Why I left big tech to build again: The reality of being a founder

What is the real difference between a CTO and a VP of Engineering? How do you build a technical team from scratch in a non-tech company? In this Road to CTO episode of the MarsBased podcast, we sit down with Emma Burrows (Ex-Google, Ex-Stripe) to talk about her incredible career path.

From her time at Google to leading as CTO at Stripe Payments UK and her current jump into the founder world with Resonant, Emma shares the lessons learned at every stage of the journey.

Transcript

Autonomy And Accountability In Tech

SPEAKER_02 0:00

I have never been a CTO that is that only cares about the tech. I think it's very relevant for today's time with respect to AI as to whether you are an engineer who ultimately loved writing code or an engineer that loved building stuff, right? I was always the engineer that loved building stuff for the purpose of like pushing the business. The interesting thing is I think of Google as a, if you think of two axes, one is accountability and the other is autonomy, right? Google runs very high autonomy generally. I think it's changed since I've been there, since I was there. But certainly when I was there, it felt low accountability, you know. And Stripe is actually like an interesting combination of both. It's it's high autonomy and high accountability at Charlotte Tilbury because Agile works great in companies that need people to write code, you know, as much as Agile likes to think it's something else, right? As you well know, right, it's a it's a technique, but it actually works better for companies that want people with less autonomy and need execution. They don't need you to do moonshot projects. Whereas Google is the exact opposite.

When CTO Became A Real Job

SPEAKER_00 1:13

Emma, welcome to the show. Welcome to Life on Mars and the Road to CTO series. How have you been?

SPEAKER_02 1:18

Uh I've been very well. Yeah, thank you very much for having me today.

SPEAKER_00 1:22

We're reconnecting after the after meeting at four years from now, the uh the startup conference here in Barcelona, where we had a nice conversation in the panel. There's so much you can discuss in the panel because we've barely scratched the surface of what we were trying to to talk about is antique AI. But uh I'm I'm pretty sure we'll go into much more detail today about your road to CTO. I'd like to start always with the with the first question. Was the first time you heard the word CTO?

SPEAKER_02 1:52

Oh, um it's a good one. I guess it probably would have been at my time at Google at some point, I suspect. Uh, you know, I don't have a kind of specific memory of of when of when that happened. Um uh certainly Google doesn't really, if they have a CTO, they don't make a big deal of it, you know, like um kind of Sundar and the individual kind of VPs of the different functional areas of Google are much more significant than if they do have a uh a CTO. So it's not a role that like was particularly commonly referred to there, but I would imagine that's where I first heard it.

SPEAKER_00 2:32

Yeah, the this question makes more sense in the in the context of perhaps in the Spanish market where we have adopted the English terminology, and therefore up until you know 20 years ago, maybe we were using director of technology, director of information, stuff like that. But the the C term C-level terminology uh was not widely adopted, and some more like elderly people are like, I didn't even know what a CTO was, and they effectively speaking, they were one, right? But it's funny, now that you mention, you're right. Google has never been famous for sharing like the rest of the C level, some of the C-levels have been somewhat famous, like the CMO was uh famous because she had been at YouTube, if I remember correctly, but uh and some and and some other maybe some more prominent people, but the CTO of Google, I'm not able to name any. Um when you were there, do you remember like looking up to who the CTO was and say, like, I really want to do that job? Or that was too far off in your in your level?

SPEAKER_02 3:28

Uh that was that definitely would have felt way too far off. I mean, like I was I I was pretty I was pretty junior. I do think you know Google is a big uh big company, and big companies often mean you think a lot about careers and the ladder, but uh even so I think that was that was way, way outside the bounds of what I was thinking about at the at the time for sure.

SPEAKER_00 3:50

Yeah, but but at a certain point in time uh in your career, you know, going up the technical ladder, you perhaps envisioned yourself becoming a CTO someday, or is that something that you found yourself just doing like, oh, all of a sudden. I mean magically it that magically it doesn't happen. But sometimes the there's got to be an intention. Like uh do you remember a time when you said like, look, my future job is going to be I want to be a CTO?

