A great plan, basically for me, is someone that is relentless until he gets this impact, until he validates that this impact is in place. In some cases, doing the biggest impact is not developing another feature. It's about making the current value more accessible. Even at this for eight years, you said there's 250,000 customers at this point. What would you say is the most counterintuitive thing you've learned through this journey of building Monday? We really have a bit in the poach of very radical transparency about everything. Before we went public, we actually shared every bit of information with our employees. Instead of demoralizing people, I think that this is something that gives them a sense of deep partnership. We really want everyone's brains in the challenge and not just one centralized brain in a lot of working hands.
You basically realized that your competitors were shipping a lot faster than you were. That made you shift the way you think about product and the way you operate. Some of our competitors did something that we can only imagine we said, okay, we need to treat it differently. We received a gift from our competitors. They showed us that it's possible. You do competition, know it and take it and set ambitious goals and believe in yourself and you can do amazing things. Today, my guest is Daniel Aureia. Daniel's currently chief product and technology officer at Monday.com. He joined when they were just around 40 employees. A few years in, Daniel and the executive realized that their competitors were able to move a lot faster than they were and ship a lot more often than they were. That spurred a transformation in how they build and operate their teams.
Very few companies are able to transform like this and even fewer recognize that something is wrong. In our conversation, Daniel shares a bunch of very specific insights and suggestions into how to go about making change or even recognizing that something is wrong. Daniel shares moments when it felt like everything was going to crumble. Why it's important to know that the skills that got you to where you are today aren't the skills that are going to take you to the next level. Why it's so important to orient all your teams around impact and so much more. Vindray this podcast. Don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year-free of paid accounts at superhuman, linear, notion, granola, and perplexity pro. Check it out at Lenny's newsletter.com and click bundle. With that, I bring you Daniel Aureia.
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Daniel, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. We're going to get into the story of Monday. We're going to talk about your journey over the last eight years, building and scaling this company, all things you've learned along the way. But I want to start with a very specific moment that you shared with me, where you basically realized that your competitors were shipping a lot faster than you were able to get stuff out a lot more quickly and more often than you guys. And that made you shift the way you think about product and the way you operate. Can you talk about that moment and that lesson and which you took away from that?
Yeah, well, you take me a while back, you know, I think it was when we were relatively a small team. I think we were something around like 30 people and you know, including engineers and product and everyone. It's actually that back in the days, we did so many things and actually we had an amazing, amazing execution where the, you know, weekly update, which would share everything that we did with the company. I mean, it was always, always, you know, super long and super like with so many different things. And we really felt good about ourselves at that point, to be honest, about the execution.
And then I remember one day, you know, coming to the office and just looking on one of our competitors and with Monday, we have like one of the main things that we have in the product is our boards. It's like the heart and soul of the product. And it's, you can think about it as a table and it has different column types, data types that you can capture within the board and work with. And you know, back then we had five of these and I was actually coding the sixth one to be honest. And each and every one of these, like took us like four months to develop, you know, together with defining the products and everything.
And at this morning, we actually saw that one of our main competitors back then is actually launched 30 new columns. 30. Yeah. And you know, we said, okay, at first, we didn't really know what to do and you know, we fought about it. And I remember that even we said, okay, we're going to take even some time out of the office. So back then, Roy and Iran, which are the founders and also together with me and Tal, which is was one of the main tech leads in Monday for a long time. And a few others, we went outside the office and we said, listen, we need to do things differently. Something doesn't make sense.
And you know, I remember back then that for me, this realization of a understanding that we are doing so much, but suddenly, some of our competitors did something that we can only imagine and actually transform the product because it's a different type of platform if you think about it. And it was really hard. Personally, first of all, admitting that although you walked like crazy, you didn't do something that really transformed the product because I remember back then when we did a conversation, we said, okay, we're doing so much. What is the most meaningful thing that we did over the last three months? And you know, suddenly the answer was, you know, there's so many things, but it wasn't something specific.
And after like, you know, acknowledging that and you know, it's a very hard thing, personally, especially when you walk so hard and you put your entire heart in what you do, we said, okay, now we need to treat it differently. We received a gift for more competitors. They showed us that it's possible. Now we need to think how. And in order to do that, we need to think differently because remember, like we said, okay, if we are going to add 25 more multiplied by four months, we're a small team, we're lost, okay, we can't make it.
So we said, okay, we need to take upon ourselves an ambitious girl like 25 columns in one month. And this is the girl that we took upon ourselves. And you know, I think that the fact that our competitors did it, gave us like, didn't give us the excuse of saying it's not possible. So in a way, it was the biggest favor that we can ask for. And you know, long story short, month and a half afterwards, we had 30 columns in Monday. And we did it, you know, by thinking totally different. And by the way, afterwards, you know, we did it over and over again.
So if you think about Monday, it's basically a platform for work and you have different building blocks. Columns is one of them, but we did the same drill exactly with a dashboard and widgets and then with automations and so on. So I think this was so transformative because a, when the students, you need to constantly think, especially at these phases, how would you transform completely the product in the next three months? And if you can't answer that and you say, listen, I'm doing so much thing, but you can't point this exact thing. You have a focus problem in my eyes.
And second, that is that, you know, put ambitious goals, it will make you think differently. And you know, we really love now to do it, even with when we don't know it's possible. And it actually like works for us time of the time. Last thing about it, you know, the team that was there suddenly became invincible because, you know, it's such an amazing, amazing experience that you have a goal that you don't know how you're going to do it and you succeed. And then it makes you feel that everything is possible.
There's so much here and I have so many threads I want to follow on one is just there's the kind of there's as a metaphor of the four-minute mile where no one thought it was possible. And then so and did it and then everyone started beating that record. So I like that this is highlighting there's just so much power and seeing somebody else accomplish something you thought was impossible and then locks the way you think.
And I love that you saw it as a gift. A lot of people, a lot of companies do this. They're in this place and they're like, no way. It's like when the iPhone launched like no, no one, no one needs that. That's not there's no keyboard. And a lot of people like like deny that it's a thing they should be paying attention to. I love that you saw it as like, okay, we need to we need to move the things have changed. We're not doing things. We're not going to be competitive long-term.
I think it's also very much about focus and I think that you know, it's very hard to get to a very good execution but it doesn't guarantee that you're walking in the right way. And many times in my eyes, you know, simple questions can provide the most and the deepest insights about your world. And I think that for us, the fact that we managed to leverage it, as he said, and see it as a gift is one of the most important things.
Use your competition, know it, use it to your advantage and you know, take it and set ambitious goals and believe in yourself and you can do amazing things. Another right, I think peace, a lot of people are probably resonating with here is starting a company that's small growing things are going great and then all of a sudden things start to slow down. And in some cases, you don't realize that they've slowed down and that's what happened in your case. Sounds like in a lot of cases, the founders are like, what the hell's going on?
Why is it taking three to four weeks to ship one type of company? You call them. And so is there anything? By the way, what was the scale of the company at this point? It's a good question. If I'm not mistaken, it was around 2018, back then, how it's safe to assume like 150 to 100 people in the company, but we were relatively small. I recently had Brian Singer on the podcast, who created the shape up method from base camp and that's kind of his piece of advice to around like 50 to 100 people things start to really change and slow down and that's where a lot of companies start to go sideways.
