S2E2 - On a Mission to Fix Hiring - Amanda Richardson, CEO CoderPad

0:00:04 - Amanda Richardson
I think most of my family would tell you, humor is a nice way to avoid a hard topic, which sometimes is how I used humor. I think I grew up in a family where we always laughed a lot, we always told a lot of jokes. We always had a lot of fun. We weren't a very serious family. I found humor to be a great way to communicate and connect with people. It provides sometimes that authenticity, sometimes that real world silliness that can make you relatable. 

But I think you know, like every superpower, there's a kryptonite. It's not an effective way to deal with hard topics, and so it can be confusing and jarring and sometimes that transition, I don't know that if it's necessarily putting on the mask, mask implies you're hiding something but, I, think it's like making sure you're at the right. You're at the right moment and the right tone for the right conversation. So and it's hard especially when, when someone's coming at you, you come at them with humor and they're like actually I'm deadly serious, Whoa, Okay, I need to. I need to get to the right place. 

0:01:04 - Rahul Abhyankar
At what point or how did it, you came to realize that it's okay to bring humor into the workplace? 

0:01:11 - Amanda Richardson
Oh, I don't know that if I ever realized it was okay, I think I've always done it. I mean I would say that my. So my first job was actually on Wall Street. I was a long short equity hedge fund analyst, which is not a humorous job, and the feedback regularly every year. I remember in my review my manager or the portfolio manager would always say you just need to get more serious, and it was some combination of you need to grow up more or you need to understand the severity of the situation, and I think both of those were projections on how I was. Just because I was making a joke doesn't mean I didn't think it was serious, but I think there's a style thing in there. And after three years of getting the same performance review, I realized maybe it wasn't me, it was them. That's okay. I think it didn't. It wasn't a good fit. Like it's not very, I'm not a great fit on Wall Street. 

As I look, back from a personality perspective and I also really struggle in like super large companies. I've had the same challenge in terms of, you know, big organizations that take themselves very seriously. That's not me, so I think maybe I've found startup land and even product management land. 

Cause you know this and the people listening know that product management is really messy and so finding the humor in that in the day-to-day is like critical to survival. So I don't know that I necessarily determined it was a good skill. I think I found the industry where it became a superpower yeah, and you're right. 

0:02:41 - Rahul Abhyankar
I mean product management generally messy, and it's just important for us to keep our sanity amongst everything that's going on around us. 

0:02:49 - Amanda Richardson
Oh, a hundred percent. I mean customers who talk against each other. I mean, you know, it's a funny job. 

0:02:55 - Rahul Abhyankar
So you've been at CoderPad as CEO for four plus years. Quite a journey and very exceptional phenomenal growth over the four plus years. 

0:03:06 - Amanda Richardson
Yeah well, I joined CoderPad because we actually had used the product when I was at HotelTonight. At its core, it's a software platform for interviewing and assessing developer talent. I think a number of us, particularly in eng roles, have been in teams where someone looks great on paper, they do well in the interview process, and then they get on the team and you're like, ah, you're actually not as good as you thought you were, you don't have the skills I thought you did, you're not able to take feedback or deal with these situations, and so for me, CoderPad was really the opportunity to fix hiring and figure out how we could help create strong teams based on people with skills, not people with BS. And for me it really resonates as someone who's been told I can't have a job because, you know, I could never be an engineer. People tell me I couldn't be a product manager because I didn't have a CS degree. That was a thing 10, 15 years ago. 

And people told me I couldn't have a senior executive job because I was pregnant and I was a mom, and I didn't understand how hard it was going to be, and so people always seem surprised with some of those facts. But that really is out there, and I feel like if we can get the world and get people to really choose based on skills and competencies rather than what they think someone should look like for a role, we'll make much better teams, and then better teams always make better products. So in the end it's kind of my way of getting better products built by people with real skills and hopefully some more diverse skills. 

0:04:43 - Rahul Abhyankar
So when you say fix hiring, that is such a big term, a big mission. Had that always been the mission or did that over the four years you expanded the mission to be that grand and large which is we're going to fix hiring? 