Leaving Google For Charlotte Tilbury

SPEAKER_02 4:16

Yes. Yeah, I think um so after I went to Google, I went to a company called Charlotte Tilbury. It's a uh beauty and and e-commerce company, and I think like often regarded as like kind of a weird blip on my CV, but um uh and it's a funny story how I ended up there, but I I really joined because I wanted the chance to um to do all the things that like Google kind of takes for granted, right? They just have a money printing machine, and so I really wanted to test actually how do you create good teams, good software, uh, etc. Uh, without having such a comfy kind of backdrop um to it. And so, you know, Charlotte Tilbury was an amazing place to do that. They had no team in place, they had no technology that was really in-house. They were planning a huge kind of technology migration from an external contracted uh system. And so I I led that all of that process and then ended up ended up managing the product team and the design team. Um, and there was a CTO in place who was my manager at the time uh for like the first year or so of that, and then he left. And so that was the point when like I was kind of doing that role, and uh, and and I think that became very real to me at that point as to um what exactly that that kind of meant, if you see what I mean. Uh so yeah, I I would say that that's the that's the moment.

SPEAKER_00 5:38

But did you impose this sort of restrictions or constraints, right? Where oh, we don't have this, we don't have that, in order to think more creatively, or because you you love the challenge and you want to have more impact. What was the rationale behind like going to a company that effectively speaking, I don't I I don't happen to know the company, but coming from Google might have seen as a downgrade in terms of career, right?

SPEAKER_02 6:01

So when I joined Charlotte Tilbury, what I what I wanted to have the opportunity to do was to do everything you have to do at a startup without the you know the challenge of kind of the product market fit stage of um of starting a company. And and Charlotte Tilbury was a great, a great opportunity really to do that um because of kind of the reasons I already I already specified. So that was that was really what appealed to me massively about that uh about that role. Um uh yeah, that was the main that was the main aspect I would say.

SPEAKER_00 6:35

When I I I read that um Charlotte Tilbury, a company um raised VC funding, right? Was that prior to your joining or was that afterwards and uh how did that affect your decision making process and were you pre-financing, post-financing?

SPEAKER_02 6:56

Yeah, so so I think I came in shortly after um they'd raised from Sequoia. Actually, I came in because of the link with Sequoia. Um so I mean the funny story about the reason I joined Charlotte Tilbury is because I accidentally got an email from uh, you know, the kind of um main internal people partner at Sequoia who meant to send it to somebody else and sent it to me. And I was thinking about leaving Google, so I met with him and he suggested a whole bunch of other ideas, and I was like, no, but what about Charlotte Tilbury? And he was like, Oh, okay, like yeah, we we can we can we can talk about that one if you want. Um so uh so yeah, that was a good one.

SPEAKER_00 7:34

Did you reveal that you were not the the person who was intended to receive that email?

SPEAKER_02 7:38

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:40

Not after the meeting, right? By the way, I'm not that person.

SPEAKER_02 7:44

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No. Um uh no, he quickly realized that he had made a mistake, but um I I ended up leveraging it.

SPEAKER_00 7:51

So uh it was But then did you did you lay out a plan for you know just not having that kind of money? Uh so my question is the is the following, because uh sometimes you join a company and you lay out your plan because they cannot tell you, for instance, that they are going to receive this kind of amount of money if this has been pre-agreed or something like that. And you sort of mentally prepare your plan. And when a few weeks into the into the role, then they tell, okay, by the way, we're raising, I don't know, however, whatever amount of millions and 30 million, just to say around the number, and you're like, uh, that completely and drastically changes my plan. Uh was that uh what happened, or how did it impact your your idea, your vision?

SPEAKER_02 8:34

Uh no, I mean, um, I I think at that point they'd already done the the kind of funding, the funding round. And truthfully, like at that stage of my career, I think I was just incredibly naive about what was going on in the background of uh, you know, a company with respect to VC and like funding rounds and what that means for like where a company is at. Um even until you know, doing my own thing, I don't think I really understood what it meant to be series A versus Series B and how a series A company can actually look more like a series B company, and everything is all semantics and like the questions that you need to ask to understand really what is what stage a company is at, you know, need to need to be quite nuanced. Um uh but yeah, definitely at Charlotte Tilbury that was not top of mind. I was mostly just interested in like building uh a good a good product and building a good team.

Luck, Networking, And Sequoia

SPEAKER_00 9:30

So but then all the while you had been in some sort of relationship with Sequoia, because what I've seen, like you you you were a scout, also you've been doing some angel investing, and so and that is pretty unusual, you know. Don't get me wrong, but CTOs are not usually angel investors, and I think that CTOs are very good angel investors if they really want to be, because precisely they add some kind of value that most investors cannot bring into the conversation or into the equation, you know, product engineering, uh attraction of talent of the kind of talent that most startups struggle to to to attract, right? Um so how did that come to be? Was that part of your stay at Google? Uh, how did you get involved with Sequoia? And and because that that's not, you know, that's not maybe easy to understand for somebody in this purely CTO world.

