S1E6 - How to Optimize the Resume - Natalia Baryshnikova, GM Enterprise Agility, Atlassian

0:00:03 - Rahul Abhyankar
Hi Natalia. Thank you for joining me on Product Leader's Journey and I appreciate you taking the time to be here. 

0:00:08 - Natalia Baryshnikova
Hi Rahul. Thank you so much for having me, and I appreciate being in such a great company. 

0:00:13 - Rahul Abhyankar
Oh great, so let's just get into it. Everyone has a story about how they came to Silicon Valley, so what's your story? 

0:00:21 - Natalia Baryshnikova
Great question. I think my story of coming to Silicon Valley spans years and years. Ironically, it started during my first paying gig back in my home country, Russia, when I was working as a street artist. So during college I would make money by painting at nights and then on weekends I would sell my art at a street market. That was because I was an art graduate in the first place, so I could paint or draw. After graduating from college, I worked at a large law firm, one of the largest in the world, Whiten Case, where I fell in love with the idea of how technology can empower businesses and advance them from traditional industries to something supercharged, which led me to get an MBA degree at MIT Sloan in Boston, because that's where technology and business met.

How to Network During the Job Search

As I was graduating, I started thinking what can I do that helps technology advancement for the businesses, which ultimately led me to the idea of taking on a role within a startup in the Silicon Valley. The only problem was that I didn't know what could I do for a startup. I ended up coming to San Francisco just meeting a lot of people and asking them what could I do for a startup with my background. 

0:01:41 - Rahul Abhyankar
These were all cold emails, cold meetings. 

0:01:45 - Natalia Baryshnikova
Oh yeah. I had a giant spreadsheet with more than 400 rows in that spreadsheet where I just started taking notes of all the people that I knew who were founders, all the people who I knew who were employees of startups, venture capitalists, so just everyone I could get a hold of. 

And then eventually I was making new connections because people would refer me to other people.

I had a manager once who said that if you ask for money, all you get is advice, and when you ask for advice, sometimes you get money.

That's only turned out to be true in my case, because I was asking for advice and eventually I got lucky enough to get an offer for a product manager. Now you may wonder well, how the hell does that connect to your artist background? It actually was a very direct correlation, because one thing that people started pointing out is that I had a good taste. I had a good understanding of what good user experience looked like. I personally attribute this due to the fact that human-computer interaction has not really changed much from the human side, in a sense that as humans, we are still pretty much the same as what we were during Leonardo da Vinci times, and even earlier, we still perceive things kind of the same way. 

Because of that, a lot of very, very early concepts of art still apply to what we'll find a good user experience today, and how we think about what's beautiful, what's not, what is convenient for us to operate, what's not. 

And so that knowledge. Ironically, I never thought it would help me, but it actually helped me to settle on the product management career and ultimately that's what led others to see that in me and send me an offer. Ultimately, I ended up having a few offers, but it was a gruelling story. It was a few months of just talking to people and not expecting much. 

0:03:28 - Rahul Abhyankar
Yeah, but what's fascinating about that is just that aspect of just reaching out to people and asking for their time and building your network that way. 

0:03:37 - Natalia Baryshnikova
Yeah, that's a great point, and I feel like it might be an immigrant story, because when I moved to the United States from Russia, I didn't really know a lot of people and I just had this mindset that the world is a friend and the more you reach out, the more you try to get to know people. You never know who you're going to meet and there's a lot of great friends and value and like-minded individuals that are out there. 

You just need to find them, and so I'm not necessarily into networking, but I do believe that the world is kind and if you reach out and try to understand others, they will reciprocate. That really helped me to build those connections ultimately. But there was a little bit of resilience there for sure as well, because if you're foreign student on a visa, the clock is ticking. But I think a little bit of grit helps too in those situations. 

0:04:30 - Rahul Abhyankar
No, that's such a beautiful thought. The world is a friend. You know, a lot of times there is this pressure about networking and trying to reach out and connect with people and approaching it from the way you did and the way you described it as the world is a friend and there are kind people out there that are willing to give their time. I think that's just wonderful. 

0:04:50 - Natalia Baryshnikova
Kindness, but also one of my early mentors in the United States, a very, very successful CFO with multiple public company gigs.