0:05:00 - Amanda Richardson
I think I probably have a tendency to bite off a lot. I'm not going to say it's more than I can chew, but I bite off a lot. So I definitely there was mission expansion. I mean products or, excuse me, CoderPad started as a product to solve the problem of I run technical interviews. And so Vincent the founder, would run technical interviews and he thought the person was great and that was done through you know, either Google docs or whiteboarding back in the day. And then the person would get on the team and he'd be like oh, I made a mistake and we've all been there right, one weekend and you realize you've made a bad hire, but it's a very costly and complicated thing to unwind.

Or, alternatively, people he'd passed on in the interview process and thought that's not going to work out, had gone on to do amazing things at Apple, Facebook you know, name your startup and he was like I need to. I need to find a better way to get signal. And a lot of times it's. It's not just whether or not you know how to code, um, it's also like your style. Can you take feedback, can you collaborate? Can you explain what you're building right? So that was really how it was built was around, you know, finding the right talent, and I think back to like why that really matters. I think that really matters, too, because we need to fix the hiring process to make sure that the right, people are getting hired and that great teams are being created. 

0:06:25 - Rahul Abhyankar
Yeah, I want to go back to two things that you said. One was you were told that you could not have a job because you were pregnant. That's unfathomable. 

0:06:35 - Amanda Richardson
I mean, I appreciate you saying that it's not. I can tell I, literally I shared this story amongst. I shared this story in my YPO forum and another woman next to me said exactly me too. 

0:06:48 - Rahul Abhyankar
I'm very sorry about that. 

0:06:49 - Amanda Richardson
It happens all the time. Sometimes it gives fire, you know, I mean the guy's a jerk and the company went nowhere. So those two things were certainly rewarding comebacks and it actually parlayed me into a CEO role. So I met with the recruiter afterwards who said why did you want that job anyway? Like that was job, was very adjacent to the job you currently had. And I said, well, I want to be CEO, and this was my next step to be CEO. And the recruiter, Bill Beer from Diversa who's amazing said to me well, why don't you just go be a CEO then? f you want to be a CEO, just be a CEO and I mean that changed my trajectory, it changed my life. So maybe a lemonade out of lemons, but yeah.

0:07:31 - Rahul Abhyankar
Awesome. Yeah, you know, engineering roles have always had this aspect of show and tell. I mean, I remember the billboard that Google had on the 101, where they had a puzzle on the billboard and if you were able to solve that puzzle it took you to a website and then you had to solve another puzzle before you could submit your resume. So engineering has always had this show and tell, but it seems like this could be the way for other roles too. 

0:08:03 - Amanda Richardson
Yeah, it's interesting. So I think how we think about CoderPad, which really is focused on developer hiring, but is how we approach hiring. 

So when we're interviewing product managers, it's about take us through a spec you're working on right now and, like tell us about the feature, tell us about how you're gonna measure success. Like, what's your readout on the results? For salespeople we always make them present their current product or their whatever their solution is. I think you have to see people in action. So many times and we talk to the customers about this, but we also learn it ourselves. So many times. There's like a super hot, great candidate that comes through a hot referral from somebody. They have an amazing conversation with the hiring manager and then we say, all right, well, we're going to do a test drive and make sure they can actually do the. You know, present the sales materials or whatever it is, and the hiring manager is like no, no, no, they're so good, we don't have time, it's too competitive. Every time we skip that step, we regret it. So actually it's interesting. 

So we work with Ripple, which is a crypto company, and they were sharing the data they have that they looked at candidates who were referrals, and strong referrals, so they skipped the technical interview and they sent them direct, and then they did a cultural interview and then gave them an offer versus candidates that they had no baseline on, no experience with, so gave them a technical interview and then did the cultural interview and hired them. They were more likely to be working out the person that was known, quantity, guaranteed, fit, but skipped the technical interview one year later. I mean they had the data just in terms of retention and performance management. It feels onerous in the process to say, hey, let's just take a minute and let's see your stuff, let's solve the puzzle whatever it is. Work together regardless of the role, but it's really hard to do in the time. Emotions get high people are excited. 

The hiring market can be frenzied, so it's important to just take a step back and run the process, which I'm sure product managers appreciate. Like I felt like every time in product management. I was like wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Let's think this through before we build it. Try not to get too overly enthusiastic, but yeah. 