SPEAKER_02 10:24

Yeah, yeah. And it's one of those questions that I wish I had like a better answer to as well. Um I I can't remember where I first I think it was a it was a friend of a friend who I think when Sequoia was starting to, you know, really set themselves up in in Europe. Um he was like, Oh, you should talk you should talk to Emma, like she's you know, she's a good person to chat to. And so um I met the kind of people person at Sequoia then, and then we just stayed in touch. You know, I went to San Francisco and um uh it wasn't anything kind of more sophisticated than lucky networking. Now I think I'm much more intentional about what networking means and how you can do it well and things like that. But again, just pretty naive at the time, I would I would say, and like I don't know, a lot of a lot of luck to it, I think, as well.

SPEAKER_00 11:22

Let's see if we have more time to to discuss the angel investments a little bit later in the conversation because uh I still I still want to get some of the um of the questions out weighed it's typical from you know scaling up and and right uh right now we're still sitting at the director of engineering, we haven't reached the CTO

Moving From Code To Leadership

SPEAKER_00 11:39

levels. Yeah. But one of the one of the things that happens once you start going up the technical ladder is that maybe not completely unbeknownst to you, you're separating yourself from code or from all the technicalities because you're post-up the management ladder. And how did you manage this with yourself? How did it sit with you, the fact that you you wanted to be maybe more hands-on, or did you intentionally also want it to be less hands-on and start going up so that you could manage more, oversee more, do more like strategy and vision and and stuff like that? Where where were you sitting here?

SPEAKER_02 12:20

Yeah, I'm I I mean, I think that that transition started to happen at Google really. Like, um uh I think that that there are different, you know, Google has the TL route and and that was the kind of first point when I stopped writing so much hands-on code and focused more on strategy, architecture, making sure the rest of the team knew what they were doing and that kind of thing. And some people at that level still spend a huge amount of time writing uh code. That wasn't that wasn't necessarily what I did. I I I really kind of focused more on um all of the other aspects of the job, and it became no different the more kind of senior you get. Um there was a short period at Charlotte Tilbury where I wrote a bunch of of code because we had to um make progress on something very quickly, and I just didn't feel like it was it was happening. Um but then I didn't really get hands-on again until until I started my own my own startup. Um but I think the expectations and the role are changing dramatically now with with AI and much more lean teams that really mean this like skill of managing large orgs and large teams of people and how you manage alignment and strategy are becoming um less slightly less relevant as teams slim down and you know you just don't need to spend as much time to get alignment, if you see what I mean.

SPEAKER_00 13:42

How much did you bring from one

Which Processes Actually Transfer

SPEAKER_00 13:44

company to the other? Because I'm I'm pretty sure coming from Google, everyone, so you're you know, so people at Charlotte Tilbury or even at Stripe afterwards, right? They wanted you to share the secret sauce, right? Everybody wants to implement the things that Google does, uh, even though you know Google might not be as cool as it was back in the day, but still it's a really good example of a highly functioning um uh company and or enterprise, if you will. So I'm pretty sure they were like, Yeah, but how do you do it in this? How do you match product releases? How do you organize the squads? How do you do internal documentation or the 20% rule and stuff like that? Were you actually asked to bring in and share the secret sauce from Google? And was there any kind of secret sauce to start with?

SPEAKER_02 14:31

Yeah, I I mean this this was what I really enjoyed at Charlotte Tilbury was this process of like working out which are the bits that you take over and which are the bits that you go, wow, that really that really doesn't work. Um you know, in addition to Google having a money printing machine, they have this like snowball effect where they they manage to get kind of the best engineering talent. And and we can talk about if I completely agree with that statement, because there's caveats to that, but certainly they have very high caliber, very smart people. Um and that is a product not only of their hiring process, but also just their reputation in the market and that kind of thing. And so there are ways of working that work better with that kind of a profile and caliber of people that just don't work if you're not able to get that caliber of people. And so that was one of the kind of most important learnings when I transitioned from Google to Charlotte Tilbury, is the amount of autonomy that you like and the all the processes that you run uh are dictated really by the kinds of people that you have hired. And so Charlotte Tilbury, not known for being a a particularly strong tech team, we had no tech team. Um, it meant that our processes had to be way more uh structured than they are at either Google or at Stripe, right? Like we were heavily agile at Charlotte Tilbury because Agile works great in companies that need people to write code, you know, as much as Agile likes to think it's something else, right? As as you well know, right? It's a it's a technique, but it actually works better for companies that want people with less autonomy and need execution. They don't need you to do moonshot projects. Whereas Google is the exact opposite.