So that resonates. That's really interesting. And by the way, this, these columns you're describing just to make it clear, this is like a new type of like data, like new format of column, like it's a new data format that you're building. It's not like just add another column to some database. Yeah, so actually, like exactly, it's a new type of column, but it's a whole product around it. Like if you think about it, for instance, you have a column that captures dates.
So it's pretty straightforward, but you can also have like formula column, which is like more complicated and has like more complex product around it. I think one of the best benefits for us as platform is that suddenly when we will like when we set the goal of adding so many different columns, we actually stopped for the first time and say what is a column like? And we also like organized all the product architecture around it.
And you know, these kind of things, like sounds really trivial in retrospect, but you know, we really define, okay, each column need to have like specific capabilities. It should be able to export it to Excel, it should be able to be filtered and sorted and so many different other things, but basically we defined what is it and then create an infrastructure for all these shared things, making the work of adding a new column, just thinking about the specific product that you want to provide with each one of these columns.
Story about it is actually even more interesting. The way we actually achieved it is that we said, okay, in two weeks, we're going to have an Akaton in which each one of our developers is going to take one column and implement it in one day. And you know, if you think about it from four months to one day, it's like mind-blowing and back then I remember people said, how can it be? But then, Tal that I told you about build an infrastructure is sent it to me. I did a column at night, you know, just to see how it works. And on the day that we did the columns, like everyone knew what they are going to do, what they are trying to solve.
And we just did it and two weeks afterwards, it was in production, which was amazing. Well, we want to do here is help people avoid these moments where they're almost like too late and realizing the things have slowed down. So I think a really another important lesson here is the power of ambition and thinking crazyly big. A lot of people think that when you ask your team, we need to build 25 columns in a month or whatever it was. People would be like, I burned out or feeling super depressed, but really, people get excited.
There's all this opportunity to think really differently. It reminds me of our bean bee, Brian Chesky was very famous for you. Give him a goal. Here's our goal for the year. And he's like, what would it take to 10x this goal? Just like, what would it take to do that? And he's always pushing you to think a lot bigger when you're like, because your first reaction is like, no, no, no. Why? Which is really just alone. But then you realize if you really think big, it changes everything about how you approach the problem as you describe where it's like instead of like in a date, what would it take to build a Senate day?
Yeah. And I think, by the way, this is something which is really important about setting ambitious goals. If you set a bit like a different goal, I want to reduce it from four months to three months. So many times this translates in people heads to, I want you to walk harder. I want you to walk longer hours. And this is not a message here. It's about walking smarter. And I think that many times when we talk about speed of execution, you know, there's fake speed, which means trying to do the same work by skipping stages or not doing the high quality that you want. But there's the real speed and speed like organizations and speed of execution.
Many times it's about doing things right. It's about understanding. Hey, what is going to move the needle and walk only on that, not walking in a lot of things that you tend to invent when you're trying to solve a problem. And being is like, you know, about like thinking, as you said, like thinking differently. And I think that for the girls, this is why we really wanted the goal that you really understand from the first minute, that if you walk the same way, you cannot achieve it, even if you'll slip in the office.
So you need to change dramatically how you think. And you know, the advanced phase of it is that today we're doing it on things that we didn't see others doing. And you know, we have the confidence because we have the experience of like trusting ourselves that this is an exercise for us that will make us actually think about different solutions. I know another element of this that is really important to you that you has shifted the way you all operate is focusing on impact.
There's a lot of focus on just building a lot of stuff. And you realize there's a lot of power and thinking from perspective, how do we have the most impact? Talk about that. This is the core and the main thing that we also measure like our teams. And this is how see a great PM. So a great PM basically for me is someone that is relentless until he gets this impact until it validates that this impact is in place.
And you know, for us, it really changed how we think about things. It really changed how we set goals for our teams. So in many ways PM in Monday, first and foremost is responsible for creating the shared understanding on what would be impactful for our customers. Okay, it's not about the solution and what we are going to build. It's about what's the problem? What's the opportunity?
And second, how we will know that we move the Nailer. And without these two things, you can build so many different things. And you know, it's like songs for the draw like I built so you know, such a huge part of what I build was never used by users, the way I thought it was going to use. So I think that for me, having this understanding of what we want to change for our customers and also how we know we did it is a huge huge part of the PM all. And for us, you know, it means that we pay a lot of time in setting goals in making sure that we really understand both again, the opportunity, but not only that, but how we'll see and we'll know for sure that we move the Nailer in many ways, you know, it changes the conversation.
So PMs, you know, and their teams many times like are spending a lot of time at the problem area before they think about the solution. The solution is not the case anymore. It's not like there are so many different solutions. And once you do that and you have these goals suddenly it produces also a lot of the discussions that you have about the different solutions because everyone knows that everything is going to be tested on real life. So they make make it everyone pre-definitely. And also in that way, you know, it makes you think much more holistically, which I also think is something that is very special at Monday is that we give our teams like real life goals as much as we can.
And then you know, in some cases, doing the biggest impact is not developing another feature. It's about making the current value more accessible. It's about connecting better to the go-to market motion that you have. It's about understanding how your customers are going to learn what you built and use it. And you know, this realization is something that we try very hard to stay on it. And it's hard because like people tend to build things like we all love to build things. Right? And when you start to build things, you get excited and suddenly you lose track of why? Why are you doing it? And what do you need to change?
And I think that in that sense, this is the most important part about like this point of impact. And you know, this is also how we measure ourselves. So we can work extremely hard. It doesn't mean that we are successful. It doesn't mean that we are doing our work right. And it's not only for the PMs. It's for the entire team. So the entire team succeeds or fail together based on the value that we bring to our customers. And we have a lot of different ways in order to make sure that we stay honest to this principle.
There's a lot of people listening to this that work at say modern tech companies, very high growth tech companies that are just like duh, this is how you should work. A lot of people hearing this are like, I don't really understand what like how like what am I doing wrong? What am I missing? Maybe what's a sign that you're not oriented around impact? I think that the most obvious sign for me is that you are building something without the aim or without the initial aim of what it's changed for your users and how you are going to measure it. So in my eyes, it's many times the fact that you don't have a goal or the goal is like many times you know, for me a smell for that is that I hear people use the word we're going to enhance.
We're going to augment. We are going to extend value and distance and it's not enough. What is it going to change for users and how you're going to see it that it actually happened? And then you start asking yourself all the questions because once you have a goal that you are committed to, suddenly you think about the target audience because it's neat enough like big enough target audience for instance in order to get to your goals. You need to make sure that what you build actually going to touch all of these people and I can share just a recent example and you know, these things sound trivial and maybe an example would you know like help resonate with that because I know many people are thinking like that.
You know, we have a very interesting offering that we just introduced with AI. It's called AI blocks. Okay. And basically it means that with no code you can integrate blocks which contain AI actions within your existing workflows and you know 70% of Mondays customers are non-tech and for them this makes AI accessible for them and has a huge, huge value. And we started building these blocks and we released it to customers and we measured you know, discoverability and adoption and retention and so on and something that we do in order to stay connected to the numbers. So each team at Mondays has like what we call the daily numbers update.