0:10:19 - Rahul Abhyankar
Obviously, AI is changing a lot of product development. So how is AI changing hiring? 

0:10:23 - Amanda Richardson
It changes my day all the time. Oh well, I was like. I mean, I spent half my day on ChatGPT this morning. How is it changing hiring? I think so. We've embedded ChatGPT into actually the interview experience. 

The hypothesis was that you know, if work is like an open book test, you might as well just give people access to get the answers right. We want to see how resourceful you can be. No one needs to memorize all the functions, but can you quickly and figure it out? So we put ChatGPT in the interviews so that candidates would have access to it. Fun fact, we've seen more interviewers use it than candidates, because interviewers get stuck all the time like I don't remember. You know, maybe I don't use Java every day, or I've forgotten this question or whatever it is and so, um, I think we've really seen it as a way in the interview process to understand how resourceful people can be and unblock people. So you can really assess skills rather than your ability to memorize lead code questions. So that's promising. 

I think there are ways that we are using AI around summarizing interviews just as a way to remember what happened. Call summaries transcription, and AI is great at that. So we're all in on using the tools available to help bridge that gap and make it faster and more efficient for everybody. And then I think there's also opportunities around how you can give better feedback to candidates. Companies have always, for a long time been reluctant to tell candidates why they didn't make it through the process, and I certainly understand that there are legal risks, but you can give enough content back to someone so that they understand how they can do better in the future. 

0:12:05 - Rahul Abhyankar
Yeah, exactly, and I think it seems like that's the positive feedback even though you're telling the candidate that they don't have the role, but at least something that they can take and figure out how to do better next time. 

0:12:17 - Amanda Richardson
Right and just you know, a little bit of a consolation prize, if you will, for spending six, eight, 10 hours interviewing with your company. Like give them a little feedback. I mean my goodness. 

0:12:28 - Rahul Abhyankar
You started as an equity analyst.

0:12:30 - Amanda Richardson
I did 100 years ago.

0:12:32 - Rahul Abhyankar
I'm curious to understand how did that then move you into tech and product management? 

0:12:39 - Amanda Richardson
Yeah, oh, that's a great question. Well, yeah. So I started on as an equity analyst on Wall Street. My boss told me I had to go get an MBA to really understand how businesses work. Maybe at the time I wasn't bought in on, but he actually sitting in my seat now, was absolutely right. I had no idea how businesses work. 

I came out for a business degree at Stanford and realized, like this is the place where it's happening. You know I often joke about Hamilton. I want to be in the room. I want to be in the room. I mean you came to Stanford, this is the room where it's happening. And I mean that kind of changed everything. So then I was like, well, I don't want to be, I don't want to be the person you know on Wall Street with the spreadsheet, I want to be the person doing the stuff, which, of course, like all good MBAs, meant I was qualified for nothing but very confident about it. 

So I ended up getting a job in business development and I was about two years into my first job and the you know I had done a partnership and the projections were up and to the right and my boss was a CEO at the time was like you missed the number of what happened. And I'm like, well, the engineering team, like they're just so far behind in the product team, nothing's getting done. And the CTO stood up and was like, well, if you think you're so good at it, why don't you come over here and try? And so next week I was a product manager and man, did I learn why shit wasn't getting done and how hard that job was. I actually quit. I did it for a year and then I was like this is terrible, I'm quitting, went back to business development and then got dragged back into product management four months later. 

So how did I end up in product management? I think by being the one who was passionate about what needed to get done, very vocal about how we needed to improve. I spent a lot of time talking to customers, which I got from my equity analyst days, like all we did was talk to strangers about different businesses, and that was the job. So I had no problem humbly going up to doctors and nurses and hiring managers all the products I worked on over my time, being like what do you do? Why is that important? How can I help? And you learn a lot that way. So that kind of put me into product management and I don't know. Eventually you're just kind of on this roller coaster that is Silicon Valley. It's a lovely ride and I'm so grateful to not be stuck in an office in Manhattan. 

0:14:57 - Rahul Abhyankar
Yeah, but I can imagine that the experience working in finance on Wall Street really came in handy as understanding the business and the financials of the product. So any story there that you can say how do product leaders build that financial acumen that you got through your background? 