SPEAKER_00 16:20

So you had to build a technical team from scratch, if I have understood correctly, there was nobody in the company. Um the you they had no technical team. Uh I assume it was relatively easy to attract uh technical talent coming from Google. And what were your strategies to recruit technical talent back then?

SPEAKER_02 16:38

Uh no, it was it was pretty difficult. Like uh not that many people want to work for like a very girly beauty company, it turns out, right? Just so um so you know, I think even though we had the the start of a a potentially strong team, it was a real struggle. Um and I think the thing that we did that made a real difference was we focused on closing the loop from like the start of the process to the end of the process in the the shortest time possible. So like somebody couldn't get into you know a deep week-long process. They would already have an offer on the table from us in like you know, a sequence of days type thing. Um and that and then over time we kind of managed to build more and more of a kind of reputation for having a good, you know, e-commerce uh tech team, uh, etc. But no, it was like it was a very chaotic first six months. Um uh honestly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:34

Do you are you the kind of manager that enjoys chaos and entropy? Or because you had to build all of these processes, you enjoy more the pre-process as part of it or the post-process as part of building a tech team?

SPEAKER_02 17:47

Um I'm like a ty it's like that was absolute type two fun, right? Like um you enjoy it looking back on it. It wasn't necessarily super fun in the moment. Um the like the positive side of it is like I made some amazing friends at at Charlotte Tilbury because I think the the nice thing about chaos that feels outside of your control a little bit is like you're all kind of in it together a bit more than if you're if you are actually the CTO or you're leading the company where you're just supposed to absorb it more, right? And not share that with other people. Whereas like, I don't know, at CT it was uh it was it was fun from that perspective, I guess.

SPEAKER_00 18:28

Uh may maybe like the the analogy would be like having uh or staying in a student dorm, right, where you kind of like share too much time there in chaotic environments, and maybe the the bonding that you do is much more it's much more strong precisely because you had to endure um these hardships or like these um things that don't go in your favor and you don't uh you don't particularly work in an environment of abundance that that's what happens in corporates where people get more relaxed, more chill, and perhaps they get complacent at times, right? Um if I remember correctly, you mentioned that you were a director of engineering there, but the CTO left and you took over the did you take over the role? Because that that that doesn't appear in your LinkedIn and I don't want to uh mess up with that.

SPEAKER_02 19:17

Yeah, so so uh um Charlotte Tilbury took a decision at that point to have instead of having a CTO to have a digital officer, so to combine e-commerce and tech under uh one person. But you know, from a kind of technical perspective, essentially um I would I would say yes, it was it was pretty representative of of what a CTO looks like, with the exception of course that like it wasn't a board position, it wasn't part of the exec team, uh, which is a which is a significant um difference. But the day-to-day of all things kind of tech design product was um something that I was responsible for at that point.

SPEAKER_00 19:59

That that is actually very good appreciation. The uh the difference between the CT CT, so C level and non-C-level usually comes down to being having a seat at the board. Um but at least in the last three or four episodes that we recorded off road to CTO, most people they dread that situation. They're like, Yeah, I want to be the CTO, I just don't want to be on the board because it's politics, it's much more. I don't know, like uh they they have the feeling, or at least what they shared, is they were somehow they were somehow a little bit more micromanaged, or even if you're invited to being on the board, it's a second level of skill level, right? It's kind of like you still report to the CEO and or the financials operations, they still dictate what technology does, even though that is changing and technology more and more owns more the narrative of the company. But uh at the end of the day, you know, if numbers don't work, VCs don't really understand technology that much. They they don't even understand what uh technical debt is or some of the implications of choosing one technology or one methodology or the other. And so they're like, yeah, whatever you say about the numbers of this, I'm sorry, right? So do you actually look back to being something positive, being on the board, or or you really didn't want to be there?

