Hey everyone! I’m Quang, co-founder, and CEO of Plato. I’d like to chime in as we had several discussions with Gergely and Plato definitely doesn’t fit his vision. Happy to have this debate with you in a public setting.
This discussion is a good reminder that we probably need to update a bit the message and be even more transparent on the dynamic in play and the incentives for mentors, here are they:
(1) Giving back to the community:
- People just feel really good about helping, seeing someone grow- In addition, to being a mentor in Plato, I'm helping every week people (for free) to prepare for YC interviews and I really feel good about helping as I've received so much help from others in the past
(2) Learning
- I'm mentoring in Plato myself every week, 1h-2h every week, 1 call over two, I feel I'm saying the same thing, but 1 call over 2, I'm learning myself a lot. For example, I had a call with the head of engineering of a 50 Engineers Company from a startup in France last week, and their company had a really interesting way of functioning to do a performance review, it's not done by a manager, it's done by peers who are assigned to you every quarter. I learned a ton thanks to all my mentees
- It helps me to synthesize my thoughts and deliver my learnings with a simple and clear message
- It's also very intellectually stimulating to be challenged every week with a different challenge it's helping me sharpen my skills
(3) Networking with other mentors:
- Mentors get free access to Plato (it was in an experimental phase and we're deploying it to the broader community next month)
- we’re organizing regular happy hours between mentors and some are joining every week
- and plenty of other events we're organizing for mentors for free
(4) Brand (we offer speaking opportunities to mentors who’ve been here for a while
- Many Mentors are proud to be a Plato mentor, and many of them are sharing their plate public profile and put that they're a Plato mentor on Linkedin
- Also, the best mentors and those who have been in Plato for a while are regularly proposed to be speakers at our conference, for example, http://elevate.platohq.com/ and https://www.platohq.com/webinars
(5) Charity We have no problem adding a 5th point about donating to a charity. But those 4 are already strong and that’s why we have 1000+ mentors and some of them are here for 3 years+. This is one of the initiatives we'd like to do in the next 6-12 months.
Finally, I doubt that paying the mentors will move the needle. When we started to do that, we started to attract worse mentors who are doing that for the money. But giving away XX% of revenue to a charity of your choice (that is aligned with our mission to improve Eng Leadership) is a good idea (that we are already working on)
If you think that is a completely new business model and dynamic, it's actually not. Plato’s model is no different than the business model of a conference: Companies paying for attendees to learn from speakers. Speakers unpaid (most of the time) Incentives for speakers?
(1) Giving back to the community, when you're a speaker at a conference, you're actually happy to help a community that you care about
(2) Learn as synthesizing your thoughts and delivering a message (through a keynote or something) is helpful
(3) Networking with other speakers
(4) Brand (being a speaker is helping for your own brand or your company's brand)
(5) Sometimes a speaker can choose a charity to donate
Although I agree that we could be better organized and transparent with those 4 (or 5) incentives for mentors (maybe add a system of points or whatever), those are highly appreciated incentives for mentors and I do think it will scale.
Also, our monthly subscription fees include:
- Cost of customer success: we help our customers build programs around TAlents Development
- Cost of Engineers: we pay our engineers who are building the platform that helps mentees and mentors schedule and reschedule their time, be matched, take notes, write action plan etc.
- Cost of Talent Coaches: a talent coach (someone who is a professional, paid by us, who is uncovering your challenges and needs and matching you with the right mentor and keep you accountable on your progress). More about it here: https://www.platohq.com/how-it-works-for-team
- Cost of Mentors Community Managers: A team that are running all the initiatives above
A bit about my story, 50 years ago, my parents immigrated from Vietnam to France, and 5 years ago, I immigrated from France to America. A couple of folks have been helping me, Jason M. Lemkin, Michael Seibel, and others who trusted me despite my accent, origins, lack of experience, or race. I felt welcome and they helped to launch my career in the US. I won't ever forget this. I understand that not everyone has had this experience and despite this week DACA win, there is work to be done and for underrepresented/underestimated communities in the US.
Today, Plato is launching this program to offer mentorship for 2,000 people of color and people from underrepresented communities in tech for free.