So we have a think about it like a message that the team is building with all the numbers that they care about because we really want people to live these numbers. So for AI, for instance for AI blocks it was AI actions. So we had AI actions, how many accounts like I was using these AI actions and so on and so on. And you know, we got amazing responses from our customers. We see great success of them getting value from AI actions. But you know one day like in this like it's a we use a select channel in which one of our internal systems big brain is sending us this message every day. And then we have conversations about it. Okay. And you know one day we saw we noticed that the amount of accounts that are using AI is super, super low comparing to the entire population that we have.
And you know we have 250,000 paying companies that use Monday and we saw only like few thousands there. And you know until this point everyone will like in a very good feeling that we're making an amazing product. We get really good feedback. We're building great value. We're adding value. But we said down and say, okay, why it's only like this and this. Then someone said, yeah, you know, since AI is new, we need to do change of the terms of service for customers before we're opening it to them. And this is planned. You know for like in the next quarter or something like that. And said, what? No, we need to do it now. You know, we need to now open it for everyone because this is actually what would be the most impactful thing to do.
And then like you know the team went and set with legal and sent with everyone and with two weeks time it was open to 98% of Monday customers. You know, and I think in that sense, you know, this is a very good example because we could have continued building value. And it's great. But the impact wouldn't be the impact that we were aiming for. And this is a very important point. And you know, we I think in that sense, staying really connected to your teams, to your numbers. So this is something that I really feel strongly about. I feel that you need to get your numbers in push. You need to leave by them. And you know, for me, it's like so exciting to see a conversation that says, oh wow, today there were a lot of new accounts that are using what I'm building. Let's see what happens.
And you know, this kind of things that I see the conversation about. It's amazing. And also, you know, for in this case, seeing the eye actions go, it's like you want to dive it and push it forward. And in many ways, I feel that this is a very good example on where you can actually build a lot of value. You can walk really fast. You can deliver a lot of features. But the problem lays in other place in order to get the impact that you want. Yeah, there's so much joy in watching watching your number go up. So just to close the loop here, to help people see if their impact driven working from a perspective of how do we drive the most impact is one simple way of thinking about it is you're working backwards from a goal that is going to drive business growth and revenue basically in the end.
If you're working backwards from a number and a metric and a goal, and then thinking through what are the levers that will most move this metric that's assigned your thinking impact through by impact versus let's just keep shipping features at the sales team once. Yeah. And I think another thing for me like it's an exercise that I really, you know, I really encourage everyone to do for me. It was like a after the columns hackathon and everything that we talked about, I said, okay, each quarter and this is when we were much smaller, but it can be each month, it can be each two weeks. But how do I imagine the company and the product is going to be different and better for customers in a quarter from now and from that, you know, walk it backwards.
But if you if you're just saying we'll have better security, we'll have better performance, we'll have less bugs, we'll have more enhancements through the I don't know this and this feature. It's not enough. You need to constantly build value, which is pivotal to your customers. And if you don't do it and if it's helpful you to answer about this question, it's a it's a very good sign that you are not impredeven and you know, I love to do it. Also with teams and individuals like what are the things that you are most proud of that you did in the last three months. And if it's like takes you a lot of time to think, you're not very focused and you're definitely not maximizing the impact that you want due to that in my eyes.
I like that exercise as kind of a like versus waiting for your competitors to do something and then realizing that it would be way behind it's forcing yourself every quarter to think about this. So do you do this as like you have a meeting or or someone in your calendar or how do you how do you actually operationalize this? So it's actually there. You know, today we are like under the builders organization, which is the engineering product management product design was 700 people. So we have a lot of different like ways and methodologies to do it in different levels. But I'll give you an example from the company level and from the team level maybe because these are the most interesting ones.
So we just recently had an early kick off each and every year we do an early kick off for our company. And one of the most exciting sessions obviously is what we're going to do with our product as a product company. And I really like to have a slide in which I like write and I just share it when I'm going to stand here in a year from now. What is going to be different for our customers? And you know, this is on the company level and every one slide and it talks about like offering and it talks about the value that they are getting in a way that next year I want to you know, it's here to start.
And my my presentation with the slide from last year and see where we are. And you know, in this level it can be something like our CLM continues with a very strong momentum and becomes a product suite when we give much more robust value to our customers. This can be an example. Okay. With an additional product of CLM marketing I would just say. But on a team level what we did and maybe I'll take an example from the early days, you know, we really did, we really love to do each and every two weeks. I told you we would write like an update for the entire company about what we did.
And the way we did it is that each and every one of our team members actually for write what is highlights. And then we would share it with the company. And this exercise really made us sit every two weeks and think on an individual level but also on a team level. And you know, every one of our team members used to write to read these updates and say then we had a good two weeks or we had a bad two weeks. We did a lot of impact. So we did not not enough impact. So I really encouraged to create these points in time where you sit down and you force yourself to understand whether what you did is what you thought you're going to achieve or not.
That's great. I really like the slide idea. It's basically there's all this power and just working backwards from something in the future. However you come up with it. So it's just like in a year we're going to have this just like working backwards from a goal, working backwards from a big vision. I think those are such good exercises. Obviously Amazon's famous for working backwards is a whole book called working backwards from their PR approach. Okay. I want to go in a slightly different direction. I want to zoom out a little bit.
So you've been at this for eight years building Monday. You said there's 250,000 customers at this point. What's like the revenue scale? Give people a couple stats to give them a sense of just how large this company has gotten. We recently announced that we cost the one billion dollar in ARR. We're serving as I said 250,000 customers across the globe from virtually any industry that you can think about like more than 200 different business verticals. It could be both tech and non-techs, every customers.
The vast majority of our customers are non-tech. And you know from like a customer that is building airplanes and cool ships all the way to real estate, construction, finance, tech and everything you can basically think of. And if I like just for reference and single golf pay so when I joined Monday, eight and a half years ago and we were called the pulse, we had around four million in ARR and we you know we scaled from the from there to one billion and from like around 30, 40 people to the company to 2500 right now.
Awesome. When you talk about the product you're building, it's a lot of people it's like, oh it's like project management stuff. All this like column like what's the big deal but I had drew how stood on the podcast and you made this really interesting point when he talks to people working at SpaceX who are like launching rockets to Mars and he talked about people building ships like if you really boil down what are they doing day to day, they're sitting in tools like Monday putting together tasks and doing to do's and sharing documents like this is kind of what the world runs on.
So it's important to have that perspective with that putting that aside for a second. I think very few people have seen what you've seen. It's having a seeing a company scale this way. Also the transformation you just shared of just like almost shipping too much and being slow to like okay let's rework things to shipping 25 columns in a month and all these things. Like very few people I've seen this so there's a lot to learn from this journey they've been on.
So I have a bunch of questions and a different bunch of different ways of approaching some of your biggest lessons from this journey. The first is let me just ask you this question. What would you say is the most counterintuitive thing you've learned about building product and leading teams through this journey of building Monday? Maybe first of all it's about like something that we really care about which is transparency.
I'm like let me tell you a story like I sat down for dinner at my family and many many different members of my family are like entrepreneurs or like working as an executive in tech companies and so on and you know back in the days with Monday before we went public we actually shared every bit of information with my employees. You would get into our office and you would see a dashboard with how many paying accounts you have how many people have chained today how many signups do we have and so many different things even if you came for an interview you would see these numbers.