He pointed out to me that I was hesitant to ask for people's help and support. 

He just called me out and he's like hey, this is not how business works in this country, you realize that people who have power and people who have an ability to help you. It's actually a great thing for them, because once you get to a certain point of your career, the best thing you can do is to invest your social capital into others who are up and coming individuals, and I think about those words so much now in my career, when I speak with young professionals who are thanking me for, I will quote one person actually this week said hey, you're wasting your time on me, and I said no, no, no, no, no. It's quite the opposite. I'm actually investing in you because you might be CEO of a company one day and then you will hire me as a retired consultant. 

0:05:51 - Natalia Baryshnikova
I sincerely believe that it's not a waste of time ever, especially to speak with young professionals and help others, because it is ultimately an investment, and that very, very smart and accomplished CFO was so right to call me out on it. People love to help, and people love to help others when they believe that this advances their careers, their lives and ultimately it is an investment. I never had thought about it this way but yeah, I do believe now. 

0:06:18 - Rahul Abhyankar
Yeah, and that's a force for good. And you know, generally speaking, the dynamic between the receiver and the giver is perceived to be one way and what you said about you know it's not a one way relationship, that the receiver is actually creating the opportunity for the giver to give. That's a wonderful way to look at it.

Cover letters can be a game changer 

So you came to SmartRecruiters as Product Manager and built the early iteration of the recruitment or ATS applicant tracking systems. So let's talk about recruitment as a broad topic in general before we get into your time at SmartRecruiters. You know, as I was researching for this episode, I came across a post that mentioned what you wrote in your cover letter when you applied for the Product Manager job at SmartRecruiters. Do you recall what you had written? 

0:07:08 - Natalia Baryshnikova
Yes, I said that I'm fun to work with, but I get shit done and I use the word shit without any, like flower or just just in that in that specific terminology. Yeah, what can I tell you about that? 

0:07:21 - Rahul Abhyankar
Yeah, well, I think, generally speaking, how important are cover letters when one is applying for a job, and you know, sometimes they're mandatory, sometimes optional. If they are optional, should people submit one anyway. Just you know. What's your take on this? 

0:07:36 - Natalia Baryshnikova
Yeah, that is a great question. I personally, if I have to write cover letters again, I will put my effort into that, because the chances that it will make a difference are pretty low, I believe right, because there's no agreed industry perspective on how to treat cover letters. Some people read them very thoroughly, some people ignore them. If you are in the market like what we have today, where a ton of extremely talented professionals are looking for roles just due to the sheer volume, I would hypothesize that recruiters are overworked and they might be just skipping some of the readings, especially if cover letters are very, very repetitive.

That being said, it's like making an effort when nobody's watching right. It's like walking your dog in the dark and the dog, the dog poops and you always ask yourself oh, maybe I just don't pull out that dog poop bag and maybe I just walk away because nobody has seen me, right. And in that moment you make that decision to still do it because you want people to do the same in front of your house and I feel, like, that's one of those things like doing the right thing and making an effort even knowing that it may absolutely go nowhere, because when it does get noticed, it actually is a game changer. And I think that was the case with my cover letter when I applied to SmartRecruiters. 

I sincerely didn't know who is going to read it and I just tried to put my best foot forward, write what I thought was relevant to a startup, and that organization, based on the spirit of the company that I could observe from reading about them and looking at their website and just trying to understand who they are, paid off. 

I think that if you are a person who is looking for jobs right now, it might be grueling, but I do recommend to stand out in cover letters because you never know, it is a low chance that it will make a huge difference, but if it will be read by the right person, it may be a game changer. 

0:09:29 - Rahul Abhyankar
Yeah, anything greater than zero. 

0:09:31 - Natalia Baryshnikova
That's right. 

Mistakes hiring managers make

0:09:32 - Rahul Abhyankar
So did your time at SmartRecruiters influence your approach to hiring, knowing what you knew about the industry and how those systems worked, and so on? 

0:09:44 - Natalia Baryshnikova
Yes, one thing is, I got so much appreciation for recruiters.

I feel like recruiters often don't get enough appreciation as a profession. It's such a hard job. It's dealing with imperfect data and trying to guess who's good and who's not, based on some very often whimsical signals. 