Some confirmed mentors:
Michael Seibel (CEO @ YCombinator)
, Cathy Polinsky (CTO @ Stitch Fix)
, Prashanth Chandrasekar (CEO @ Stackoverflow)
, Papanii Nene Okay (Director of Architecture @ Venmo)
, Rukmini Reddy (ex VPE @ Abstract)
, Donal Sumbry (Head of reliability Engineering @ Airbnb)
, Erica Locheimer (VP Eng @ Linkedin Learning)
, Jason Lemkin (CEO @ SaaSTR)
, Elias Torres (Cofounder/CTO @ Drift)
, Sara Garner (Sr Software Engineer @ Stripe)
, Nick Caldwell (CPO @ Looker)
, Jason Shah(Director of Product @ Airbnb)
, Nicolas Dessaigne (CEO @ Algolia)
, Shivani Sharma (Sr EM @ Slack)
, Richard Sun (Sr EM @ Facebook)
, Tido Carriero (CPO @ Segment)
, Will Larson (CTO @ Calm)
, Eddie Kim (CTO / Cofounder @ Gusto)
, Cosmin Nicolaescu (CTO @ Brex)
, Pooja Brown (VPE @ Stich Fix)
, Nidhi Gupta (ex CPO @ Hired)
, Michael Pryor (CEO / Founder @ Trello)
, Juan B (fmr GM / SVP Prod/Eng @ Braintree)
, Daniel Saks (CEO @ AppDirect)
, Luc Vincent (EVP Autonomous Driving @ Lyft)
, Asanka Jayasuriya (CTO and SVP Eng @ Sailpoint, former SVP Eng @ InVision)
, and 100 more...
The thing you need to realize about startups is that everyone else is figuring it out too. If you feel left out or like you're being replaced, it's not on purpose.
Unlike a big company where there's a very strict hierarchy and structure, and all you have to do to rise up in the ranks is put in the time, in a startup it's a free-for-all.
That means you have the power to change your situation. As more engineers join and take on pieces of work you've been involved in, you can start to scale yourself. Be a leader, start new initiatives, think about the bigger picture instead of just your job, and inspire others to see your vision.
You don't need a fancy exec title to be a leader. You don't need permission. You just need to start behaving like one.
Lots of great answers here. I'll just add, as a founder myself, that things will probably not be very structured at that stage.
That means you may find yourself working on very different things every day, maybe even things outside the traditional software developer role. (For example, you might be asked to help on customer support). Be open to wearing multiple hats and being a team player.
Also don't expect to get too much direction. You'll need to be a self-starter and autonomous. In fact, I encourage you to take the initiative and even lead projects. There's no better way to hone your leaderships skills than at an early-stage startup.
Finally, don't think of it as a regular job where you clock in at 9 and out at 5. You may not be told explicitly to put in extra hours but if others are doing it you probably should too. You are a part-owner after all (if you're getting equity).
That being said, don't forget to take breaks and recharge!
It's one thing to read material around sales and another to practice it. That being said, one book I'd recommend is Daniel Pink's "To Sell Is Human"
In general, sales is something you need to practice every day. Like Sam mentions, it's about being able to convince other people of what you believe and you have an opportunity to do this in your every day life, from convincing your kids to clean their rooms to convincing your reports to adopt a new process.
The first step is to look for opportunities in every interaction to practice sales. Sales starts by listening, so try to understand the other person's point of view and why it's different from yours. Really step into their shoes and see things from their lens.
Once you identify where the difference is, ask questions to learn more. Why do they think that way? Why do they prefer the current process? Why are they hesitant to change?
Again, they key here is to listen. Once they list the reasons why they believe differently, summarize what they said. Then start to work through each difference together.
This is important. You're not competing with them. You need to work together to arrive at a common solution. If they say adopting a new process is a waste of time, then calculate with them how much time it will take and then work to reduce that time by offering help in some area.
In the end, you should both walk away having achieved something together without one person browbeating the other into it.
I'm Quang, cofounder and CEO of Plato. At Plato, we're on a mission to help engineers become great engineering leaders. We're building a community of the best Engineering Leaders to help you find the perfect mentor and the perfect resources to become a better leader and make you and your team more productive and happy.
After thousands of calls that happened in our platform, hundreds of Engineering Managers met, tens of event participated and organized, we're putting together this collection of 500 resources (stories, blog, videos) on Engineering and Product Management.
In our beginnings, we made quite a lot of mistakes because we didn't have access to such resources. We want Plato Elevate to become the go-to place for engineers who want to become better leaders.