SPEAKER_02 21:20

Um I think I would generally see being on the board as a as a pretty significant positive from the perspective that like I have never been a CTO that is uh that only cares about the tech. I've always been a CTO that like you know, I I think it's very relevant for today's time with respect to AI as to whether you are an engineer who ultimately loved writing code or an engineer that loved building stuff, right? I was always the engineer that loved building stuff for the purpose of like pushing the business forward. And that that's that's really what you get to do on the board is discuss like where is the business going and how can we best shape the product and the tech to to meet those goals. So yeah, I would I would definitely want to be like in the in the room for those kind of discussions. Yeah, I think it's it's uh it's a pretty important part of the the role.

SPEAKER_00 22:17

Cool. Well let's move

Why Stripe Works For Engineers

SPEAKER_00 22:19

on. Let's move on to Stripe because the Stripe are widely well known for doing things the right way in engineering. The documentation they share, some of the open open source they work with and generally speaking people going to Stripe they don't leave Stripe. They stay there for many many years because it seems like it's one of the very few companies in in in the world that I would say we look up to in that they do engineering the right way consistently across the years. Right some other companies have been leaders in technology and leaders in how they organize their tech teams and and they scale them but then somewhere along the way they kind of like maybe numbers were not working well financials didn't quite quite play out and they had to remove all of that or maybe it was it was just a marketing stunt right so in that case Stripe has been consistently a really solid um technical team doing great work.

SPEAKER_02 23:16

Did you know that before joining Stripe I'm assuming yes but uh was that also a driving factor in the decision of joining Stripe versus other companies yeah yeah no it it definitely was I I wanted when I left Charlotte Tilbury which is you know makeup and beauty I wanted to get back to a company which felt like tech was the primary driver of the business's success.

SPEAKER_00 23:41

And so you know I don't think you could have picked a company where that was more the case made Google I guess but like tech it stripe is all tech right um from the bottom to the top and so uh yeah that was absolutely a driver and and working with extremely high caliber people um was a was a very high driving factor uh as well um it's uh it's definitely a pretty extraordinary uh company and when you join stripe there's a company that's very opinionated they do have pretty uh from the outside look like pretty rigid way of doing things because they work and they know how things are versus you coming from maybe you know you have your your like your culture you adopted at Google part of it with other you know blended it with other experiences uh what you acquired at uh Charlotte Tilbury so how do you how do you gel in all of this how do you mix and actually um I don't know there wasn't there like kind of like a culture clash because usually you know when you hire a manager from another company try to bring in their method and uh that's one of the friction points that technical teams have.

SPEAKER_02 24:50

Yeah I mean I I actually I think I didn't find I didn't find joining Stripe difficult at at all really the the interesting thing is I think of Google as a um kind of if if you think of two axes, one is accountability and the other is autonomy, right? Google runs very high autonomy generally I think it's changed since I've been there since I was there uh but certainly when I was there it felt low accountability you know I I personally found it frustrating that stuff wasn't always delivered that it didn't feel like there was a sense of kind of urgency and if you really delivered on what you said that you would be rewarded and if you really didn't then you wouldn't right and Charlotte Tilbury was the absolute opposite end of the spectrum where we were all about accountability and low autonomy um because of you know all of the kind of factors we've already talked about. And Stripe is actually like an interesting combination of both. It's it's high autonomy and high accountability um closer probably to like an Amazon for example and so that that was actually quite refreshing to have both the like sharpness of thinking of the people who were there and the like quality of the tech with a like environment that believed in delivery if you see what I mean.

SPEAKER_00 26:07

So no it was a it was a pretty good transition plus Stripe's got loads of ex-Google people so um yeah what were the kind of teams that you had to set up there because um you you mentioned that you had to build also teams in Stripe and obviously you got extensive um uh background in doing so but uh but yeah essentially it's another company and maybe I don't know if that's the case but sometimes when technical leaders go from one company to the other they usually take in some people with them. I don't know if that's the case and if that if you had somebody like you you call them for the third time it's like I made you join Google with me then Turtle Tilbury now I'm asking you to come with me with Stripe I don't know if that's the case with you do you have like these kind of people that move with you across companies yeah I I I mean I think every company that I have been at has been so different that I haven't um I've never really asked someone to come across you know we definitely there's been conversations at various points about like would this be the right fit.

SPEAKER_02 27:07

The the bar technically at Stripe is extremely high. So when I first joined Stripe I was actually managing the teams in Dublin uh for local payment methods and then my role really moved to focus on more team incubation. So we had a number of kind of new areas we had you know no real team built out at the time um and so my role changed to really focus to like establish those new teams um in a in a Mir essentially and that was what I did until uh 2022 um when Stripe did a a very large and significant kind of reorganization of the the whole company really.