And I remember sitting in this dinner and everyone would tell me listen you are making a mistake how can you do it when thing goes south you know you'll demoralize the team and people like you know we'll get upset about it. And I think this is you know for me one of the most important things when you hire and you have such a talented team you want to show them we want to show with them everything and the reason for that is that then you're working on every challenge together.
And instead of demoralizing people I think that for the right people and the people that like you know and are working at Monday this is something that gives them so like you know a sense of deep partnership. And as a leader you know there were many situations in my professional life that I knew some bit of information and I felt you know all the weight on my shoulders and I love to call it the dark side of the morning or they're alone right.
Like you're coming to the office there's nothing you know like more demoralizing as or like depressing as a leader that you feel awful because something that you know and you're coming to the office and everything is great and everyone are like happy. And I think in Monday we really wanted to do a different thing we really have a little approach of like very radical transparency about everything and this actually makes everyone part of what we are doing.
And in a way we like to say we really want everyone's brains in the challenge and not just one centralized brain and a lot of walking hands. And I can share examples you know when for instance suddenly people would come up to the office we have dashboards across everyone in the office like each team has its own dashboards we have our company dashboards with format to exist and so on.
And I remember cases in which someone said listen what happened to the conversion and you know think how powerful it is when you have everyone at the company looking at these things and many of the things that we discovered many of the things that we saw as challenges and problems is things that people saw due to distance transparency.
And so I think that's maybe the you know counter-intuitive part is that don't be afraid to share the information it's exactly the other way around and I can probably share share that you know even today's public company we really share everything that we can. You know and also like if you are product manager at Monday you are signing like a 10-by-five program for selling your stocks meaning that we found a way to make everyone still see the data because we think this is the most important part.
And I think this is one thing that I really believe in and really changed how we walk and also how people are feeling about being partners in building Monday and not just walking at a company is that thing they sign that's just like auto-sell stocks so they're not selling based on information based on announcements that's coming okay. God it's every PM basically has to automatically I can't like decide I'm going to sell my stock tomorrow because of this numbers thinking yeah.
So so you know like we want to give people the choice but like usually we really feel that in most cases you really need to know this information in order to do your walk and so interesting and I think people even prefer just like dollar cost average sell you know it's like it's like easier not having to try to time all these things. I definitely think so yeah that's really interesting and that's and that's just product managers or how far does that all go no so basically when we became public you know I remember still like one of the conversations that we had with like the bankers and the lawyers about like listen guys things would need to change you cannot have a dashboard with all your financials the entrance of the building it doesn't make sense as a public company and we understood it but we didn't want to let go of what we cared about because we really believe this is one of the main drivers to the business having these transparency and having like shared brains you know and mode so we tried to think about ways in order to do it.
So now if I like fast forward you know we're almost four years public and we have an internal app called Monday morning and in Monday morning you have two parts parts A and part B part A is for the every company employee contains a lot about engagement and a lot of data that can be shared with everyone and part B is confidential and it's by role okay so it's their company management but I think the important point is that we see product management as something that got to have these numbers so we thought about it really hard and you know it's a it's a lot of logistics to do like so many plans and then be five plans but I think it's worth it yeah this is so interesting like a lot of companies talking about transparency and you guys are I think radical transparency is a good way to describe this because I've never heard of a company doing this they didn't care about it as well apparently and yeah it took time to you know to get to these solutions.
That's so funny so for people that are listening to this are like maybe we should explore this what's like one thing you'd suggest they they could do to start moving down this road and the benefit again is you I guess maybe again remind people the benefits of doing this because it sounds like a lot of work and and risk so I think that as a young startup it's actually not such a hard work if when we were very small you know back in the days we had like like the daily numbers concept that we now have for the teams we had the daily numbers for the company how much paying accounts how many upweigh dead down there then so on daily and you saw people reacting to it like on a daily basis so this is something that you can do in virtually one hour and it like changes how people see you know they're all within the company it focuses everyone to the companies KPIs because everyone understand what you care about and so on so this is one thing that you can do extremely fast and I don't see any disadvantage it aside from the fact that people are afraid many time you are afraid and I can share it's so much like it's even like a big relief that you don't need to think can I share it can I don't share it like can I like you just let it go and everything would be okay.
And I can share from my experience that we shared everything and the second thing which is really practical you know it's the office dashboards we really believe in it so you know you buy a TV you put it on a wall you start a conversation to do it what do we want to show on this TV and you know when we was like a smaller startup and we set all in one office space we had our company goals a dashboard and it also had like we programmed it to have sounds on meaningful events so when you add there like for instance new paying account you had almost Simpson saying like they're the same one million dollar become a millionaire or something like that for you know a new sign up you add the tick and so on so suddenly everyone are leaving it you know it becomes part of the cadence of the company.
So these are just two ideas to make it super easy and the change happens immediately and I love how that connects back to the whole point about impact people all lining around here is what we're trying to drive like if the Simpson sound is going off that's a sign that this matters and the something we should be driving up and it creates such a partnership you know I remember like reaching to the first time where we had one a million dollar collection in one month breaking the record of like new paying accounts for one day everyone are living what in many companies you know only the management or the founders are like filling and I think that in that sense you already feel that you have a great power because everyone around is the same things and it makes conversations different because everyone understands what matters to a different this is awesome really cool counterintuitive lesson I feel like a whole podcast.
Could be done on like how to do this effectively I want to move on but I guess if people want to start implementing this at the company let's just say they should co-doc to you and you could approach a bunch of advice I would love to this episode is brought to you by Vanta and I am very excited to have Christina Cassiopo CEO and co-founder Vanta joining me for this very short conversation great to be here big fan of the podcast and the Vanta is a longtime sponsor of the show but for some of our newer listeners what is Vanta do and who is it for sure so we started Vanta in 2018 focused on founders helping them start to build out their security programs and get credit for all of that hard security work with compliance certifications like sock 2 or ISO 2701.
Today we currently help over 9,000 companies including some startup household names like Atlassian ramp and lane chain start and scale their security programs and ultimately build trust by automating compliance centralizing GRC and accelerating security reviews that is awesome I never experienced that these things take a lot of time and a lot of resources and nobody wants to spend time doing this that is a very much our experience but before the company and some extent during it but the idea is with automation with AI with software we are helping customers build trust with prospects and customers in an efficient way and in our joke we started this compliance company so you don't have to we appreciate you for doing that and you have a special discount for listeners they can get a thousand dollars off Vanta at vanta.com slash Lenny that's v-a-n-t-a.com slash Lenny for one thousand dollars off Vanta thanks for that Christina thank you.
Any other big countertude of lessons from the journey that you think would be fun to share one thing I really love about what we do in monday is that we really love to take risks not for the sake of it but we are not afraid to do bold moves and many times when you want to do bold moves you have a lot of concerns especially when you start to be successful because you you're afraid that you are going to break everything that you built till now and for me you know one of most pivotal moments in the company life is when we decided that you know back in the days as you said we were a platform but we had to go to market of project management tool and we said listen people are doing so many different things on top of monday they're building a CLM with monday and they are building a software for managing their dev cycles and they are building so many different things.