Indeed, Matt is great. He's one of our most appreciated mentor ;)
Everyone has their own incentives. Even though it can be linked to Koan, I guess that it's alwasy a combination of many factors. His words :"i've been lucky enough to have an exec coach for the past couple years and he's great. I aspire to be better at it over time"
1) Mentors who are already doing that or always wanted to do that, and what we provide them is:
- No time spent on scheduling / rescheduling. We take care of this for them
- We do a thorough work of qualification of the problem before so the mentee and mentors can jump right into the problem/challenge and spend 30 very efficient minutes
- A perfect matching so they spend time with only people they can actually help
- A product that ensures the follow-up, mentors don't want to give their time and receive 0 news from the mentee about how it evolved
2) For mentors who need to be convinced (although they already are very interested in the beginning, you can't convince someone who doesn't want to give their time), their feedback have been that:
(i)They good to give back/help
(ii)They learn a lot doing that, being confronted to so many different challenges every week challenges you
1) The heavy process of recruiting the mentors (we talk to each single one of them to gather some stories)
2) The engineers that are working on the matching algorithme so mentors and mentees enjoy the calls
3) The manual task of scheduling and rescheduling the calls with mentors and mentees (and that's a cumbersome)
4) The engineers/designers that are working on the real product that is helping the mentor and mentee to build a long, lasting relationship that will be more efficient than just networking and having coffee.
About your second point, I agree that is the main challenge. This is how we'll tackle this:
1) For each new mentor, we assess their experience by gathering stories (examples of stories here stories.platohq.com)
2) So each mentor has some specific domain of expertise / things they like to talk about
3) You're not generally good or bad, but you can help on specific things by giving advice, or at least just sharing your experience on how you approached things (and that helps)
My name is Quang, I’m cofounder and CEO of Plato. Before Plato, we were Birdly and were in YC W16.
After having graduated from college, with two of my engineers friends, we decided to build our own company. We made a lot of mistakes along the way; and one of the biggest was to hire too soon a bunch of engineers. We were all three technical cofounders so we could have built the MVP ourselves. But instead of that, we decided that two cofounders over three would do the “Product management” and “Marketing", and that we should hire 3 engineers (including 2 interns) to code the product for us. That was before YC. YC could have prevented us from making that mistake. And this had been our worst mistake.
Without even noticing it, we transitioned from “Individual Contributor” to “Engineering Managers”.
Without even noticing it, we happened to spend more time doing “management” than building the product and optimizing for product-market fit.
Without even noticing it, we were doing the rookie mistakes most first-time engineering managers do.
Among some rookie mistakes:
- We hired our engineers focusing only on their technical capabilities
- We didn’t make one-on-ones, but rather two-on-ones, and we focused on performance and operational
- We micromanaged them, and even time-boxed them sometimes
- And many more mistakes…
But at the time, those mistakes were unknown unknowns. In other words, we didn’t even know we were doing the bad things.
We don’t all need to do all those mistakes, or at least, when we do, we should know it, figure it out and fix it.
That’s why we’re building Plato, a platform to find your perfect mentor to help you become a better Engineering Leader. Mentors of the community come from top tech companies such as Google, Facebook, Lyft, Slack, Trello, Netflix, Spotify, Digital Ocean, Segment, Uber… They want to help you avoid the common pitfalls they learned the hard way.
I know many of you already have learned the hard way many lessons like us. I’m sure many of you would be amazing mentors. Feel free to let us know if you want to become a mentor.
Looking forward to have your feedback on our new product,
Thanks HN community!
The idea is radically different. I define an idea:
- What problem you're solving
- Who are you solving this problem for?
Idea 1
- The problem of gathering data of a customer (SFDC, Intercom..)
- Who: Product manager, Marketer, Sales... ?
Idea 2
- The Problem of management challenges
- Who: Green Engineering Managers and CTOs
Being in Slack makes that the two ideas have the same UX / Distribution channel. But those two ideas are radically different.
"how do you know you aren't completely wrong?"
=> It's the whole point of the article, to derisk at the maximum this. If you can make sure that
1) You're solving a real problem => We are because we have some paying customers and interviewed more than 400 Engineering Managers
2) You're excited about this problem => We are because, as you said, we "burned" people being bad managers
3) It's innovative => We are because we haven't seen any similar product
Then if the 3 are checked, we have at least some chances of learning from our past experience
At the occasion of the launch of our startup Plato, we organize an event with great engineering leaders sharing their experience.
We are honored to have great leaders among our speakers:
- Tido Carriero- VPE @Segment
- Luc Vincent- VPE @Lyft
- Christian McCarrick- VPE @Telmate
- Shivani Sharma- SEM @ Slack
- Yi Huang -EM @ Facebook
- Brett Huff- EM @Trello/Atlassian
- Nikhil Pandit- EM @Clever
- Tasneem Minakadis- EL @Uber
- Richard Sun - SDE @Kabam
- Benjamin de Point - SDE @Datto
These talks will be followed by a networking event with mainly CTOs and engineering managers.