Why are they whimsical, you may wonder. We have now so much automation and artificial intelligence, all because humans are whimsical and people who have a great resume are not necessarily great workers, as any leaders know. And people who interview well are not necessarily good at their job, as, again, everyone who has hired knows. Recruiters trying to develop that good sense of who might be good for their role and being able to translate that into hires are the real MVPs of any startup or corporate world, and that was certainly my SmartRecruiters acquired opinion In terms of how I hire.

My personal hiring motto is if it's not a hell yes, it's a no. 

So, I've learned that sometimes people rely on wishful thinking in hiring and so this person you know might be a little bit you know not what we're looking for, but let's give them a chance. 

Or we're under such pressure, let's just get this person in there. We'll help them on board. We'll help them get up to speed and set them up for success. If you have the slightest doubt, don't hire. And that only comes true once you develop a good sense for hiring people. So I wouldn't do this, or I wouldn't practice this, unless I had such a wide exposure to hiring. But ultimately I think it's one of the most important tools, if used right, to help you build the organization. 

Optimizing Resume for Human Consumption

0:11:33 - Rahul Abhyankar
I think that's great advice for a lot of people who are currently going through this process right now. You know people spend so much time on resumes and there are a lot of things that you see online about how to make your resume ATS friendly, optimize your resume for the applicant tracking system. How much time should one spend on those types of things? 

0:11:53 - Natalia Baryshnikova
It's a great question. I think that the way I think about resumes and optimizing them, not just for ATSs but for human consumption, is similar to the advice that I give to product managers when they ask me about executive communication. I usually have three tips: Be helpful, Be clear and Be gone. And what I mean by this is resume needs to be helpful in order for the reader to understand who is the applicant. What are they looking for? What have they done? How is it relevant to the organization that is hiring? 

It's very appealing to have one resume and use it to apply to all the companies, but, on the other hand, on the other side, it's incredibly difficult to discern how somebody's experience is relevant to an organization. So that's what I mean by maybe adjusting your resume and making sure that it's relevant to the organization that you're applying to.

Being clear is using words that are not ambiguous and using numbers and metrics to explain your impact. Sometimes people use big words and if you read a resume you can't even tell what they have done, and that usually is not a good thing if you're trying to get hired and then Be gone is brevity. No one has that patience to read when you have a lot of applicants, which most jobs do these days and so I would highly recommend to cut your resume to, if you can, one page. 

If you're not, two pages, but always think about how much time will the reader really be able to invest into looking at it if they have 100 of those to read, or 200 or 1000, and how might you make it simple for them so that they just scan through it and understand what's going on. 

Extracting Signal from Noise in a Resume

0:13:38 - Rahul Abhyankar
As a hiring manager, what are your ways to extract signal from the noise in the resume and how do you coach your product leaders to ensure that they can do that too? 

0:13:50 - Natalia Baryshnikova
Yeah, I look at words that are simple and elegant. I find that people who write well are people who think well, and I find that people who write well write their resumes well, so it's not the highest level of signal that you can get from that, but generally I would say there is a correlation. So it is a good sign of a resume is well written and it uses simple words. 

If it's full of jargon, then that's my signal of lack of empathy, which is one of the most fundamental product management requirements to do a good job at it, because if you write something that people will likely not understand and you just leave it as is, to me that means that you haven't thought through the use case of consumption of your product, aka resume, and that might signal lack of empathy. So that, to me, is something that I coach my team to look for.

I think that people who write best resumes are clear about not only where they have been career wise, but also where they're going.

But one other thing that is always hard to understand reading people's resumes and even interviewing them, one of the first questions that I always ask what would you like to learn in your next role. 

0:15:00 - Natalia Baryshnikova
What is the delta between you now and you, five years down the road? Like what those experiences are you looking to acquire? Just to understand not only the journey that a person has done so far, but also their destination. What's their next milestone?

I find that the best resumes tell a little bit of that story.

Just by looking at the resume you can see a progression, or you can see that a person, for example, tried different roles in different areas of business. You can tell that this person is interested in not necessarily being a generalist, but like trying themselves in different types of work. So again, you can see what might be their strengths and what might be their interests. And so if you do that with your resume, that it tells a story, not only who you are, but where you're going. I think that's an excellent way to get noticed. 