And we took a decision strategic decision to become like a multi product company which is built on top of this platform and we actually did something which is really counter intuitive you know the the first thought that comes to mind at least for me is why maybe not just launch a new product do it relatively on the side gradually understand if it's successful and if it would be successful double click on it but we actually did it in a very different way we actually announced five different. new products simultaneously on the same time and you know we had so many like I can't stress enough how you know how hard it is to think about it because like I remember when we talked about and doing it people say what but we are going to confuse our quantity users and it's going to have conversion and how are we going to do the marketing now when we have so many different go to markets and the sales they don't know how to navigate people to different and what about pricing so many different concerns and but we decided to do it because we really want to create a pivot a lip and I think that in that sense you know fast forward to this day like part of these products were really successful and for instance monday sales CRM is like like going faster than monday back in the days like you know and it's amazing to see it and some of them we understood that they don't need to be separate products and we collapse them back to the main product but the point is is that we managed to learn and to change both internally the company how the perception of everyone around what we are building but also externally like this move changed dramatically the competitive landscape that we live in.
And you know I think there was a lot of friction many people at the company were like having a lot of friction with it was really really hard but looking back it's such I'm so happy with this move and the fact that we did it like that because just imagine what would happen if we would choose one of them and it wasn't the successful products and our conclusion can be that multiportal work for us we really managed to transform the company in a very short amount of time and also to create new reality you know and I think that people need to remember that and I'm constantly reminding it to myself and I think this is something that we are constantly working you know with each other in order to make sure that we remember it that not taking world risks not making world moves it's a risk for itself okay and many times like you know people want the inertia and people want just the incremental value but if you want to do lips many times you need to let go of things that were successful for you at the past and this is very counterintuitive and we did a lot of you know a lot of mental models to help us cope with it.
So I remember that when we were small and we had for instance like 20,000 paying customers so we said listen but most of Monday's customers are not customers of Monday yet so we need to think about them as well you know and this is something that really helps you because many times you need to do things that affect like the current success that you have and but I think it this is another very very important thing that I'm constantly reminding to myself there's kind of this other recurring theme that I'm noticing of just like thinking big and taking leaps and I love this point you made of not doing that is actually a big risk not taking risk is a big risk that's a really powerful point and it's innately scary to do something risky and so I love the push here of just like take more risks because it's so easy and this comes back again to the beginning of the conversation where you we're just like building things the way they've always been built and looking back and like what have we even done what have we done of a year of hard work and tons of features think a lot of companies get in that place where they're just like what do we like at our bb I had this exact bar and constant like what do we even shipping all these billions of experiments that are moving the numbers like what are we even doing like I don't know anything that we ship that's really exciting.
And so I think this is a really good and rendered push to just like think bigger and take and you need to take big leaps so love that is there any other big counter two-to-ve lessons before we move in a different direction I really believe that many times like spending more time on walking on something will not yield to better results or to better products and you know I think that many times like we as people that are building products for others and get to a point where the feedback that we want to get in the bottom of our heart you know is like wow what an amazing product you have built and I think this is a very bad feedback to get for initial things that you are doing because it means that you know I filled it in many ways.
The point in which you make real people use your product is really scary because you suddenly you know put your walk out there and then in order to like actually and you are afraid that do we say listen it's a lousy product it's not a good product but actually we really encourage people to get really fast production to put traps for themselves that is called by time and not by effort and you know many times I saw that more time creates more questions it creates more complications it creates more assumptions that we put for ourselves in thinking what our users need and we invent things you know and we do it all from good reasons we want people to like what we build we want them to get value but for me like this is a very important point that many times many times using like the setting traps mechanism of saying listen we have three weeks let's think about it and scope it by time it makes you extremely focused.
And you know this is very important because you know we really want to get feedback from customers yeah listen this is on the direction I'm still missing this and this and this and also we really love the fact of this is not a good product and I can give you a recent example you know even when now we you know we work with big customers and of course like there are different ways to implement what I said then you are a small starter but we are building like a new offering of enterprise walk management think about it like a way of managing projects the huge huge scale you know thousands of projects like tens of thousands of employees and so on so I really love using the deadline prep and it makes you focused it makes you sharper and thinking.
We just had a recent example with the offering I was telling you about of like enterprise walk management managing projects the scale and you know this is an enterprise product so you have all the reasons in the world to say no I can't really sit yet I need more time I need to do more things they won't use it they need this and this and this and I think that we actually released the first like alpha version to them and we got a feedback of listen guys this is premature we need more like more comprehensive value but we got exactly the feedback of what and this is priceless and my response to the team says well done like I think you did an amazing job in like releasing it and making sure because you know many times being so afraid of releasing it and like thinking if I just have one two three more weeks and it will be the product.
I think it's not it's not true this is such good advice it resonates so much with recent other conversations I've had so just to clarify what you're saying basically you have a time box when you say traps it's basically a set amount of time we're gonna spend three weeks on this feature and if it doesn't if it we don't hit the three weeks we just cut scope essentially is that idea I think it's it's like this is the basic version of it yeah but now for us we really want and we really love doing doing it as an exercise for ourselves for instance let's say now as a public company we say listen we're working on something we want to announce it on the next turning and put a trap for ourselves why because again it makes you sharp it makes you super focused about things and you know I think that in many ways this results in a much better product because you're not building things that you invented you're staying really true to what your users needs the real you know core of the value and it's really funny to see the dynamics of teams you know when they are planning.
You know from the bottom up so it starts like you know with something that like let's say you've done everything great okay you have the opportunity you understand you have the KPIs everything is in place but now you're starting to plan it and suddenly people are raising you know concerns and issues and it becomes a sport to say what can go wrong and like being filled driven and then you tend to you know protect yourself and adding more content and more corner and then when you see what happens it's actually like it's going to be shipped in two years and then we say okay no okay we have earnings in two months what can we ship to these earnings and let's put a tab.
And then you suddenly see the conversation changes first of all it makes everyone really focused on what's the core of the value and it removes all the theoretical discussions that people have and things like that and you know the results are amazing and you need to remember when you do it you need to continue afterwards if you like according to feedbacks and and not let it go just but what you did in the first version but in many ways I really love the fact that you know the first version get a feedback which is not everything is perfect because if this is the feedback it means that we build too much and probably it's not focused product enough.
And when you build a lot of features this can be like you know the a draft by a thousand cuts because in each corner of the product you add more than you need like yeah there's so much here that connects the other conversation we just had we had a car of misruff and he's CEO of captions and he's made this point that if people aren't complaining about your product like you want to see people complaining because that means they care like there's something there that they care about if they're not here and he complains they could care less about what you're building and that's not that's a bad sign I really love that.
Yeah their company actually goes to the extreme which are describing every engineerships a feature a marketable feature every week that's their pace I really connected to it and by the way about user feedback I think you know it's really it's really nice because like many times you know people associate like they only measure themselves by use of feedback and a specific point and I think this is also maybe you know something that is a counting intuitive not every customer feedback is the feedback that will drive you to the you know to the end result of the best product out there there are many aspects to it.
And I can share you know just one example about us we as you know in the beginning of the company we for instance didn't want to have a free trial and part of it is that we really wanted to hear feedback about a product only from people that the product means something to them that the best proxy for that is that they are paying because it means to get real value and you know in that sense it helps us it helped us at the beginning to be to stay super focused about like you know separating the width from the shaft with the the customer's feedback so I think it's a super important point and we need to take customer feedback in context.