SPEAKER_00 27:48

That is uh subtle language for layoffs right just trying to make sure that or not really now normally reorg or you know sometimes it's like a rethinking how we restructuring of the company usually is kind of like sugarcoating layoffs I'm not I'm not saying this is the case here just trying to understand because I don't remember the fact.

SPEAKER_02 28:09

No I mean uh yes but but that actually wasn't what I was referring to.

SPEAKER_00 28:13

I will uh I would I will just talk about it if uh if uh if I was referring to layoffs but no uh so in 2022 basically strike changed its approach to how they managed global products uh products outside of the US um uh and then you know later that year there were there were layoffs across the company um but no the reorg came came significantly before that okay um one of the things that happened when when you're moving from one company to the other right is like maybe you are CTO of a company of 30 people then you move to a bigger company where you have 200 people but you're not the CTO anymore. So it's weird to lose some of the responsibilities but then you gain other responsibilities that you should have had in the first place. So moving between jobs and maybe you know I'm assuming the largest teams you've managed were at Stripe not at Google or at Chiawood correct me if if I'm wrong.

SPEAKER_02 29:07

Yeah that's correct.

SPEAKER_00 29:08

How did you how did you uh how did you accommodate mentally for this?

SPEAKER_02 29:12

Like uh what kind of neuroplasticity methodology did you uh did you adopt to to sort of say like wow I do have larger teams maybe larger budgets more responsibility more impact across the board but I don't have the role now right some of these things I have to ask for permission here and there and and how do you battle this uh maybe these internal frictions yeah I I mean I mostly think uh at any stage of a company there is no one way to run a company right but like the bigger the company there are some kind of consistent trends in the amount of process you need the way the company functions etc and so I think it's pretty important to understand early on like the first thing to that I like to understand is like okay who who does what really in the like broader team that I'm in right like uh how would how do decisions get made how do I get involved in those decisions etc um I think that's the first the first piece and then to try and understand obviously all the processes etc but I think over time more and more the more time I spent at different sizes of companies and different kinds of companies the more I've realized like there really is many many different operating models that you can use depending on how you want your company to run and really just like almost just a personal preference you know like I know a very successful startup that runs with a larger number of very junior engineers working round the clock for example and I'm like it's a legit way to work right like makes complete sense. Not my preferred way to work so not how I would run my company personally but I can see why it works as a model and I can imagine the processes that you would need to make it effective. And so I think like just being able to understand the context and why things work like they do because it tells you what the founder and your manager really care about. You can glean a lot just by watching how companies do their day-to-day processes uh as to what's important to them.

SPEAKER_00 31:25

Um some of the some some of the leadership profiles in Stripe really they documented how they work how they want to be addressed and stuff like that. I remember one of the uh one of the documents that actually crossed my path a few years back maybe like 10-15 years back was that one of the C levels of Stripe if I remember correctly or VP at Stripe wrote the work with me yeah yeah sort of like it was kind of like a repo on GitHub right and I was like that's that is super interesting. At the same time more or less around that date was the um I think the CTO at the time grec something like I I now I'm I'm I'm firing blanks here the name of the the name of the person wrote the post of Define CTO uh right right right or maybe it was the VP engineering maybe maybe um I'm getting that wrong but there was that that uh for me one of the you know cornerstones of of technical leadership wrote a post called hashtag define cto and which there was a clear distinction between CTO and VP engineering how they manage that internally so combining the both of them I actually got the idea that Stripe is not only super opinionated but also well documented with but I don't know if that really makes it more difficult to understand wow there's so much literature here to read before I joined this company um wow these people either know very well what they're doing or they it it also could be perceived as some sort of elitism and I don't know if you perceived that or how did you how did you appreciate this when you were were joining and whether that you know transpired outside of the company or not or was just you know some internal stuff.