Assessing Candidates for Potential

0:15:46 - Rahul Abhyankar
And you know the resume really tells you the history of the past. And then there is that aspect of you know hiring for potential and how do you really understand the potential of a person based upon resume, the conversation that you have with them? Have you created your own ways to assess potential? 

0:16:06 - Natalia Baryshnikova
Yeah, it is super hard and I would be lying if I said that I am great at it. I'm a lifetime learner on this one and, like any hiring manager, I've made mistakes. I've made some amazing hires by betting on people when no one else would bet on them, and I've made some terrible hires when everything looked right both on the resume and in conversations and interviews. 

So I think when I'm looking for potential, the first thing that I look for is grit, which a lot of CEOs, when they get this question, they say that you know just grit and perseverance and an ability to push forward is the quality that they look for. I personally very much agree with that, because I think grit is one of my qualities and something that helped me in my career, in my life. I certainly look for it in others, but I also do believe that, even if you have nothing else, that is something that can help you overcome and become great at what you do.

What Natalia Looks for in Hiring PMs: HACK

Specifically for the product management skills, my methodology is what I call the HACK acronym - Humility, Analytical thinking, Creativity and the Knife. The knife means yeah, the knife is from the famous Michelangelo quote, who said that it's very easy to make a sculpture and cut it out of the marble. You just need to cut everything that doesn't belong. And in product management, the hardest thing is always saying no and cutting off things that you're not going to build. So people who have this good judgment, on what to cut and what not to cut I always find are great product managers. But even if you are trying to break into product management, if you're trying to change the role or become a new type of a profession leader, I think grit is one thing that will get you there. 

0:17:48 - Rahul Abhyankar
HACK, Humility, Analytical, Creativity and Knife. 

0:17:52 - Natalia Baryshnikova
That's right yeah. 

Positioning Yourself for Internal Promotions

0:17:53 - Rahul Abhyankar
So let's come to your time at SmartRecruiters. You joined as an individual contributor Product Manager and over the course of seven years, rose to Director and then to Head of Products. How did you plan your own personal growth and development to put yourself in position for these promotions? 

0:18:11 - Natalia Baryshnikova
Great question. I did not really plan it well. I was just trying to do the right thing for the company and try to be ahead of what was going on at the moment and live a little bit in the future. I got really lucky, in a sense, that I had been reporting to the CEO of the company, Jerome Ternynck. I've learned a lot from him. Reporting to the CEO as a leader is always a great learning experience. I do feel like a lot of that experience then helps a lot now, even in my role with Atlassian, because once you get to know what it's like to work with CEOs, the ultimately responsible individuals for the entire business, makes it very easy to work with, communicate with and relate to executives.

I've learned that you never make excuses. Excuses are just a waste of time. 

I feel very liberated by the fact that if something happened, if there was a mistake, you just don't invest time into explaining what it was, but rather what have you learned? How do we make sure that it doesn't happen, how do we move on? What's next? I'm forever grateful for that learning. You also get exposed to all this more than just your individual craft if you work for the CEO, because CEOs are such great context switchers and they work on everything, and so just by that proximity you get to learn so much.

If you are a product leader, if you are an aspiring product leader, in particular if you're looking into going into general management or becoming a CEO one day yourself I really believe that surrounding yourself with people who have CEO roles, I know it's a high task to find CEOs and just hang out with them, but I do believe that getting that exposure somehow, either from mentorship system or through networking or whatever that opportunity is for you, will give you a chance to start thinking in many more layers than just the product, which I feel like one of the hardest challenges to overcome for product leaders specifically that are looking into transitioning into more of a general management or CEO role or COO, or what have you just starting to understand those other layers of business. Because if you are squarely focused on product and building, you may not be building that muscle at the same time. Going back to your question, I know that I digress. 

0:20:29 - Rahul Abhyankar
No, this is great. 

0:20:30 - Natalia Baryshnikova
So how did I make sure that I pave my career? I was never complacent. One thing that people sometimes think when they look at promotions that are happening within the organization they think it was easy for you because everybody knew who you are and, of course, it was like a journey. It's never that, because, in fact, for every single step along the way, you're competing with the entire market.

