🚀 From Hollywood Animation to Pioneering AI: Ralph Gootee's Entrepreneurial Story | TigerEye | Ep.15
November 24, 2024 • 47 mins
Join us for an electrifying conversation with Ralph Gootee, Co-founder and CTO of TigerEye, as he shares his extraordinary journey from creating animated blockbusters at Pixar to revolutionizing business strategy through AI technology. In this episode, you'll discover:
Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur, tech enthusiast, or business leader, Ralph's story offers unprecedented insights into turning complex challenges into breakthrough innovations.
- How a chance meeting sparked a $875M startup success
- The inside story of PlanGrid and its game-changing impact on construction technology
- Insights into building TigerEye: An AI platform transforming strategic decision-making
- Technical deep dive into Flutter and open-source innovation
- Y-Combinator advisor wisdom on startup growth
Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur, tech enthusiast, or business leader, Ralph's story offers unprecedented insights into turning complex challenges into breakthrough innovations.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
This is the Startup Still Say Podcast. Thank you for
tuning in. Do us a favor like subscribe on YouTube
or LinkedIn, and be sure to give us your feedback.
Hope you enjoy this episode.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hello everyone, welcome to a brand new episode of Startups
Still Say. This is Anthony Prakash, your host, and I'm
thrilled to be joined today by Ralph Godie from Tiger.
I I've known Ralph for a couple of years. I've
had an opportunity to listen to Ralph recently at an event,
and since then I've been trying to get Ralph on
(00:33):
our podcast. So I'm super happy that Ralph is taking
the time to talk to us about his journey, more importantly,
what he's up to these days. He's a co founder
of a company called Tiger, and he will talk to
us about Tiger on many more things along his superb
entrepreneurial journey he has been on. So first of all, Ralph,
welcome to the show. Thank you very much for inviting me, Anthony,
(00:55):
nice to be here. Awesome. So just for the audience, Ralph,
and why didn't you kick us off with a little
bit about yourself, You know, things that they should know
at a high level. We'll obviously go through everything that
you've been on on all the learnings in your journey.
So what do you go to alf?
Speaker 1 (01:10):
Thank you. My name is Ralph Goody. I'm the CTO
and co founder of Tiger. This is my second company.
My first company was named Plagrid. It sold to Autodesk
about five six years ago. So this has been a
really fun journey for me. I didn't expect to be
an entrepreneur, or certainly to be a second time founder.
(01:32):
I started my career in research, actually at the Johns
Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, where I was a researcher and
also I did a lot of like very low level
grunt tasks like set up source control systems on Unix machines.
It was a really fun job. I really enjoyed it.
(01:52):
I eventually got to do some map optimization after that.
You know, I was working in suburban Maryland, that's where
John's Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratories based. My friend invited me
out to interview at Sony. This was at the time
Sony Erickson was around before the iPhone, and so Sony
Erickson used to make the best films, right before the
(02:13):
iPhone and I interviewed out at Sony Rickson. I ended
up loving California. I could go rock climbing, I could
eat delicious vegan burritos. The work was interesting to me.
It was I worked on Android one point zero with
Sony and Google as a collaboration, so I joined Sony.
I worked there for about a year and a half.
It was when they launched the iPhone. My background also,
(02:35):
I was working at the cell phone company while the
iPhone was being launched. I actually got to watch a
company respond to the iPhone's launch, which was exciting and
really taught me a lot when building my own company
as well, how to build how to build a product
team I did do. After working for Sony for a bit,
I had a really great opportunity to work at Pixar,
(02:56):
where I worked on Cars two, Toys three, and Brave.
I'm credited on Cars two. I'm really proud of It's
my children's favorite movie, which is kind of crazy considering,
you know, Cars two is not not my personal favorite
Pixar movie, but it is all, you know, all three
of my children's favorite movie right now. So I'm very
proud to have done that. In the past. I had
(03:17):
a great job there, I had a great boss, I
had a great team. It was it was a really
good experience for me, and the only reason I left
Pixar was to start start playing with at the time
my partner now my wife, and three of my best friends.
Actually we all started a construction software company called Playing
Great built it from us, you know, us five co
founders to about four hundred, five hundred people at the
(03:40):
time of the acquisition by Autodesk. Still, you know, a
great journey. A lot of people that were joined us
during that journey are still working at Autodesk. It was
really quite an experience going from a kind of zero
to one hundred million dollar company, and a lot of
those experiences were kind of what led me into Tigrey.
So that's just a little short thing on my background.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
That is such a fascinating background, Ralphi. I'm I honored
that you're also the first guest from Hollywood, I should say,
giving your work in picture and cars and elsewhere. So
that's that's another feather in the podcast. So thank you
for that. So one of the things that I was
really curious to learn about you just as a person
(04:27):
and your fascination for math in general. Is I mean,
were you as a as a kid, were you inspired
by somebody and drawn towards matt or how did that happen?