The other really interesting point here that you're making is this idea we had I think I mentioned this already Ryan Singer is the creator of the Smith that shape up which is very centered around appetites over deadlines there's so much like so many everyone listening to this has probably gone through an exercise where like let's redo our landing page and it's like yeah it'll probably have some impact let's spend some time on this and ends up taking like six months and everyone's like why did we spend six months redoing this friggin landing page like look I would have given it three weeks and then moved on.
这里你提到的另一个非常有趣的观点是,我们之前提到过的一个想法:Ryan Singer 是 Shape Up 方法的创始人,这个方法更注重需求而不是截止日期。很多人可能都经历过这样的事情,比如重做一个登录页面,大家都会觉得这可能会有一些效果,于是我们花时间去做,结果却花了六个月。最后大家都觉得:为什么花了六个月时间重做这个页面?明明可以给它三周时间,然后再继续推进其他事情。
And the way to do that is you just commit upfront we will spend three weeks on this deal as much done as we can in three weeks and then we'll move on people talk about this very hard to actually do so I love that's how you actually approach shouldn't these bigger features you work on. Do you guys practice shape up by the chance or is this just like a thing you do and no actually I wasn't okay if you knew if it but I definitely going to check it out yeah okay cool yeah it's a it's a whole method and we'll have I think the episode right before this is actually that episode.
Okay let me go in a different direction and kind of keeps striking lessons from this journey because I was a really fruitful place to go so let me ask you this question what's one thing that you wish you'd known before stepping into the role you're in today this is an interesting question I think I you know many aspects to it and maybe if I'll take the personal aspect so you know I've been in charge of like the the product and technology from from like sense I joined the company but with that my role has changed I think like dozens of times like I feel I'm very fortunate to walk in one company but actually walking dozens of different companies think about the scale that we talked about like each point is a different it's actually a different company and a different role and different challenge and I think that you know something that maybe is kind of kind of intuitive personally for me was that in many of the phases that we undergold with I felt that what got me to this phase is not necessarily what's going to make me successful in the next phase.
If I want to be even more blunt you know they will like personally times when suddenly I saw how my biggest you know strength for instance like mastering all the details and having everything in my head knowing exactly what's happening on every corner of what we do this is was probably something that gave a lot of value when we were small but as we got bigger I think like it suddenly created you know even the damage you know continue to do the same thing and in many ways it takes time to do this realization and I think that a good advice that I would love to have is that don't be afraid again to let go or things that you think are superpowers many times you're superpowers that brought you to this point and made you successful many times you think that if you let it go you won't be successful and it's frightening but really feel that you need to constantly evaluate what your control is actually is actually what what is the role like and what is needed in order to be successful in it and not continue with the inertia and this is something that I wish someone has done me yeah it took me time in many cases you know many cases that did it too late.
Is there anything that helped you realize this or get good at this is it like coaching is it just doing it and surviving and failing and really oh I see I think all of the above I think that one sign for that for me was that in many cases I felt I'm doing a very good job but then people like it can be like I'll give you an example okay like for instance doing a company like leadership QBRs okay I call telebusiness reviews so when we just started it with it very early you know I would actually tell about everything and you know I remember one meeting that I went out of the meeting and I say wow I really managed to you know convey everything and explain everything and very like in a very articulated way and like one of my colleagues in the college the ship team said why I didn't understand anything like what is the bottom line of all of this and you know it was like you suddenly realized that what you thought is good is not necessarily what the other people needs for you at this point and you know like after understanding that I went and asked like what would be beneficial for you we said listen I want to keep in my head like the freeing most meaningful things that you are currently facing with I don't want to hear everything and you know like it's hard but but this was a point for me that I realized that I need to change and I need to change something and the like the requirements are different and like at the beginning you know I tried to say but listen it's very it's important that you know like you you're sticking to it right but we need to let it go sometimes.
And think like from the beginning there's this phrase that someone shared on this podcast once where in as you're rising your career you often go from the person that is pitching leaders on something to the person being pitched and that's a really weird place to move from you know having to learn how to be give great feedback delegate let go of things and I love that this this is a good example that yeah since we're getting a little vulnerable and open about stuff I want to try this question you haven't you've done a lot of podcasts and don't have interviews you've been all over the place is there anything you haven't shared anywhere else that might be helpful to share her about the journey you've been on.
Yeah so maybe continuing with the same point you know like it's a crazy journey and it's crazy personal journey if you think about it like I remember Roy once said if someone would have interviewed me to a public company who off you know like I would say 10 billion dollars in market cap and managing 2500 employees I'm not sure that I would interview myself and get myself to the job and I can you know for me there were a lot of moments and it's constantly happening.
And you know when things you know going sideways and things doesn't work and you see so many things are breaking down and you know you can be on the same day super happy and suddenly on the lowest point there is and I can share you know many times I have I've asked myself like whether I'm the right person to lead it whether we need like someone that is coming with all the experience to this phase and I remember like I talked to the air there with a run it tell me it told me something listen first of all as the one who built it no one would be able to do it like you and I think it's an important you know think to remember when times are tough.
I really believe that you know if you have the passion and if you have the will and and if you are willing to do the hard work you know order to constantly adjust and evolve and you know to be vulnerable and also you know to say about yourself like I didn't understand something now I need to learn it and I need to do things differently you know it's a very important point if you want to do this kind of of journey and it's hard and something I can share you know I can reassure everyone that are listening to us you know if you're feeling it you're not the only one everyone are feeling it from once in a while.
Be confident about yourself be vulnerable in order to learn and to evolve and I really love to do like a mental you know mental exercise of like saying like we we said about the product so let's say I'm I'm a Daniel of like next six months how do I want to look back on these six months and what do I want to say about myself that I learned that I evolved and this helped you get out from the state of like everything is okay I'm good and it makes you like want to learn and want to evolve and and also like staying doing mode like I don't believe in like I think the one one thing that really characterized me is that I can be like very you know it can be very difficult and very challenging time but on the next day I'm already bouncing back with energy and you know the like to come and do things and win it.
And you know there are a lot of things that we as leaders needs to do in order to help ourselves to keep like this mental you know state so I like to run I like to do things that are unrelated to work in order to get back to my center but then quickly bounce back and to really believe in myself in the team around me and so this is yeah this is something maybe very personal but I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one you know feeling it.
I appreciate you sharing that there's a post that I did a long time ago with a coach and she it was about imposter syndrome and she made this really powerful point that like you are actually an imposter in the role you're in you've never done this before like most people are imposter in the role they've never been as chief product officer in a lot of cases they've never led teams this large and first of all just realize that you actually are and second of all that's okay and most people are like you said and then third of all this advice you shared about it you can work through that it's really powerful just like no many people feel this way work hard because a really important part of this just like no there's another day and that you can bounce back remember that everyone are people no one is born to be like in the world that is currently at.