If you think about it, there's no good reason for the company to put a bet on you because you have not gotten a proof that you can do it. It's only on potential, whereas the market is full of many, many talented people who have done it, who have seen the movie and who would be much more qualified to do the job that you're aspiring to do on your next level. 

That, to me, was one of my biggest learnings. If you are trying to grow within the organization, you can just be not curious and just sitting and thinking that, oh, I'm doing great job at this stage. Therefore, I will get noticed and promoted to the next stage. You have to reach out there. You have to start thinking about broader context of the business around you. You just have to accept that, yes, you will be competing with external candidates for the next gig, and that's perfectly normal. I know that some folks sometimes get sour about it. Please don't. It's the reality, right? If you're the business owner, there is no reason for you to promote anybody unless there's a justification for that, and sometimes having a high potential doesn't cut it. 

0:21:50 - Rahul Abhyankar
There is an element of acting as if you have the next role already, which makes it easier for other people to visualize or see you in that next role. 

0:22:00 - Natalia Baryshnikova
That's true. That's very smart. Yeah, that's a great point. I would add to that, that visualizing yourself in the next role does not necessarily mean acting that role. In all ways it is showing that your knowledge and understanding of the next level is there, because one mistake acting as bigger bosses than they actually are and then they annoy the hell out of everyone and actually has the opposite effect on their careers. So that would be my only caution if you're trying to think about this how to proceed. 

0:22:35 - Rahul Abhyankar
Great clarification. It's really about the understanding of the next level, the thinking that's required to be at that next level. That's really important.

Enterprise Agility vis-a-vis Company Architecture

So at Atlassian, you are GM for Enterprise Agility. What does that mean? 

0:22:51 - Natalia Baryshnikova
Great question. Enterprise Agility is the area of our business where we offer products to our customers that help connect strategy of the organization to execution. So arguably the most well-known product of Atlassian is JIRA. And so in JIRA developers do work, right. So they kind of specify what pieces of software they're working on and then move the JIRA tickets around and things like that. 

That's work or one of the ways to represent work. There are other Atlassian tools, like Trello, that may be used by, for example, marketing teams to move things around, and so what my area does in terms of the product offerings, we create ways for leaders of the organization to represent their strategy into objective and then objectives and then strategic priorities, programs, initiatives and all types of ways to represent a strategy of the organization and then connect it to different tools that track work and then make sure that whatever your organization is working on is actually consistent with the leadership vision for what an organization needs to do or, if it's not consistent, to have visibility over it. Because, ironically, when CEOs ask a question what are we working on as a company, it is incredibly hard for them to get an answer. And if they're trying to ask a question are we working on the right things? It is even harder for them to get a question. And if they're then trying to ask, well, if we want to change something, how do we change things? And that's even harder. 

So that's the problem area that I'm dedicating my work life to right now, and I think it's a fascinating area. How do you quantify the strategy? How do you make sure that everyone in the organization is moving into the same direction, versus creates corporate entropy. How do you keep people aligned, inspired and just progressing towards a company goal? So that's what we're all about and it's a big problem, and for that reason, customers that we work with in my business are some of the largest Atlassian customers, because the bigger their organization, the harder it becomes to align everyone across the same goal. 

0:24:56 - Rahul Abhyankar
Yeah, and when you talk about these large organizations undertaking these initiatives like Agile or Enterprise Agility and Digital Transformation, a lot of that really comes down to the structure of the organization and how that has evolved over time. You know, having a set of tools to enable these large initiatives is one thing, but how do you, you know, negate the friction that you get from the organizational architecture? 

0:25:24 - Natalia Baryshnikova
Oh, that is a very difficult question, but it's my favorite one. You're absolutely right. It's very challenging to create an organizational structure, or company architecture is the term that I would like to use and that you've used as well, that can serve your business for many, many years. It's always evolving, it's always changing. One of the things that my business area, the tools in my business area, like, like JIRA Align, for example one thing that customers say they do, they say you know what? It's like an ugly mirror. You can actually see what is not working within your organizational structure.  