0:15:17 - Amanda Richardson
Yes, I mean. I've always encouraged PMs. They always say I want to spend more time with engineers. I'm like no the engineers are fine. They don't need your help. You know who needs your, who needs to understand. Spend time with the sales team and spend time with the finance team. No one asked the finance team what's going on and they have a pretty good sense of how the business is running. 

0:15:37 - Amanda Richardson
I think people just consider them. You know an expense line, G&A, whatever dismissive ways they talk about it, but the finance team really understands how the business works. So I always encourage product managers to spend an hour, find the FP&A person and just cohabitate for an hour a week and just try to understand each other's world. The finance team often has good product ideas too. We recently rolled out or maybe this is spoiler alert, we are rolling out the ability to do spreadsheets in CoderPad, because this technical assessment portion often will have like spreadsheet manipulation that just needs to be done better. So the finance team has. 

Then that was an idea from our finance team. So shout out to the finance teams and then spend time with the sales teams, because it's very easy to talk about how much something should cost or whatever, because it's very easy to talk about how much something should cost or whatever. So, understanding that and then the best advice I always give to the product managers, especially those who are in bigger teams or maybe it's a lack of clarity on what you do every day. 

You've got to get a metric and you need to understand what that metric is and how that works into the bigger tree diagram of metrics for the business and how it ultimately drives revenues or costs, whatever it is. But really study to understand that metric and get a metric, get your boss to commit to. Like you need to move this conversion rate from X to Y or increase this number of leads from Y to Z, whatever the case may be. Number of leads from Y to Z, whatever the case may be.  

0:17:03 - Rahul Abhyankar
Then you were at Prezi and I love Prezi. And the way I came to know about Prezi was through my kids. One day, you know, the second grader came back home and was doing something on the computer and I'm like what are you doing? He's like, well, you know, we've been asked to do this presentation. And he was creating something in Prezi and it was just a fantastic visual experience for a second grader to create their first presentation without having to deal with PowerPoint, for example. Right. So, Prezi, it's a completely different take on doing presentations. Yeah, but you've got a big incumbent in Microsoft and PowerPoint. 

0:17:46 - Amanda Richardson
Which is free. 

0:17:48 - Rahul Abhyankar
Yeah, so what was the strategy and how did you sort of define that product and business strategy to have the right product and go to market against a large incumbent like PowerPoint? 

0:18:02 - Amanda Richardson
Yeah, Well, a couple of key strategic pieces that I will attribute to the full Prezi team, not just to me. One was that we made the product free. If you were willing to make it shareable across everybody, right, so we would gain from SEO, so Prezi's would be done on whatever your, your second graders project was. Thank you very much. Uh, had an SEO benefit which certainly drove the virality. And if you're sharing a presentation by, by definition it's a viral product. Um, and if you wanted to use it for work and were unwilling to share it, so if you wanted to market as private and unshared, we charged you money, which made sense, because then we could quickly identify those who were doing it for probably some sort of money-making confidential reason, as opposed or even like keynotes, as opposed to the people who were doing it to. You know, share widely and use for free. So those were some of the strategic choices. 

Oh, it's been a while and I know that business has changed and they have all new products now, but yeah, the education route was important for us has changed and they have all new products now, but yeah, the education route was important for us. And then, of course, the presenter route. You know we would take it into. You would. You would see great keynotes or TED talks. A number of TED talks were done in Prezi. I mean there's no better platform for presentation software than a TED talk. 

But we were killed for sure by management consultants everywhere. And the reality is a lot of people use PowerPoint and slide decks, and I've since talked to some of the people who are on the original PowerPoint team, where their goal was to replace Word docs and migrate Word into a presentation style. And if you think of Prezi as the goal of having a visual way of communicating an idea, powerpoint and Prezi were such different answers but ultimately solving the same problem. And then PowerPoint was free, you know, as part of the Microsoft bundle, and so that was very tough to compete with. 

0:19:59 - Rahul Abhyankar
Yeah, you know. I was reminded of this, General Stanley McChrystal, when he was being given a presentation about the American strategy in Afghanistan. He said that we've met the enemy and he is PowerPoint. And he said, I mean, this was one slide that had all kinds of lines all over it. And he said, once we understand that slide, we would have won the war. 