SPEAKER_02 33:11

Yeah yeah so um the person that wrote the document of like ways of working with me was Claire Hughes Johnson who was the COO when I joined um and I I kind of like it as a like it's like a low um a low friction way for people to get to know you a bit like I don't think it does more than that to be honest. I do think that Stripe Stripe had this huge culture of writing things down right and so it's not surprising to me that they tried to put a framework around the idea of VP of engineering versus CTO. It only partially works in my opinion. People wrote things down for the sake of writing many many pages of writing all the time at Stripe and it and you drowned in documents many page documents without necessarily and and the the the background of it I think is good, which is that usually when you write and I certainly find this you do better thinking but it didn't always mean that we got as quickly to like the main discussion and the main interesting points right you can kind of drown in fluff without discussing like okay but like this is the point that really matters. We haven't actually discussed it at all right you've written 12 pages of stuff that talk around the elephant in the room. Um and I think on the VP of England versus CTO thing I remember like talking to people about like sorry what exactly does that distinction mean and I mostly think it arises a little bit out of you get a CTO who comes in and they found the company right and they're they're good at like writing code. They're good at like that first zero to one stage and they kind of like that job of like writing a bit of code but they have no idea how to manage people. And so the VP of Eng CTO distinction came about really because you needed like a title that was basically like a CTO but clearly like they were doing all the management of the team. And I I personally think in reality the VP of NG in many cases was playing the CTO role but the CTO had a title for historical reasons is a like fairly common uh thing that happened. I think it happens less now in the last kind of five six years I don't think it happens as much now but it definitely still happens.

SPEAKER_00 35:30

I yeah that's that's a good point. I understand where some people are you can retain the original co-founder right a title. I understand that maybe the first CTO wants to have that sort of status at the same time if if you're blocking the CTO role from somebody else taking over that might be more experienced or maybe you as you mentioned zero to one is what kind of one kind of CTO as is the CEO it's maybe not the same kind of CEO that will IPO the company right so um maybe it's a an act of responsibility to sort of the mode yourself and just get rid of the CT of role and say like look now I'm gonna be you can be CXO of something else uh if you really want to keep the C level title just unblock the the you know precious uh title like the CTO because it's

Becoming CTO For Stripe UK

SPEAKER_00 36:20

very important. Speaking of which we come to the point where you eventually become the CTO of um Stripe Payments UK which is not Stripe Global let's uh just make that clear for the audience but uh what does that mean? How many CTOs were there in the company? Because we had former CTO of Zynga said like oh everybody was a CTO at Zynga but that was not the case in Stripe Yeah I I I think um I don't think we had that many.

SPEAKER_02 36:44

I mean outside of the US AMIA was the you know we were kind of uh organized into AMIA APAC and and LATAM and AMIA was by far the biggest kind of engineering uh cohort um outside of the US so um there was a CTO for the kind of EU and the UK and we kind of swapped back and forth um when I was on maternity leave um and I I think that was it I don't remember there being a CTO for Latam or for APAC um obviously Stripe had an overall CTO and then Stripe had definitely had people who were doing what I would consider to be closer to the CTO role who didn't have the CTO title. The CTO at the time um when I joined Stripe I think Stripe's reliability was was not particularly good it was kind of three nines and over the four years I was there you know the CTO really focused on what was called I think it was called foundations or something like that. And it was all of the infrastructure platform side of things to bring that reliability up which he did an incredible job on um rather than being the product facing uh CTO um which I think Patrick also continued to really kind of do that role to some extent.

SPEAKER_00 38:04

When you were be prior to getting the the the title or the role of CTO was that being discussed is that something that you had your eyes set on saying like oh I I really want to become the C maybe I will not become the global CTO because um maybe that's a little bit far off for whatever reason maybe that's somebody who's been there for 20 years and and doesn't seem like he or she is going to be quitting your job but um becoming the CTO of a this kind of division or region was that something that you you intended to do or it kind of like came overnight when they did a reorg saying like now we're gonna have a like these two or three other CTOs in the company to empower you a little bit more to give you more you know position margins and whatnot. How how early did you find out that you were going to be a CTO? That's my question. Yeah honestly it was a bit of an overnight it was a bit of an overnight thing and I think it was partly um it was driven as much by governance as by strategy you know like um around that time uh you know Dora was was a thing I think there was a lot of pressure uh in terms of the relationship between uh stripe and very yeah's licensing uh bodies by that time like Stripe was a a really significant um company to many economies right and so it was more of a that was more of a driving factor I would say um uh because that was actually somewhat of a chaotic time at Stripe I would say generally for global teams which I think is now Stripe's in a pretty good position but it that 2022 reorg that I mentioned was a very very big shift in how things were uh were organized so um yeah that was the that was the driving factor I would say and what changed so like most of the CTOs when they when they come to the channel and they share the experience they say like not much changed outside of maybe being part of the board um but getting the C level kind of like just push them a little bit farther from you know from from being uh hands on with the with their teams and the technology and whatnot but they were already so far away from it that it doesn't really matter right and it's a little bit more of you know maybe governance or status and stuff like that or what it hasn't uh enabled them to do afterwards right because I I was a CTO here I became the CTO somewhere else I became a partner at the visa firm stuff like that uh what what changed your day to day when you uh adopted the CTO role yeah I mean uh honestly not that much I was I was already on the the the board at that point um I think I think the main thing it's mostly just a kind of like understanding of the significance of the the role right um there is more of a kind of governance aspect to having the formal title to knowing that like from an FCA perspective that is something that they are aware of and so the bar was pretty high already in terms of governance but definitely felt uh more directly accountable uh for it um but yeah I I mean aside from that I wouldn't say that the direct job changed because of the title change the direct job changed because Stripe