0:25:59 - Natalia Baryshnikova
Once you've gotten accustomed to how your corporate architecture is, you don't even think about it, and so exposing the challenges and shortcomings of that through gaining that visibility, is a big step for organizations, right, because that is about, ultimately, transparency and also willing to take a look at what it's like. It's very challenging, it's very hard, and I've never seen an organization having an easy journey towards that, but ultimately it's necessary. I'm very privileged to work with companies that started, you know, hundreds of years ago. Just seeing how they've been able to evolve is agility. And, yes, now they're enterprises, so there's more things to move around and it's harder, so hence Enterprise Agility. But it's very inspiring to see how businesses can adapt and survive and thrive, and that's ultimately what my role is about to help organizations to do that. So that's why I like it so much. 

Atlassian Value: Open Company, No Bullshit

0:26:50 - Rahul Abhyankar
Interesting. It's nice to hear your thoughts on that. But coming to Atlassian, large company, multiple lines of businesses, broad portfolio and what typically happens in companies like this is not that it's happening at Atlassian, but what generally you end up seeing is that different teams have different ways of working. And how do you bring an element of consistency to an organization as a product leader across the portfolio, across the multiple lines of businesses? 

0:27:22 - Natalia Baryshnikova
Yeah, it's a great question. I think that for me, as a leader, I always try to understand how do different teams think about what we're doing? And maybe asking them that question directly to understand what do they believe we're optimizing for and what are some of the principles, because sometimes people say try to understand the WHY. I would also argue that if you look at the HOW, you can uncover a lot about the Perceived WHY and the Actual WHY, because people will oftentimes use Aspirational WHY when you ask them why we're doing this. But if you look at the HOW, you can actually see the Lived or Experienced why and see the delta between the Aspirational WHY and the Actual WHY. I do think that it is about ultimately investing the time and trying to align on purpose, on principles of how we operate. It's about being transparent as a leader about the standards that you want to see in their organization, but also not just being the only endorser of standards If you're the only person who aspires to act upon a certain standard, then it's a lost cause. 

And how do you inspire people to care and to adhere to the same standard? As always, a leadership challenge. But ultimately, I think one thing that has worked extremely well for Atlassian, and something that I will bring with me to the rest of my life, is transparency. If people don't know what's going on, they cannot make good decisions. And Atlassian has a value as an organization called Open Company, No Bullshit and that means the utmost transparency, where the leaders share with the teams what's going on, and it's very, very, very open company indeed, and I do think that it ultimately helps both leaders and frontline teams and individual contributors to get behind the same set of principles, the same set of goals, know how we're doing that. Ultimately, its that inspiration that helps people to contribute more and desire to be more and more for the organization and for the customers. 

Leaders, Can You Get Shit Done, But Also Be Fun to Work With

0:29:25 - Rahul Abhyankar
I want to go back to the cover letter that you wrote. You said I'm fun to work with, but I get shit done. And then as leaders, it's important that we make sure that stuff gets done. We get shit done. There is a certain personality and interface that goes along with that. But then how do you balance the aspect of I'm still fun to work with? 

0:29:48 - Natalia Baryshnikova
That is a great question. First, let me say that to me, having fun is a predicament to doing good work. I know that some folks will not necessarily believe in that. One of one of Atlassian's probably most famous employees, Dominic Price, our work futurist. He talks a lot about how the concept of play and performance are really interchangeable at a certain point. I relate to that because I do believe that teams that don't have the lightheartedness about working on something will not do their best work. If you're just driven by fear of failure, you can get to a certain level, but not beyond that. 

0:30:31 - Natalia Baryshnikova
And it is an ability to have fun and ability to experiment and an ability to think freely and to have that psychological safety and to laugh together that creates better outcomes. 

That's just something that I fundamentally believe in, try to endorse in all possible ways, whether it's my own bad jokes or embracing the quirks of the team that I join and celebrating them, or using memes in communication with employees and things like town halls or things that people can relate to. I truly think that lightheartedness and humor and having fun and feeling like you're enjoying what you're doing ultimately makes for better outcomes. 

It's not easy to create this as a leader. I think that's in order to be able to project that you need to have a peace of mind and just have fun yourself.

So, because, ultimately, fun is representation and reflection on energy that you have as a leader.