0:20:23 - Amanda Richardson
Right, we're still trying to study it. 

0:20:26 - Rahul Abhyankar
Yeah, so you know PowerPoint as a tool is one thing, but the way it gets used is another thing. And so you know it's so difficult to capture something in just a bullet point, at which point you have a lot of context that's missing. And then I've seen presentations I'm sure you have where the bullet point runs two or three sentences lines, and then at that point it might as well have been a Word document, right, right, yeah, so tell me about how your work at Prezi sort of shaped your thoughts on how to become a better presenter. 

0:21:03 - Amanda Richardson
Oh yeah, no, one of my favorite and terrifying responsibilities at Prezi, particularly as the head of product, was you had to give a certain number of presentations. I think you had to do like one or two presentations a quarter. It was part of my like evaluation in front of a hundred plus people and you're like what. But you had to do it and really understand it and use it. And the research and we funded studies with Harvard and any sort of learning platform will tell you you learn better and remember better when you experience things spatially. 

The example I think we always gave was if I asked you to close your eyes and alphabetize the appliances in your kitchen, list them in alphabetical order, you'd be like the refrigerators here, the toasters here, the microwaves here, because you, everybody learns visually, everybody remembers spatially, right, and if we could take that and put that into a presentation, ideas just stuck better. We, I think our, I know our tagline was make ideas stick, cause that was what we wanted to do. It wasn't about the three bullets on the PowerPoint, and I literally had this conversation this morning with our marketing team. We have a new template that we're using with the sales team and I was like this font is too small, it's going to put too many words on the page, like we can't do this. It's gotta be limited to how many words are on a page, otherwise it's not a presentation. 

It's just a Word document that's chopped up in pretty colors Like this, is crazy. But yeah, we're still fighting the good fight on that and yeah, we've got to figure out how to get presentations to be better and more resonant, because people really learn in different ways and reading things on a slide is not how people remember content. 

0:22:43 - Rahul Abhyankar
Right, and then after Prezi, you came to HotelsTonight. 

0:22:48 - Amanda Richardson
Yes. 

0:22:49 - Rahul Abhyankar
And you were chief data and strategy officer, and now I haven't come across a title like that that combines chief data and strategy officer. So how did that role come about? 

0:23:02 - Amanda Richardson
Well, so I went to HotelTonight as the head of product, Sam was the CEO at the time there, founder. So I was like Sam, you need to hire me. And he was like we're 12 people, I don't need you. 

But, we stayed in touch and eventually he needed me. Hopefully he thinks that now, but I led product for two years and then our data just got to be a mess and I'm sure product managers everywhere understand this. Like, eventually you just you haven't invested enough in the data infrastructure, you haven't done the data dictionary the things that people knew just intuitively when you were 20 people becomes unwieldy at 300 and you've got reports going out that don't make sense. And so Sam said I really need you to focus in and fix this data problem. And I was like cool, so I'm excited about that. Right now I can own the engineering team, parts of the engineering team. I can. I'm going to take the analysts we're going to, I'm going to make sure that the reporting and like everything gets buttoned up and gets organized. But I'm not your data monkey, I'm only doing this. If you, let me then take those insights and drive strategy. 

And maybe he was desperate, I don't know, but he let me do it, let me do it. So it turned into not just the data role. So we had the data team, but we also ended up running strategy and metrics and reporting and kind of the annual planning process in terms of like, okay, what do we need to achieve in the next year? How do all the initiatives roll into that? How do we tie that together and how do we report and track on that? And so the data and strategy pieces came together in a way that I absolutely just gerrymandered but made it a much more interesting role for me, because I was just worried we were going to become like the data team who was just taking a bunch of JIRA tickets off a Trello board and be like, oh, and I wanted it to be more impactful than that. 

0:24:46 - Rahul Abhyankar
So, coming back to CoderPad, you know we often hear that what got you here won't get you there, but you know, when I look across your experience and the roles and responsibilities that you've had, it feels like it was a foregone conclusion that, at some point, that you would become a CEO, and so is that how you looked at it. 