Speaker 1 (04:37):
I was really lucky on my career in math. I
was actually drawn towards computers as a kid. So my
I you know, I was talking to my dad and
mentioned I learned how to program at about twelve, and
my father corrected me I was actually nine, some studid.
I barely believe that. I think he's just being proud.
But I taught myself CUE basic off of the Doss
C Basic because the helped manual was like a full
(05:00):
functional pro and you would like literally learn to program
from just the help guide. And I really loved it.
There was example code, and so the example code really
gave me a lot. Like you know, I just was
a kid living in the country with Q basic and
a help file, and I I really loved it. I
taught myself Visual Basics. One of my friends' parents had
that gave it to me, and you know, that really
(05:22):
just gave me something to do before the Internet even existed.
I was just having fun designing Windows three point one interfaces.
But the reason I got into math was when I
was in the computer science program, I was very lucky
to have a teacher that really cared about me. And
I was talking about computer science and like the different
(05:42):
careers and this is just advice I got. I liked it.
Was the advice that he gave me was that you know,
computer science was just it was a tool, and that
you wanted to do something with that tool. And it
was really helpful to have some domain experience with which
to buy the tool. And he told me that math
was a good, good area because you know, when you
talk about code or programming, yeah, everyone knows that, right,
(06:06):
Like I can use Excel, right, Like I don't know
how to program. But when you say like Chinese remainder theoryum,
Everyone's eyes like glaze over. And so it was pretty
it was good advice for me back then. It got me.
I was also lucky to have another teacher that when
I wasn't very good at math. Let me really put
it short, I was not good at math until I
got into kind of college and upper level math. And
(06:27):
it wasn't until I learned how to tie together math
concepts with programming that it really started to come together.
For example, I learned matt Lab and so like matt
Lab was like my bridge between mathematics and coding. And
I really ended up loving high level theoretical math. So
I wasn't not a math kid very much. I wasn't
very good at math in high school. I wasn't very
(06:48):
academically skilled at it. But by the time I got
to upper level mathematics, I really loved it. This particularly
abstract algebra and you kind of like fundamental theories of
prime numbers and cryptography. It's just much fun for me.
But you don't get to learn that stuff until later.
I failed math just like everyone else when I was younger.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
I'm actually the opposite. I must say. I was really
good in math in school, and then something happened when
I went to college and everything went away in this
in dis array, right, So I mean I actually did
mechanical engineering, so I did nothing related to computers until
I got a job, which was in the computer science industry.
So life happens, as they say, right, So that's cool.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
That's cool.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
Yeah, So so you're told about math, I mean, how
did how did the whole design aspect come in? Was
that more at Pixar and Sony or somewhere else.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Just going back to that, like teaching myself visual basic.
I actually like just kind of you know, I'm I'm
an amateur artist. I'm not like very good, but you know,
I work out it. It's very fun for me and
the aspects, you know, when I was at Pixar, I
was very lucky to be able to sit in art classes,
like everyone can join our classes. When I worked at Pixar, Yeah,
so I got to like work like seek our classes
(07:57):
by real artists, so I know, like I'm not them,
but I really enjoy it. And the interface, like you
user experiences. I'm so into user experience. I think it's
because it's like a personal passion of mine being able
to try to drive something towards simplicity and usefulness, kind
of work through the edges. It's really fun for me.
So on the design aspect, I for plan Grid did
(08:20):
pretty much all the initial user experience and design I did.
I was lucky to have some co founders that were
really good editors and did do some parts of it too.
But I was very lucky to have been able to
build the design team and build the product team and
been able to design a lot of the core products.
I'm lucky at Tiger I have hired an amazing designer
to work with. So you know, for me personally, I
(08:40):
like to hire people better than me, and thankfully I've
got a designer that's much better than me that I
work with it now. But I just love his designs.
It's fun for me.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
Yeah, that is always a smart approach to get somebody
smarter than you on the team. Right, So let's double
click on plan Grid right before we get into Tiger
Eye itself, because I think your foundation for Tiger Eye
came from your years of experience working with working on
plan Grid, all the issues that you had to deal
with with planning and number.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
Crunching and things like that.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
So for the audience, Ralph, I mean, can you just
take us through how plan Grid came about, How did
you become a co founder with your now partner in life,
and how is that journey as a whole for.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
You, Clangrid, What a special journey that was. Really, you know,
the more years to go by, the more you can
kind of reflect upon really a special experience. Were very
it was just we were very lucky. Like that's the
thing to say, We're lucky. We worked hard, We're in
the right place the right time. You know. That just
doesn't happen very often. It's a big component of luck. Here.
(09:45):
I've had one had just been launched brand new. I
had deep graphics experience from Pixar, particularly around EPs and
PDF files. I'm like a world expert in pdf files,
so weird thing, like who wants No one even wants
that being an expert in p files, But here I am.