Where? San Francisco, 350 Rhode Island Street
When? on the 15th of May, between 5:30pm and 9pm
Hey there, Quang, CEO of Birdly here. We think there will be a new way we consume enterprise softwares and apps via messaging.
Today the average employee has to use over 10 enterprise products in order to do their jobs. Salesforce for CRM, Zendesk for Customer support, Stripe for billing, Concur for expense reports, Quickbooks for accounting, Intercom for customer communication … Each time they have to remember a password, navigate an outdated UI, and then context switch back into what they were doing.
Our goal at Birdly is to allow you to use any enterprise app directly from the communication tools where you spend most of your time: Slack, Email, and SMS.
As Matt said in the article, we'd love to collect information from potential customers. We're very open to feedback, please email me at [email protected]
Quang, CEO of Birdly here. We are on a mission to let you use your enterprise softwares (CRM, accounting, Customer support... ) from messaging apps.
Birdly is a bot that lets your team have a 360° view on your customers. Now, your whole team can access customer data right from where they spend most of their time : Slack.
Take a minute to connect your favorite enterprise software and apps (Salesforce, Stripe, Zendesk…) and ask the bot insightful questions about your customers.
We have plenty of plans to improve the product : more integrations, more actions, more messaging platforms (SMS, emails…) and we would be happy to have your feedback !
This discussion is a good reminder that we probably need to update a bit the message and be even more transparent on the dynamic in play and the incentives for mentors, here are they:
(1) Giving back to the community: - People just feel really good about helping, seeing someone grow- In addition, to being a mentor in Plato, I'm helping every week people (for free) to prepare for YC interviews and I really feel good about helping as I've received so much help from others in the past
(2) Learning - I'm mentoring in Plato myself every week, 1h-2h every week, 1 call over two, I feel I'm saying the same thing, but 1 call over 2, I'm learning myself a lot. For example, I had a call with the head of engineering of a 50 Engineers Company from a startup in France last week, and their company had a really interesting way of functioning to do a performance review, it's not done by a manager, it's done by peers who are assigned to you every quarter. I learned a ton thanks to all my mentees - It helps me to synthesize my thoughts and deliver my learnings with a simple and clear message - It's also very intellectually stimulating to be challenged every week with a different challenge it's helping me sharpen my skills
(3) Networking with other mentors: - Mentors get free access to Plato (it was in an experimental phase and we're deploying it to the broader community next month) - we’re organizing regular happy hours between mentors and some are joining every week - and plenty of other events we're organizing for mentors for free
(4) Brand (we offer speaking opportunities to mentors who’ve been here for a while - Many Mentors are proud to be a Plato mentor, and many of them are sharing their plate public profile and put that they're a Plato mentor on Linkedin - Also, the best mentors and those who have been in Plato for a while are regularly proposed to be speakers at our conference, for example, http://elevate.platohq.com/ and https://www.platohq.com/webinars
(5) Charity We have no problem adding a 5th point about donating to a charity. But those 4 are already strong and that’s why we have 1000+ mentors and some of them are here for 3 years+. This is one of the initiatives we'd like to do in the next 6-12 months.
Finally, I doubt that paying the mentors will move the needle. When we started to do that, we started to attract worse mentors who are doing that for the money. But giving away XX% of revenue to a charity of your choice (that is aligned with our mission to improve Eng Leadership) is a good idea (that we are already working on)
If you think that is a completely new business model and dynamic, it's actually not. Plato’s model is no different than the business model of a conference: Companies paying for attendees to learn from speakers. Speakers unpaid (most of the time) Incentives for speakers?
(1) Giving back to the community, when you're a speaker at a conference, you're actually happy to help a community that you care about
(2) Learn as synthesizing your thoughts and delivering a message (through a keynote or something) is helpful
(3) Networking with other speakers
(4) Brand (being a speaker is helping for your own brand or your company's brand)
(5) Sometimes a speaker can choose a charity to donate
Although I agree that we could be better organized and transparent with those 4 (or 5) incentives for mentors (maybe add a system of points or whatever), those are highly appreciated incentives for mentors and I do think it will scale.
Also, our monthly subscription fees include:
- Cost of customer success: we help our customers build programs around TAlents Development
- Cost of Engineers: we pay our engineers who are building the platform that helps mentees and mentors schedule and reschedule their time, be matched, take notes, write action plan etc.
- Cost of Talent Coaches: a talent coach (someone who is a professional, paid by us, who is uncovering your challenges and needs and matching you with the right mentor and keep you accountable on your progress). More about it here: https://www.platohq.com/how-it-works-for-team
- Cost of Mentors Community Managers: A team that are running all the initiatives above
Again, Happy to have this debate with y'all!