And you know another thing that you know in monday we are scaling so fast so even people that are coming with experience and I had you know the chance to see it over and over again because we're going so fast each one of us will get to a point which is the first time he's doing it sooner or later so experience matters and we have like a lot of people that are coming and bringing spins from the outside but also remember that and remember that. everyone of people and like no one was born in a position yeah and the company's like like yours it's I've people have described it as like every six months you have a new job exactly exactly we had Cheryl Sandberg once did a talk that I was at were people are complaining we're we're just like so much is changing we're growing every the culture is not as strong as it was and there's just like things not working our processes are no it was hiring is hard and she's just like this is the problems you want because you're growing very fast and that's very good versus if you were not growing it'd be much more painful and hard so please be thankful to see the problems you're facing.
I couldn't the game oh you talked about things breaking along the way and things you have to deal with is there an example of something I love these stories of just like maybe a moment of crisis along the journey where you thought like okay things are gonna fall apart this is over see you everywhere yeah to be honest we have so many and like but again this is the problems that you are lucky to have and but yeah maybe I'll give you an example like you know I remember this day that someone from our customer success team is approaching and say listen Daniel we have a spike in performance issues with in the board and you know again like our board is this table of like think about it like of data and on each time we add new functionality and we make the platform or mature people are taking it to the extreme.
So if you look back eight years ago so this kind of tables usually had like let's say five columns and 100 rows and if you look about it today it's like hundreds of columns you know tens of thousands of flows and like so performance was always a challenge and struggle like and making sure that everything works as smoothly and this is also a value to us we really believe that performance is the number one feature it makes people use your system so you know we came to me and I remember like suddenly seen the spike in the tickets you know it's super hard right like you say wow it's something super hard you don't necessarily have a magic wand of like fixing it immediately and what we did we actually again connected everyone to it the first thing I did was like taking this graph to everyone in the team and showing and thinking together what we can do and we did a lot of things and we worked really hard and we managed to make this situation better.
And you know and then time passed by and you are like continuing and then it happened again and I can share that on the first on the third time I said okay we had enough like we need to think totally different in a different way and back in the days this is where I think like many of our core like long-term projects have gone the signature one would be MondayDB it's like it's an name we use for like an underlying data infrastructure that we've been building in the last three years or so so think about a very small team and a very small startup I remember the day that we said listen we need few of our most talented people they are now not going to contribute features anymore we are putting them on like a separate like a place and let's think and solve this problem while thinking about 100x.
And you know we really like in many ways so different from what we talked about in so many other of the examples right and I think now we said listen instead of being like fixing an issue we want this to be our competitive edge we have a very unique product architecture where everyone can build their own schemas of the table and you know it's like a crazy thing in terms of technology behind it we want to do something that will not only solve the problem but also will serve us as a competitive edge and we took a huge risk because you know we took a lot of people and put them aside for that or like not a lot of people but them very talented people and I think in retrospect by the way we released MondayDB I think one and a half years ago like the first version it did a huge change of customers and in many ways this is what like actually makes us today a platform which is enterprise grade.
And so my lesson from that is that if you feel about something it is strategic you need to not only solve problems but be super proactive and also again like this contradicts the fact of like what are the goals what are we going to achieve because you need to lean on like something which is strategic so with the everything that we said at the beginning of the conversation there is also things. that you need to do because this is the company you want to build this is the product that you want to build and you don't necessarily get the you know looks of getting convictions from things that happen in the past or from data you need to just go with your intuition and take this risk and I'm super happy that we did it yeah but this is an example where things really broke you know and what we did to fit there's a couple other stories of crisis I'm thinking back to and they're all seem to be a database started reaching capacity and we are about to fall apart because their growth was too fast.
So it's an interesting lesson for people to hear just like try to anticipate this a little more and sounds like that's what you realize is like let's think 100x from now not not just like a couple years from now there's it reminds me of so Brian Johnson he's this dude that's trying to live forever as long as he can and he makes this really interesting point that I promise connects to what you're talking about which is he's like okay what is what is your goal he asked everyone what's your life goal and so they're like oh I want to do this and this and that okay to accomplish that the base goal you're not even thinking about is you need to not die and that's actually the number one goal everyone should have don't die and I feel like that's infrastructure that companies is like you have all these metrics and goals but really the goal that underneath that as your infrastructure needs to scale so it makes sense why this is outside of like okay we always metrics and goals like not necessarily treating it as a as a tax or as a risk but rather like you know for for our offering like as a platform this is like actually in now one of our core advantages.
So it's super important as well that value to customers comes in different ways shapes and forms and you need to to think about the experience and not only about like you know and many times the general experience start with things that are reliable performance that you can download them and suddenly you even use them differently because they are fast so I think this is another important like aspect to it that's such a good point when you have a problem some that's slowing down or might crumble the company just not flipping it from how do we just put the bandaid here it's how do we turn this into a strategic advantage if we really invest the time yeah I like that a lot.
Okay to start to close out our conversation I'm going to take us to AI corner which is a recurring segment I tried to get to is more and more with this podcast and the question is how of you what's an example of using AI tools in your day to day work to do better work to do faster work that you think might be helpful to other folks and maybe I start with a personal one you know like I'm it's not it's not about work but I think it really shows that for me it was like a moment of like really saying this this has so much potential in it so I actually prepared myself for a marathon and unfortunately I got injured in my knee so yeah so I went to do an MRI scan and I finished the scan and they gave me this disc which the results and then they said listen you need to schedule a doctor appointment five days from now okay I said I do it put it in Chagy Pitian ask for like the results and explanation of flying by line what what does it mean.
And then I of course went to the doctor and said this are the results but I think like for me you know this is a this is something that I was really happy about using it and it also opens my mind a lot because I think that if you think about it from the product perspective and this is how we think about AI in Monday the technology is amazing yeah you you can do so much with it but you know there's still the part of like productizing it because every person that I talked with him about this example like with enthusiasm he said how did you think about putting your MRI there and I said I don't know like I just did but this is a all like creating products that actually allow people to leverage this technology and more on the website you know I use it a lot.
I think like for me like one recent example I would say is like we really worked hard towards like determining the pricing for AI offering and that I was mentioning earlier and just in like two hours I was managed I managed to get a full perspective on what everyone else are doing you know and we have analysts and we have product managers since but the fact that I was independent and managed to get like you know the initial thoughts and like all the information ingest a bit it was mind blowing.
So I used it a lot in order to understand things that are like very extensive like what the competitors are doing what is the history of this and that and I think it helped me a lot in that sense these are awesome examples and is this all chat GPT is that the tool choice.
And you know it's hard we I have like my own periods right now it's changing from one week to another and this do actually with chat GPT here very cool the first example of my wife does all the time my mother-in-law was in hospital and we're waiting for the doctor to show up and she just put the chart in chat GPT is like what's with the problem and it's exactly what he told us and it feels like like it feels like we're in a world now we're an engineer without say cursor or these tools is just not like that's not that's not possible anymore and it feels like now with going to doctors is like if you don't do this and see what it says like you're missing out on a big gap there's this near time story and if you've seen where they actually compared a doctor's analysis versus a doctor plus chat GPT plus just chat GPT and guess guess what was the the best most accurate diagnosis yeah I want to say chat GPT you know but that's exactly what it was not even a doctor with chat GPT you know.