0:25:10 - Amanda Richardson
I do have friends who say we always knew you wanted to be a CEO. You always said you wanted to be a CEO. I mean, my mom always said I wanted to be the boss, so maybe it is a foregone conclusion, but I mean, I think even now, being in a CEO, it's not the final stop. It's actually, in many ways, the first of the next series of stops. Right, where do you want to go with this? And how do you want to go with this? And how do you want to grow your? There's a lot of different strategies for growing your business. I've been stretched to learn about go-to-market motions and you know sales motions and how do you deal with direct sales, indirect sales, partner sales. How do you manage, like all the different roles that are in sales? I mean as a product manager. To me it was all I like. I could tell you every single engineering role and you know what the iOS guy did, differently from the Android person, which did differently from, you know, the web dev person, which was totally different than the backend team, which was different from the SRE team and like all this stuff that the sales team looks at me and they're like are they engineers? 

And so it's like very clear to me how they're different, but on the sales team it turns out they're just as granular and specific in their role. So you know, the next level of this is figuring out market strategy, figuring out how we want to scale, what meet, what it means to scale, how we get the you know capital and resources to continue to scale. And that's a whole new set of whole new set of skills to continue to develop that probably, at the end of the day, are product management somewhere, but on the day-to-day it's a lot of learning and it's a lot of growth and it's a ton of fun and I get so much customer time, which is what I love from the product days, so I get really excited about that. 

0:26:46 - Rahul Abhyankar
You said skills, not resumes. So when companies are looking to screen and interview and hire candidates through the Coder platform, are candidates not submitting any resumes at all? 

0:27:00 - Amanda Richardson
When you apply to work for us, you don't submit a resume. You submit either a screen or what we call a take-home project, and that's the first step. I mean we eventually will look at your resume, but we have found that by starting with skills and looking at what someone can do, you find a lot of talent that other people have dismissed. So 60% of developers actually didn't study computer science . Yet, so many jobs say degree. You know, must have bachelor's degree in CS. So great for those people, because they are only going to get 40% of the applications that the rest of us can look at. 

I mean, one of the best hires we ever made was a woman who was getting her master's degree in biology and her parents really wanted her to be a doctor. She didn't want to be a doctor, but she was kind of stuck and on the side, she liked the code and so she was given a take-home project for the weekend and said if you can do this, you can come interview and she knocked it out and we were like, oh my God, this is amazing. And then we looked at her resume and we were like the recruiter was like I never would have called her back. 

0:27:58 - Rahul Abhyankar
Fundamentally what you're looking for people who really have a way to think through a problem, you know, get to the solution. The tools, the how you code, and all of that is, you know, part important, but you know, the thinking really comes first. 

0:28:15 - Amanda Richardson
Yeah, and people get so distracted with. Do they have a CS degree from Cal? Did they work at Google? You know were they a senior engineer at blah blah blah startup. You know, like it's just a mistake. You miss out on great talent as a company. And as someone you know who works on teams, you just miss out on a whole section of idea generation and problem solving. I mean, if we only hired CS grads from Cal who went to Google like we wouldn't solve any problems except maybe like ramen delivery or something. 

No offense to my friends at Google, but you, but it's such a narrow view of the world and if you can get the people who went to other schools, have other lived experiences, understand other aspects and can, to your point, do problem solving, because that's actually the skill that has longevity, right, no one's going to be coding in, whatever it is. I mean, I laugh at the Ruby engineers. 

I'm like remember when that was cool 10 years ago and here we are things change, so you have to at least have the raw skills to be able to evolve your own talent and your own thinking to problem solve. 

0:29:26 - Rahul Abhyankar
Yeah, when you were talking about your experience taking on the responsibility of data analysis and at HotelTonight, it struck me that you know, you said yes to something and you figured out how to go about doing it. And you know, early in our careers we tend to say yes a lot, but then at some point we learn how to say no and then we figure out how to say no, right. So are you more of a yes person or a no, let me think kind of a person? 

0:29:57 - Amanda Richardson
I'm a yes person., I'm a yes to everything, which can sometimes be distracting for my team and can sometimes make my husband insane. But, um, yeah, I believe in the possible, I believe in figuring it out. I also believe in editing, right. I think the nice part of uh admittedly a product management experience in software is like if it gets screwed up, you just roll it back or you fix it. You know and I know that doesn't apply to everything my husband works in hardware and he's always like we can't just roll it back. I'm like that's too bad, you should pick a different career. But uh, yeah, I mean I just believe in like let's try and we'll learn and we'll figure it out. 