I've researched pdf files. And I meet a woman at
(10:05):
a punk venue, you know, watching a really great show,
and we hit it off, and I want to impress her,
and she's like, I've got this, my friend. We're doing
a startup blueprints on an iPad, and I said, hey,
I can put blueprints on an iPad for you. And
it turns out it was actually quite hard. At the time,
the iPad one was a very limited in its graphics abilities,
(10:26):
and blueprints are huge. They're physically large, forty two by
thirty inches, right, So when you do the measurements for
dpi right went about two hundred dots fringe try to
get a good scan going. It's just a lot of
memory and a lot of space these things take up,
which was My specialty was dealing with that, so I
put some It wasn't like anything too advanced I applied,
but just kind of general off the shelf, good, good
(10:48):
graphics algorithms and was able to produce a blueprint render
that's still at the heart of audit ask solution as
far as I can tell. And it was, you know,
light years ahead of a competition. For instance, on the
iPad one playing is the only thing that could view blueprints.
For about two to three years that we had only
(11:09):
viewer right Auto Acrobat and Crash you know, the built
in preview crash at a memory. Eventually, you know, hardware
got better, software got better, you know, five years in
that wasn't We had other features that kind of kept
us ahead, but the core of the product was a
blueprint viewer and the idea of version control and blueprints
because construction blueprints changed really frequently. So we brought in
(11:31):
a few version control concepts from you know, computer science,
and we leafed that together with like issue tracking and
then having issues on the different versions, and then deploying
that to the field really fast, having cross platform annotations.
It was a very user friendly, a very loved product.
We had a very high NPS score, you know, four
point nine stars, two thousand reviews on the app Store,
(11:55):
a really passionate user base, and construction in the field.
You know, this was a product that was meant for people.
You know, there's all kinds of ways to say people
that wore boots, people that people that had to shower
at night, you know, after a long day's worth of work, right,
there's all kinds of ways to say it, but people
in the field is the most simple ways say it. Like,
we tried to build software for folks that were hard
(12:17):
hats to the job every day, and it was it
was really I'm a constantly an honor and a privilege
to be able to serve the work those folks working
that hard, like it was inspiring, you know as I
look back to it, and I'm really proud of what
we build as a team. The fun note is we
also are able to build a really strong company culture.
You know, at Playing Grid, we were well known to
(12:38):
have a very strong team. There's probably about ten successful
startups that were all from alumni at Playing Grid. Some
of them, you know, they're advertising on one oh one
when you drive into San Francisco. People that have met
at Playing Grid are at a company with those folks,
and you know, I think are going to be more
successful than Playing Grid was a long term which is
I'm I think that's probably what I'm most proud of
(12:59):
when I think else for the Playing Guard journeys, that
we were able to build a place where people could
connect build even more successful things in the future. And
it was really, you know, as I said a few times,
a special place based out of seventeenth a mission that
was where our office was right above Thrift Town. Really
good burritos in the area. We had great places to eat,
great bars, great neighborhood to be in. And you know,
(13:24):
I think the industry has changed quite a bit from
what it was back when we started. I still friends
in the industry, they're good friends of mine, and you know,
I'm glad we we I think got to help move
the industry forward into the digitization era. You know, it's
a different era now. That was like kind of the
mobile digitization are now we're in obviously the AI era.
There's different challenges in construction than there were when we
(13:44):
were doing Playing Grid, But for its time, it was
you know, something really proud of them, something that thankfully
made a lot of people very successful.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Yeah, that's super inspiring. And you know, like you said,
I mean being in the right place at the right
time that very important with the iPad. And I was
also connecting in my head about you know how important
design is, right because in those early days of using technology,
like on a flat screen, and people who are not
(14:14):
really technology savvy, right, I mean like the construction workers.
I mean maybe today in today's world, everybody is mean,
but in those days for you to first of all
get that adoption and then from a design perspective, make
it intuitive enough to say okay, I mean if they
say nope, I don't want to use this, I want
to use something else. I mean, you've got to cater
to that audience. So I see how it all comes
(14:36):
together for you. So super cool, Ralph. So let's shift
gears a little bit. I mean, so with your current company,
so maybe not there yet. So with plan grid you
sold that to Autodesk, and you were there for the
transition for a little bit with Autodesk. And what are
(14:59):
you thinking about Tiger II right back then? Or when
did you start kind of thinking of oh what what
what should we do next?
Speaker 1 (15:08):
Would say that I have you know, you're always kind
of thinking about the next thing, or at least a
few of the next things as an entrepreneur. Certainly wasn't
working on Tiger I at that point, right, of course not,
but you know, kind of thinking about it. What are
the problems that we have at Autodesk, right, what are
the problems with integration? Right? These were all inspirations that
kind of landed us where we landed. So I think
(15:31):
that probably the best thing to say is, like, there's
I always had a challenge at plane Grid around data.