That's one of the most challenging, I think, things to keep, but also its one of the most important ones, how do you make sure that you don't run out of energy as a leader and that keeping this stamina and then representing it in ways that inspire your team. I think that in order to create fun and psychologically safe and high performance environment for your team, you just need to be that person who doesn't hide it. You know things go wrong, but also, fundamentally, you do need to be a center of energy and exuding fun sometimes and that's like a personal work that is not easy to do. 

Natalia, the Person Behind the Leader

0:32:11 - Rahul Abhyankar
That's very well said. I love to read books, so is there a book or two that you read that had a great influence, impact on you, that you would love to recommend to others? 

0:32:23 - Natalia Baryshnikova
Yeah, first, a little bit of a story. So my fiance has over 1600 books, and so in our house the only room where we don't have books is the bathroom. So I'm lucky to have access to a lot of great books in my household. Yeah, one book that I actually have lying around because I have a bunch of books around me is the book that I loved as a child, so growing up in the Soviet Union. This book is Physics for Entertainment by Yakov Perelman. I just convinced my fiance to buy it in English. 

But in the Soviet Union growing up, we were so lucky to have an incredibly good scientific books for children that were real science but also fun, and so this book was one of them and I absolutely loved it. It talks about how do you actually shoot people to the moon. Remember that the very, very old 1900s movie where they like take a cannon and then shoot people to the moon and people land there. Or how do you create a perpetual mobility, so the perpetual engine, what is the physics behind it? Or how do you confuse the plants to not grow upwards. Because they rely on gravity and so if you put them like in a centrifuge so you can basically fool them and then they will grow inwards and things like that. 

I think that this book really inspired me in many ways because it fueled my curiosity about the world. I find that curiosity has always been one of my biggest driving forces. So when I had this 400 spreadsheet coming to the Silicon Valley, one of the things that just got me going is like the curiosity and saying let's take a look at the other day and let's see what the other day brings and let's see what this meeting will be about and let's see what this person has to say. And I think that this formed, I think, in my childhood years. But also this was one of the most curious books that I've ever read. 

0:34:15 - Rahul Abhyankar
You know that is such a coincidence. I remember I had these books growing up as well Physics for Entertainment by Yakov Perelman, translated from Russian into English, and that was just beautiful. Yeah, such a coincidence there, great. So what are you reading right now? With 1600 books around you? You've got a great choice. 

0:34:35 - Natalia Baryshnikova
I actually have been rereading a book, so I read it before, but I am a rereader. I like to read the books. The book that I'm rereading right now is a Stripe Press book. It's called Where's my Flying Car by J Storz Hall. If you've been following the AI hype, you may remember he's like early book on AI, which I think was one of the first kind of books for AI in broad terms. 

But this book I highly recommend it to anyone who likes to think about the future of technology, because he explores why has the scientific progress slowed down since the 70s and what are the limitations of science and how do we, as humans and as who we are are the ultimate limit of science and what we value in science outcomes. It's very fascinating. 

0:35:27 - Rahul Abhyankar
So you know great combination of growing up, reading about physics and getting interested in science, and then the working as a street artist and learning about art and the sensibilities around design. You know great combination of right brain, left brain. So if you had unconstrained time at your disposal with no distractions, what would you want to learn? 

0:35:51 - Natalia Baryshnikova
I would want to start an NFL team. It has been a while since there has been a new NFL team added to NFL and I think it's time. I looked at it briefly and well, not briefly a little bit and it's going to take about 12 years and like about four billion dollars at least to, with a lot of grit and a lot of everything to make it happen. But that's what I would do. I would start a new NFL team in one of the states that does not have an NFL team today. I think that, as somebody with the art background, I really like building movements and thinking about, like, how do people come together for something? 

Right, because movements and art and understanding what brings people together conceptually is a great representation of leadership. If I think about what are the movements that I would be interested in, I think sports is something that brings people together, that celebrates human ability and is really a unifier, because when we root for our favorite sports team, it doesn't matter who you are and you can connect with people so much over this course. I really like that. 

0:37:06 - Rahul Abhyankar
So fascinating, fascinating. I'll definitely be on the lookout of this new team that gets set up. Awesome. I wish you all the best and thank you so much for taking the time to be on product leaders journey, such a fascinating conversation. 

0:37:20 - Natalia Baryshnikova
Thank you for having me and thank you for your thoughtful questions and a great conversation. 

Transcribed by https://podium.page