I don't know that I say yes as much as I did when I was, when I was younger. I mean I remember the first. I got that first job as a director of business development. I called a friend and I was like I just signed for a job as director of business development. Can, can I ask you a question? And she said, sure, I said what does a director of business development do? You know what I mean. But you're like we'll figure it out and if I hate it, we'll change. You're right, as you, I think, advance in your career. It feels riskier, it feels mistakes feel much more visible and more costly, and certainly as a personal level right, I and certainly as a personal level right, like I've got two kids and a mortgage. 

And I remember people said to me start a company when you're young. And I was like no, like I don't know what I'm doing, I need to learn, and I know what they were talking about. Now, like now, the idea of like, starting a company is hard right, like there's so much at risk and there's so many complexities personally, so say yes. Just try it, say yes. 

0:31:33 - Rahul Abhyankar
What's the hardest part of being a CEO and what's the most exciting part of being a CEO? 

0:31:39 - Amanda Richardson
I think it's the same answer actually is the possibilities. What I didn't appreciate when I didn't have this job was I thought the job was really like running the business and making sure the strategy gets done, and that is certainly important. When I didn't have this job was I thought the job was really like running the business and and and making sure the strategy gets done, and that is certainly important. Um, if you don't run the business and execute on strategy, you get nowhere. But uh, it's kind of only maybe half to a third of the job. The other half is like what should the strategy be? What can be? You know? 

I remember I was, I was talking to a board member and I was complaining about, you know, the market and the economy and no one was buying. And he stopped and said Amanda, you have 40 engineers to build something people want. And I was like you're right, I do, like I, I don't have to execute on this strategy and maybe people aren't hiring, but we have customers who have a need like let's go solve it. It's still around the same problem, and so I think it's been exciting to see, and it's scary to see where you can, where you can take a business and how much opportunities out there. It can be overwhelming, right, because there's like an infinite solution set and you don't know until you say yes and start trying. I mean, you can certainly like do research and things like that, but the reality is you don't know what you don't know, and so it's like every day is like exciting in the morning and then by the end of the day it's like really scary the variety that's out there

0:33:09 - Rahul Abhyankar
Yeah, I know we are coming up against the time here, so maybe one question is if you were to say, go back in time and look at all the inventors and the inventions, if you had to pick one person to collaborate with, who would that be? 

0:33:23 - Amanda Richardson
I don't know that I'd pick a person to collaborate with, but I got to tell you the one place I wish I could be. This is my childhood dream I'd want to be on the first spaceship to the moon. I want to be an astronaut and I just think space is fascinating. What's out there is fascinating, Infinite possibilities. And, like God, what a rush it would have been to have been there and just been like, oh my God, we're on the moon. 

We did it and it's like mind bending today even in the advent of SpaceX, but to think about 60 years ago wow yeah. It's crazy. 

0:34:06 - Rahul Abhyankar
Amazing. Yeah, that's a great place and point in time to be yeah. So, Amanda, thank you so much. This was so great and a few things that I took away from this is humor is important, saying yes and being in the space of possibilities. And maybe one final question before we go Any advice for women in tech, women in product, aspiring product leaders who want to be CEO, like you. 

0:34:39 - Amanda Richardson
Yeah, I mean, I think honestly the answer is put your hand up and say yes. I think the studies and the data show that women don't apply when they don't think they have accomplished 100% of the bullet points on the job description, and the men don't even read the job description. The answer is just put your hand up and say yes. And it's scary and it's hard and it's not what we're taught in school, so you have to kind of unwind the rubric you've learned. But it's so worth it, it's so great, and we're all cats. We all eventually land on our feet. It'll be okay, but this was wonderful. Thank you for having me. 

0:35:12 - Rahul Abhyankar
Thank you so much, Amanda. Great conversation and wish you all the best with CoderPad. Talk to you soon. 

0:35:18 - Amanda Richardson
Thank you so much. I look forward to it. I'll talk to you again soon. 

Transcribed by https://podium.page