When we built the company. This was when Luker was
first released, red Shift was first there, Like there was
the concept of insights like this was very new, Like
mixed panel was like brand new. Still Amplitude was still
you know one of my friends' companies who's now you know,
(15:52):
power to them. They're so successful right now, I'm so
proud of them. Were kicking ass. Like these products were
still so new it it wasn't like that then, And
so you had to build a team to do any
type of data insights, right, like a full team. And
we built this amazing team like PhDs, great leadership, great individuals,
and they started like trying to like do stuff with
(16:14):
our data, right, Like where's the hot leads? How are
the customers connected? What's our arr you know, like let's
share the data and all the shit. So I think
pretty common stuff. Every company kind of went through the
same type of journey with you know, ETL and kind
of where we landed. And that team was like ten
people is expensive, and they didn't really like their work,
and you know, truly it could have been management. I
could have maybe tried to be a better boss. But
(16:36):
eventually it's like an analyst, right, It's like a ticket
crunching machine, right, like what's my like segmentation breakdown and
my growth? Right? And then like someone with the PhD
would like try to answer that with SQL and like
return the results. It wasn't a very satisfying job for them,
and they eventually left and they're like leading the data
science teams at BREX and like very successful folks, doing
great things with their career. But when they left, they
(16:58):
kind of left a bunch of like dashboards and around
not quite assembled fully, you know, and so like you know,
they're on to their next jobs, right, they weren't worried
about their old dashboards, And I started to notice when
I was a board member different companies that the same
kind of thing would pop up, Like it's just a
bunch of dashboards laying around and you know they weren't
really fused together well that there was a lot of
(17:18):
work to put them together too. So this was something
we kind of started to put together at both Autodesk
and at Plaine Grid was during the transition. You know,
there's like two salesforce environments. You know, people were trying
to sell to the same companies, right, Like, it was
kind of hard to coordinate some basic things around back
office in particular CRM, ERP marketing type stuff like knowing
(17:40):
what campaigns were successful was mysterious somehow, Like it was
still very difficult, and this for most companies. So these
were some of the challenges we saw during you know,
some of the challenges we saw during the transition that
kind of helped inspire us for what's next. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:54):
Yes, it's so spart on, you know, I mean for
those of who you who don't know, I mean I
come from twenty years of go to market and when
I saw Tiger Eye, you're putting together something like this
and with all the features that you've listed, I mean,
it was, you know, I look forward to what you
guys were building, because I mean, you're you're so right.
You know, I used to be an account manager, a
(18:16):
client partner for some of the largest accounts out there.
The week that I would dread is the week I
did forecasting, right, because it is it is fifty percent
math I mean and fifty percent gut field, right, I mean,
and you're so worried about the gut field that you're
putting out there saying, oh my god, is my forecast
going to be right?
Speaker 1 (18:35):
Right?
Speaker 2 (18:36):
And then the same thing I mean, when you're running
a product. I mean, I've seen saying Okay, you spent
one hundred thousand dollars on this campaign. What is the
real impact of this hundred thousand dollars from the campaign?
People will say, okay, we got these ten leads, I mean,
and it stops there, right, I mean, nobody is quantifying
it beyond the ten leads and saying okay, I mean,
how are we taking this forward? What result to what dollars?
(18:59):
Is it a result in? Nothing like that? So I
totally appreciate what you're doing, I mean, and in a
way correct me if I'm wrong. Ralph, I mean you
were actually trying to build a new category with Tiger I, right,
I mean you would not classify this as a CRM
or you know, another go to market tool which captures
leads and things like that. Where do you see Tiger
(19:20):
I fitting into that whole realm of things?
Speaker 1 (19:22):
That's a great question right now. It was actually kind
of surprising that business intelligence was where we landed. You know,
I don't wonder if it's like I got to like
check can I say rich for business intelligence out loud?
And particularly the go to market space. We what the
learning was as we started the company and from our
last one was that like democratized data was great for
(19:43):
like a certain generation, right, but then it had some
type of like inverse effect where it got so democratized
it's like just a bunch of stuff around, and it
was hard to get the answers of like what's really happening?
And so you end up with these companies that are like,
you know, basically just ask them the question like where
we at over and over again out into like basically nothingness,
(20:03):
you know what I mean, Like they just keep asking
that same question, keep getting the same results back. And
so what we tried to do is bring together both
the business intelligence space with obviously artificial intelligence combo artificial intelligence,
both the current generation of artificial intelligence. Now it's generative
AI is what most people mean when they say AI,
as well as predictive artificial intelligence and machine learning, which
(20:26):
is what people would have meant, you know, a few
years ago when people said AI. So we bring all
those things together into a very like tailor made go
to market erp business intelligence solution. The advantage of this
is it like from out of the box, you get
a lot more functionality. You don't really have to hire
a team of people to try to customize it. Like
(20:48):
these things end up being a pattern at every company
we work with. We've noticed that there's just a very
strong pattern of what kind of graphs people are looking
for the connections they need to make between their you know,
the whole quote to cash kind of you know, or
even before that, what about like just touch to cash right,
Like we were trying to work on Basically that's what
most people use business intelligence for in the go to
(21:08):
market space. We're basically trying to get people the information
and you a lot faster so they can make better
strategic decisions. AI unlocks a lot of superpowers that we
didn't have before. Like certainly it's you know, we we're
we feel like we're far ahead of the competition right now.
