruiting people that met my quality standards and now having
worked here. And I've been in multiple
countries. I can see that.
So many startups are popping up and because I actually traveled
a lot and talk to many of these. All those amazing to me is that
these guys are really seriously good at technology which 10
years ago, was not the case. So everybody in Asia is really
really building up to be some really high potential.
That's very good to hear. So, how about business model?
Maybe in terms of scale, challenges, are there.
Any interesting stuff you've seen lately?
So you have a country, like, Singapore is very technical.
And many of the startups are embracing highly technological
problems. While you have your, I'm
Indonesia with the country that is growing extremely fast.
You have a lot of startups who are about solving issues that
have been solved a long time ago.
So for example, many of the startups, I took two are about
ensuring quality of delivery of service.
Right, right. I talked to companies while
ensuring quality of delivery of coffee and showing quality of
office space and showing franchising.
Laundry systems. It's not like you don't have
laundry in Indonesia. Is that the model of the startup
is to make sure that if you go to certain laundry shops, you
have a guaranteed level of quality.
Whereas, in Singapore, for example, this is not really a
question, which you do have is more about this related to the
population. Density.
The high industrialization of Some more for the areas and the
importance of the port and the importance of logistics and that
sort of. So it's very highly controlled.
A lot of the very large successful companies in Vietnam,
for example, our e-commerce and well it because it's something
that is very important and successful in Japan.
There's a large amount of companies while mobile first and
will stay mobile because mobile has been really, really big
versus about of India. Web applications are still very,
very big. So what You find is people are
different stages of evolution and very often in the reflects.
What is the local culture about interesting insights?
So before we recap the show, I would like to ask you this
question. What are the three with the
means that you would like to share our audience here in terms
of technical leadership? Sure.
So I would say, first of all, for many people who like me grow
from being very good engineer to becoming a leader, you have to
remember, Leading with the girls is leading yourself first.
That means you need to add some point.
Really sit down and understand your own character.
How you regulate emotions would behaviors?
You have how you communicate this Behavior River.
There's how you handle difficult, conversation and
difficult decisions. That's a very big work of
self-awareness and you should always do that.
The second one is really as a leader, everything you do
impacts the company and if you are not careful, too.
Keep bad behaviors in check. It will actually have an effect
that he puts down all the way to everywhere.
So, basically, anything you do creates the company culture.
It has to be very, very intentional and less.
Right? Would be never hire out of
desperation, never high, or just because you've been looking for
somebody for so long that now you have lost in the patience of
looking for a great candidate. You should never do that.
You should always have the highest standards and pressure
on be hire somebody you are smart.
When you want to never be the smartest person in the room, you
want to be buying smarter people and learn from them.
Those three are really insightful coming from all your
various experience around the industry.
So how can people find and connect with you on the internet
Jerome? The best way is LinkedIn, this
is where I have the most activity.
So you can just search for my name on LinkedIn.
It's actually a very uncommon French so name, so you won't
find many Jerome between and find me and connects and me a
message and then we can start discussing.
Wonderful. Thank you so much Jerome for
joining us for this episode. It's always a pleasure having
this conversation with you. Thanks.
It's been fun for me, too. I love meeting you.
I had a great time. Thank you for listening to this
episode. And I hope that you learned
something from this conversation.
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