Back To Zero To One

SPEAKER_00 41:30

changed everything about how organized so um yeah good um we got the last five minutes and I know we're running out out of time I don't know if you got any hard stop right now if you can devote uh five minutes to your current projects right because uh yeah after the you know have be having become the the the CTO um at at StripePavements UK um I've seen a recurring theme in which some of the most prone CTOs we had on the podcast are like fuck it I'm gonna create my own thing right so they quit the you know typeform stripe um what other big companies we we had over here like um sketch or Zynga and stuff like that and they go to be to become their either normally they go to be the CEO of their company in your case you co-founded a company and became the CTO as well so how does it feel to be back on the zero to one stage of things that's yeah yeah I mean it's been it's been great uh it uh early stage companies they are such a roller coaster right um hour to hour day to day I can change how I feel about things but um I think what has been amazing is actually technology has changed so much in the two years that I have been building our first Porsche which was an open source um SDK and now and now Resonance and um the way that you build and interact with technology has dramatically changed.

SPEAKER_02 42:59

So having the opportunity to build on the absolute edge of like what is possible um has been just so much fun and such an interesting challenge to say like you know there's been times when like maybe we burnt too many tokens by experimenting with like a new technique that like obviously if you were in a big company they would be like what did you do? Whereas we would would we're just like we probably shouldn't do that again. So yeah it's been uh it's been a lot of fun.

SPEAKER_00 43:29

Um yeah good a good time to to to learn how to build again I would say uh exactly one of the things I was gonna say is like every time I try to start something new I tend to overcomplicate things and over engineer things because I fail to break away from all the learnings I had in previous companies and I know this is going to happen. But I don't really know whether that's going to happen. But if it happens I will want to have this in place. I will want to have this infrastructure I will want to have this documentation and I want to be prepared for that. The thing is, like, you don't know if you're going to get to the river, right? Um, so yeah, how how did you do it? How did you get rid of all of these things you knew? How did you unlearn how to become a founder again?

SPEAKER_02 44:13

Yeah. Um I think you make a lot of mistakes. Um But also You know, it's funny because on the one hand, it's so different. The speed that you can build at, I mean, particularly now, but in general as a founder versus at a big company is completely different. But I think the thing that surprised me a bit was it's actually doesn't feel that different in terms of like if you know how to build a product and you know how to do engineering and you've trained a muscle of like, okay, do you want to build something that's just you get out quickly, or do you want to build something that's built for scale and those are different engineering challenges? That bit is the most familiar bit and almost the funnest bit of building a startup, right? It's all the other stuff that's the hard bit, to be honest. Um so yeah, I I I I found that bit quite quite natural.

SPEAKER_00 45:10

For the last two minutes, I'm rolling out the carpet

Resonant Pitch And Closing

SPEAKER_00 45:13

for you. Um explain what uh Rosone and uh and Portia do and how can we help you back? You've been so um so generous with your time and with your learnings. And uh I I feel sorry that we're running out of time because we could be talking here for hours. Uh I feel like we barely scratched the surface again, but uh because you know the road to CTO has got many nuances, it's got many different ways to become a CTO and and and uh learning technologies, methodologies, managing people, whatnot. So um how can we help you back?

SPEAKER_02 45:45

Uh yeah, so uh so Resonant, uh which is coming out uh next week um for public sign-up. Um we have the ability for you to articulate product changes, product features um that you want to make uh via voice. We'll turn them into PRDs, tasks, and build them. Uh and you can do the same and get direct feedback from your customers to turn it into a kind of software factory. So uh yeah, check it out.

SPEAKER_00 46:12

Thank you very much, Emma. You've been super generous. Thank you.