I'll tell you I'll tell you a story about it so in the MRI you know I did it because I wanted to go ski and I didn't know if I can do it or not so as chat GPT and he said older recommendations and what I need to do and so on and then when I was at the doctor I said I asked him the same question can I do ski I said I don't know I never ski you know so it's not only about like getting the information straight away and getting accuracy it's the fact that you can continue deep dive with it and this is something that also like when I was in the pricing you know it's not only the bit of information but the fact that you can continue and continue and continue it's like it's definitely super super impressive and it doesn't get annoyed it doesn't get bored it's and it's very supportive always with good intent or not but yeah so kind amazing.
Okay well Daniel we've we've covered a lot of ground this was extremely fun before we get to our very exciting lightning round is there anything else that you wanted to share any other nuggets of wisdom you want to leave listeners with I think that in many ways like the things that we managed to achieve in monday is due to the great people and culture that we have and you know on early days we used to take it for granted in a way that not the people but the culture the fact that everyone understand it the fact that everyone are practicing it and then you say okay culture is like something that you can put your fingers on but now as we scale like I really see how this is what actually drives everything forward.
Yeah so maybe just to say like on a personal note that a huge part of how I see my role is about like the people and also about how we walk together and what kind of an environment we want to build to ourselves and we talked a lot about it during the episode but you know I really feel that I can't underestimate on how meaningful it is and how like grateful I am that I'm working with such talented people and doing what I love that's awesome I bet we could do a whole other episode on just culture and what you've learned building a culture with the culture is like in monday but we got to we got to get to our very exciting lightning round Daniel are you ready I'm ready.
All right so I've got five questions for you first question is what are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people the first one I would say is like is there no world source book by Netflix back in the days we used even the slides but I think we took a lot of inspiration out of it and I think that although we have different cultures many of the things around like you know execution like excellent people and so on are things that like I can really resonate with and this is something that we really like to give people away after talking about our culture and so on to get inspiration also from other cultures.
好的,我有五个问题要问你。第一个问题是你常常向别人推荐的两到三本书是什么?我会说,第一本是Netflix以前出版的一本叫“一种没有世界的资源书”(Is there a No World Source Book)*。虽然我们使用过其中的幻灯片,但我觉得我们从中获得了很多灵感。尽管我们有着不同的文化,但关于执行力、优秀人才等许多方面的内容我都深有共鸣。这本书在我们介绍完自己的文化后,常常会推荐给别人,让他们也能从其他文化中获得灵感。
*请注意,“一种没有世界的资源书” (Is there a No World Source Book)可能是虚构的书名,如果有错误或不准确的地方,请核实书名的正确性。
And another maybe on a different way you know aspect is a book that actually Roy our course he always giving to me his name is non-violet communication and it's about effective ways of communication and understanding the people and their needs and how to communicate in a way that actually promotes you know an effective communication and what I liked about this book is you know mean way we love to to talk a lot and like after we both read the book like our way of talking like change so it's very practical so I also like like to give it away to our leadership and people within the team because I think it has like little value in it I'm trying to remember the framework of non-violet communication is like I observed you speaking too much in this meeting and that made me feel like I wasn't listened to something like that right I forgive you.
Yeah you shouldn't be judgmental you just need to say facts and talk about how you feel like in that so yeah yeah and I know I'm kind of joking about it but it's actually really powerful and we had we had a Carol Robin on the podcast who created this program at Stanford called Tecchi Fili which is similar to this whole process this all approach to talking and by the way I love the combination of Israeli directness and non-violet communication I want to see that in action yeah definitely.
Okay next question do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show that you really enjoyed so to be honest I don't watch TV so much like I get bored really fast and going back to other things but but like when I do watch TV so many times it's like in order to clear my head so it's not that kind of exciting things maybe a different thing that I'm doing is like playing on the PlayStation with my son you know FIFA just to vent out yeah and in terms of serious maybe like one thing that pops up is like the formula I really liked it formula one and Netflix to survive.
The life to survive exactly I really loved seeing the dynamics and everything behind you know it looks like something simple like driving cars but you see that there's so much into it and so it's also something that like really interesting and like opens your mind to watch. Yeah I haven't started the new season yet I wonder if it's great yeah like what yeah.
Okay next question give a favorite product you recently discovered that you really love. So you know I don't want to like to to fall into the all the eye trap you know in terms of products so maybe I'll say something which is not so recent but the product that I love and I really like to take pictures and one product that I really love is Google Photos I think that you know they managed to create something which takes like the technology edge but to a place where myself as a human like really can connect to it and get a lot of value for it so I'm like a really heavy user of that yeah yeah that is a magical product that I think people under under appreciate yeah.
好的,下一个问题,请分享一个你最近发现并非常喜欢的产品。我不太想被那些产品的吸引力所盲目影响,所以可能会说一个不算太新但我非常喜欢的产品。我喜欢拍照,而我最喜欢的产品之一是 Google 相册。我认为他们通过技术创新创造了一个让我能很好地与其连接并从中获得很多价值的产品。因此,我是这个产品的重度用户。我觉得这是一个很神奇的产品,但很多人可能并没有意识到它的好处。
Next question give a favorite life motto that you often come back to you find useful and work your own life stay positive like I think being positive saying saying like the good things is the huge huge power and it's a huge driver and it allows you to give energy to the people around you and it contagious so I really love you know staying positive making sure that we keep being optimistic and it doesn't mean that you need to you know let go of the problems and don't like see the problems but also think about always look forward and always think how you can take the current situation make it better and I learned with the way that it's really more fun and actually brings better results this way and 1000% aligned with that.
Final question I know you were in the army at one point in your life was there anything that you learned from that experience that helps you build better products the funny thing is is that I think that like many things that I did in the army I was actually commanding of like a very big group of people in the army and I think it's not about building products but more about building teams and being building like this sense of purpose sense of shared like belonging and I think that in that way many things are quite similar to be it might be like a counter intuitive but many things are quite similar and from that many many of the things of like being together although it's like a hierarchical environment is something that I take with me and a lot of like practical ways to lead the bigger organization I would say.
Daniel this was awesome you're awesome so much stuff that we went through so many golden nuggets I think that we're going to help a lot of people with building products building teams scaling surviving all these scaling challenges that keep coming up in these conversations.
Two final questions working folks find you online if they want to reach out maybe talk about being more transparent and then how can listeners be useful to you and so online like I think that's two main ways is like bilingual and I would say and second is podcasts and like I'm guessing in a lot of podcasts and I think that this is like a cool way to share things for stories and for like practical examples.
And you know in terms of listeners being useful to me so first of all that in many ways they're already are useful to me I really love your podcast and like I'm getting a lot of you know insights from others and this is something I really love so many of the people that probably listening will also contributing to that so thank you for that.
I really hope with that that this episode would also be meaningful to people and that they will take value out of it and if they are it would be amazing to hear about it like I remember you know someone that sent me a picture of his new dashboard in the office and what he he do with that and add like additional ideas of what.
What you can do that way we actually took also here in monday so if you do something even if it's small let me know it's super fun to hear and also interest things all right there's the call to action if you implement some a Daniel's advice especially put up new dashboards or monitors in your office please send photos of her LinkedIn it sounds like is the best medium.
Daniel thank you so much for being here thank you very much Lenny towards the pleasure bye everyone thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcasts Spotify or your favorite podcast app.
Also please consider giving us a rating or a leaving review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast.com see you in the next episode.