I mean that's just because the competition is still trying
to release products and we have something we can demo.
(21:31):
You know, we're always keeping an eye because there's a
lot of marketing message out there on what business you know,
what AI is doing in the business world, but we
haven't seen much when it comes to real agent technology.
And that's that's what the core of our product is
is is an agent analyst that can answer basic questions
around your data and then also answer more complicated questions
(21:52):
about growth of next year, what happens if I add
three sales reps to Maryland? You know what I mean.
These are very challenging things to model and do scenario
analysis on. That's what our product's meant for, not the
basic stuff, but the more complicated stuff. Of course, we
have to answer the basic stuff really easily to answer
the complicated stuff, so we do that too, got it?
Speaker 2 (22:11):
And I also noticed with the Holy AI Analyst, I mean,
you're kind of giving the freedom of choice to pick
which LM your customers want to use. So you're kind
of marrying let's say, tigerize own proprietary technology that you've
developed with all your knowledge on this data, with the
BI tools and all of that, bringing in whichever the
(22:34):
customer is comfortable with, and kind of bringing the best
of both worlds so to speak, right, I mean, is
that a right way to put it?
Speaker 1 (22:42):
Oh? Yeah, absolutely. One of our lessons from Planegrid as
well was the needs of enterprise customers. You know, Tiger
as an enterprise product built for enterprise companies, enterprise and
mid market companies that are growing very fast, and because
of this, they might have already chosen the model they
want to work with or maybe partner with, you know,
Open AI or and Thropic already or Google, you know,
(23:03):
and we want to be able to take advantage of
working with the data teams that, you know, the work
they've already done, and be able to integrate with whatever
solutions the customers already chosen that fits them. That being said,
you know a lot of our current customers just you know,
you use the default setting if you will, right, They
don't really need much customiz issue. I think most people's
(23:25):
journeys around AI and business is still very new. Actually,
it's it's like happening right now as we speak. Got it.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
And for the sake of our friends from the Flood community,
those of you, those of whom have not listened to
your story from you know, Flood of Silicon Valley as
you are preparing to build a brand new company, a
brand new technology, right, I mean, how did you land
on Flood?
Speaker 1 (23:49):
My gosh, man, Flutter. It's good. I get like freedom
to talk about how much I love Flutter, and it's
okay people want to hear it, right because normally this
would stop a conversation with like a normal person and
it doesn't want to talk about like butter. I Actually,
so this was like almost as we were trying to
learn about, you know, what the challenges of businesses were.
During integration, I also knew about a core tech problem
(24:11):
that I personally experienced, which was cross platform development. It
was really a nightmare at playing Grid. Really, I mean,
just gosh, the wasted time developing the same feature on iOS,
on Android, on web, on Windows Native. And then also
we had a very robust back end. They could also
export data would often need parity issues. We had like
(24:31):
a whole project manager just managing the coordination of a
simple feature development between all the platforms. We had this
matrix of feature parody across them all, and then every
team started developing its own culture, you know, like the
iOS culture is like, oh, we're so much better than
the Android developers, and YadA YadA. It's really just a
total waste of time. Like I couldn't believe the effort
(24:53):
that was just thrown away. And I didn't think personally
that the native interface was giving me that much, you
know what I mean. I mean, like, sure, it's like
kind of nicer, and I like iOS. I like Android
apps stuff like Android. But you know Spotify is pretty
good looking, right, It's like Spotify on every platform, right,
Even Apple does development on Android. Now, Apple Music is
like also on Android, looks great in its own weird
(25:15):
little Apple UX. So I kind of felt like, you know,
even chat gpt has its own kind of UX. It's
not really iOS when you're using it, it's its own
little chat chpt world. And so I felt like that
would be the approach I wanted to do, but I
didn't know the tech stack to use. So I tried
two major approaches. I tried web and you know, React
(25:36):
native and all that, and I really hated it for
like a million reasons that I don't know if anyone
wants to hear about, but it which wasn't fast enough.
I don't like the programming paradigms. I don't think web
is meant to build apps. I think web technologies were
meant for documents, and they're great at documents, they weren't
meant for like an enterprise app. I don't want to write,
and like everything comes back to the dom. Like I'm
a I learned web very early. I'm a good web developer,
(25:58):
and so like all the technology still have dom leaking
through it. Even you know, web assembly is really cool.
I love the tech, but you know, most of the
UI you're still gonna end up writing in the dom, right,
You're just gonna end up calling unless you re implement
it all on web assembly, which then sparked my interest
in like, what do video games do? Video games already
do this, right, they already share code. So I found
(26:18):
some video game toolkits. One immediate guy was what I
was really interested in. I wrote, I wrote a CRM,
a very simple CRM in immediate gooey and c an
immediate gooey with a direct to open gl and it
was like pretty hard, and I worked with a designer.
I was like, hey, man, can you make this look
like a business happen? Like take immediate gooy and like
build me like widgets with it. And he's like, I'm sorry,
(26:41):
I can't. You know, I tried my best. This is
as good as I get. While this was all happening,
one of my old friends from Sony posted a paper
and it was a white paper on how they were
developing their new Sony worked with one of the automobile
manufacturers in Japan to develop a new interface for their cars,
and so it was, you know, as a friend of mine,
really good talented, low level engineer. So I just was
(27:02):
reading the paper and it was like, okay, they're using
this technology Flutter, and they've it's so low level that
you can strip out all the widgets and it writes
directly to the frame you know, right, can work right
with the frame buffer, so you can get really good
performance and graphics effects and shaders and stuff, and it's
totally cross platform. And then I was like, whoa, that's
really close to her I want And I started looking
(27:24):
at how the widget tree works, and you know, the
uni directional and data flow of the state structures, and like,
I just for me personally as somebody that's been writing
UI since Visual Studios one point zero. I've done QT,
I've done mac iOS, Android, Swift, Objective C Mac, I've
done so many toolkits it's nauseating. And this is to
me the best. This is like the best I've ever
(27:45):
seen on developing front and systems, and it's proven itself out.
We've built a lot of products, and Flutter I think
probably you know, i'd say we're probably probably built. I
don't know who else is built what, but I'd say
I would say, without anyone stand it, I'd say we
built probably one of the more complicated, if not the
most complicated Flutter app out there, because we've you know,
we've dealt with every challenge Flutter pretty much had. Yeah,
(28:08):
it's been it's been awesome, man, I've really loved it.
So that's why i'd say about Flutter, it's like I've
you know, I always want there to be a lot
of development on Flutter in the future, so I've got
my wish list. But even when I first came across Flutter,
like a year or two ago, it was already so
close to being perfect, and you know that's it's still
it's still something I love and a technology we're really
we're really close to.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
Yeah, thank you for that. I mean I would attest
to everything that you said. I mean, you know, yes,
I mean there isn't I mean, it's it's not going
to check all the boxes, but everybody, but I think
it checks most of the boxes that you need, especially
for a use case like yours. And I think, I mean,
your implementation of Flutter is one of the more complicated
implementations from at least what I saw, So I think
(28:50):
everybody should take a look at what you guys have
done with tigeraie, which is pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
So thank you, Anthony. I have one other throat there.
Just just remember we do we also do open source work.
Open sources really important to us as a company. But
we want to we want to make sure that we
support what we launched, so we're ticketed slow. Our first
open source launch was duck Dart dB. Dart's the lower
level language that Flutters built upon very well, as you
all know, I mean, your audience, you know, they're they're
(29:16):
they're they're in the know, and dark duck dB is
DUCTYB bindings really high quality ones that work directly with
dart at a low level. And the advantage of DUCTV
is like a super sql light. You know, it's does
everything sq light can do, but it is much more.
It's much more built for analytics, can handle you know,
millions of data rows and doing kind of more complicated
(29:38):
comp calculations on them, which you know tiger ide does
a lot of that. So I just want to throw
that out there too. Is we also have some open
source start tools perfect.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
I'll be sure to tell the audience about that when
we post this. So switching gears a little bit, Ralph,
I know you did not set out to be an entrepreneur,
but here you are too companies later, I see you're
also supporting a bunch of folks in why combinator or
you were right? I mean, so, what what are the
(30:08):
top things that I mean you you think you know
people are doing. I mean, nowadays this obviously ten x
more startups than what it was even ten years ago, right,
I mean, so many coming through the funnel, so many successful.
But I mean in your experience and y combinator, I mean,
what are the things that you know just really stood
out to you that you take away as learnings, any
(30:30):
any inputs for founders, Ralph from your perspective.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
Thank you for that. I was a visiting partner y
Combinator for almost a year is a very I was
very proud of that experience. Was a great experience for me.
We still we still work really closely with them, and
we're very proud to have Gary Gary on our board
who also heads up y Combinator. So I'm not an
active investor right now, but I was an active angel investor,
and you know, my partner and I've given a few
(30:56):
talks the recent why I see classes, So I'll try
to summarize a little bit of what I see. You know,
in general, for people that want to apply to y See,
there's some good advice I can give you. It's very straightforward.
You should generally apply with a co founder. Companies are
best done in partnerships. It's good to know your partner
that you're doing that you're doing in company with for
(31:17):
longer than a little while. The way you've met the person,
how long you've known them, is really important. It's a
big difference from somebody that was a roommate in college
with their co founder and you know, build things with
them for years and good friends versus somebody that met recently.
It really makes a big difference when you're interviewing them.
So to try to if you're going to find a
co founder, try to find someone you know and love
(31:38):
and build a relationship with them. It's important anyways. If
you're successful, that's going to be very important for you regardless,
and it's important to have a co founder. The reason
for that is from the investment standpoint, like things happen
all the time, you know, like it's just that's the world.
Like things happen. It's tough life, life's always moving, things
always changing, and because of that, you if you only
have one co founder, it can actually be rather risky.
(32:00):
There's many public stories where there's like one co founder
that's always publicly you know, there's all kinds of stories
in the news about one person that you associate all
success of a company too. But that's normally not at
all what most companies are like. And those companies you
know are questionably like that as well. Most of them
requires a whole group of people, a bunch of people
behind the scenes to make a company workout. So it's
(32:21):
really important for you to have a good partner to
do this with, as well as a good network where
you're going to be recruiting from. Right these these questions
aren't going to come up while you're trying to build
a company, So it's good when you're applying to y
Combinat or other good startup accelerators to already have that
kind of covered out. This is just I'll give like
I don't know, I'm giving a range of advice because
the challenge with advice is you really like it changes rapidly,
(32:44):
like as a company scales or where you're at. So
this is the initial advice is for people that are
trying to get into startups. Yeah, boy is it really
nowadays are so interesting with I know right now is
a time where you don't have to be a ten
X engineer to do a startup, you know, like it
used to be that was the thing, like find it
tenex engineer and then have a good business idea if
the idea is that AI has changed that and you
(33:05):
can actually build like a product a lot quicker now
even with just like being a one X engineer with
a good idea, I still see that strong engineers make
better companies. So my personal position is that you should
find a strong engineering partner. But you know that's you know,
like I could talk more about I'll leave the sense
to find a good, strong engineering partner and then go
(33:27):
to a company with them. I would say most funding
is around AI nowadays, like eighty percent, Like eighty percent
is around AI, and then the rest of the twenty
percent is around like literal curing cancer drugs. Like it's
basically like you're either curing cancer or you're doing something
in AI. Maybe there's some problems in between, you know,
especially if you personally have experience in it. So that's
(33:48):
the next most important point is you should have personal
experience and whatever problem you're solving, you shouldn't just try
to solve general problems like that's not going to be
fun for you. You're probably not going to be successful
at it. You should probably have something you care deeply
about that you've experienced, and that that's always where you
should try to start a company around. It comes off
stronger when you're pitching, comes off stronger when you're building
(34:10):
the product. It comes off stronger when you're working way
too many hours and you're tired and you still got
to work on it. It's nice to have something you
really care about. So that's a little bit of my
advice for if you haven't yet applied.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
Yeah, great, great input. I mean, and you know, like
you said, you know you'll have plenty of advice, but
it's always the best advice that stays top of mind.
So whatever you've said is super applicable. And even though
you didn't answer the question on engineering, that's what I
was going to next, right, I mean, because you have
that sort of really good mix of you know, being
(34:45):
a CTO Gralphi, you've been a product leader as well,
and you've been an engineering leader. One of the things
I've seen in a lot of these startups, I mean,
all of them gets kind of muddied, right, each of
their roles, I mean kind of gets mix step. People
don't know whether they're doing product management versus engineering and
(35:06):
what suffers the output eventually suffers, right, I mean, you've
kind of been through or one all of these different hats.
I mean, what is your point of view on where
do you draw the line? You know, where when do
you need to bring in, say somebody from engineering to
start with, and when do you need a chief product officer.
(35:29):
What are your thoughts on that in general?
Speaker 1 (35:31):
Well, you know, one thing to notice is that my
thoughts on this is still evolving. So even after a
decade at Planing Grid, you know, three years of Tiger I,
it's still like I'm learning daily. As it comes to
this topic on how to how to be aware, the
most important thing is to try to be aware of
the different hats you're wearing so that you can better
compartmentalize and understand the job you're trying to do. Like,
(35:52):
I'm doing a much different job when I'm product leader
than when I'm engineering manager when I'm CTO. They're actually
like very independent jobs I do. But normally at most startups,
we don't have the luxury of hiring a bunch of people,
so you end up doing a lot of this. Yeah,
you're wearing all these hats at once, I find I
bet this is natural for pretty much everybody that you
have to wear one of the hats more often depending
(36:14):
on the day of the month. Right, you just got
to pay attention where am I week, this month, this day,
what do I need to do today? And let me
I'll give you a few I've got I've got a
rubric here. I've been working on this for a bit,
so I got a rubric here on how to handle
this products. I'll do product first. I've learned this again
over and over again. If your pre product market fit,
don't hire product managers. That's just like I should have
(36:37):
learned this already. I've tried it a few times. I've
hired some really smart people that are very talented, and
I loved working with them. I just don't think it's
very satisfying for them. I don't think it's very satisfying
for the company. Founders have got to own product and
in a strong way, like like with the capital O
for own until you hit product market fit. You've got
(36:58):
to be in the customer conversations. You have to it
close to your chest. You can't let it drift off.
And if you try to hire products too early, they're
just not going to be happy, even if you hire
the best person possible. So that's one of my lessons
is to wait till you've got product market fits to
hire products and then Okay, how do you know what
job you're doing when you're doing product. I got this
(37:18):
from a leader in the past when I was personally
having trouble figure out what the hell product? It's prioritization, Like,
that's the number one thing product does. Like, that's the
simplest thing you could boil it down to is prioritization.
And the reason that's so important is because product doesn't
actually say what's right and wrong. That's like a weird thing.
Product says what should go ahead of the other things.
(37:38):
And of course what often becomes part of product's job
as well as what the heck are we talking about?
What do we call this concept? What are a few
of this you know, what are called users stories or
the solutions that this product solves? Right, if we were
to talk about this product when it launches, how do
we talk about this thing? So product kind of organizes
the order of those things based upon and this is
(38:00):
is very strongly I believe in this a Cartesian coordinate system,
very simple to vectors. How hard is this to build?
How valuable will it be for my customers? And then
my best trick to early product managers and early founders
that are dealing with engineering challenges is you take that
Cartesian coordinate system, how much value is this going to
(38:20):
bring to our company? And how hard is this to build?
You plot your features on it, and I guarantee when
you're having challenges, you'll start notice that your engineers they
won't be estimating how hard it is. They'll be like
guessing about how good this would be for the market.
And then for some reason, you're like other co founder
that's like a business person is guessing how hard it
is to build. Like they're both not doing their jobs.
(38:42):
Like the engine needs to estimate, the co founder needs
to say how important it is. And your job in
product is to try to bring those together and find
the optimum way.
Speaker 2 (38:49):
The low hanging fruit to like move the company forward. Beautiful, beautiful.
I'm going to look it up myself. I mean, I
mean I was thinking it doesn't have to be necessarily
for product managers, just for prioritizeization in general. Right, I
mean that model is going to be super useful. So
and well, said Ralph. I mean, I mean a light
bult off went off in my head about how important
(39:11):
prioritization is. Right, And of course you're speaking to the market,
you're speaking to the customer to understand what is more
important for them to actually help with that prioritization, which
is the flip side to it. And then you go
build it right. I mean that's why I think your
point on product market fit is also super important as
to how it overlaps right.
Speaker 1 (39:33):
Totally right. I'm glad, thank you for that. For that,
I'll give you two more to finish your question. The
engineering management and CTR engineering management is when you are
trying to hire, fire and manage your team. So it's
bringing in the talent. It's sometimes you know, helping the
talent out. It's figuring out what projects are doing next.
(39:53):
It's figuring out what projects they want to do, figuring
out what they're confused about, what they're inspired about, where
their blockers are, you know, what the names of their
kids are, what they do in their free time, what
they want to be in their career right, where they
want to go, and how to help them get there.
It's it's it's tricky to run both product hat and
management hat because you've really got to like you can't
(40:14):
be like bullet point bulletpoint bulletpoint, like where's my feature,
where's this? How do I build this? You do have
to actually add a little space to understand the person
and make sure that you're not going to have someone
just quit out of nowhere, because that's going to impact
your product development too. If like you don't realize that
somebody doesn't really like their job, or you might not
realize that somebody's you know, been looking for a while
to find a new job, and you know, you just
(40:36):
you just assume that you thought they were happy because
you were spending too much time having fun working with them,
right to not really get at the core issue. Are
they feeling satisfied with their career or is this company
pointing them where they want to go? So engineering management's
like I think, now this gets a little bit more controversial,
but also it tends to be you can be a
player coach and engineering management. You can still code a bit.
(41:00):
You can still be an architects those especially for early stage,
those jobs sometimes split up later. On coding, you got
to be careful on You've got to code the stuff
no one wants to do, the CICD, the tools, you know,
the kind of ugly stuff. You can't do the cool stuff.
And you can only code if you're an engineering manager,
if you've got the time. You can't block your team.
You can't write bag code because it's embarrassing, right, You're
(41:22):
just gonna embarrass yourself, but you do have an opportunity
to still be a player coach as an engage manager.
It's a very special job. I love it. And then
finally my last job, I'll tell you about the CTO job.
This one's the most weird. So it's the funnest to
talk about. CTOs do any portion of everything I just said,
so product and engineering management, all the things I've said.
CTOs could easily have that in their purview. They're either
(41:44):
going to be direct management, which is what I am,
so I manage the entire team and all the functions,
or they're going to be more of a leadership capacity
where they might not manage anyone directly, but they might
still plan for the future. When I'm talking to you
right now and getting to you know, share with your
audience and hopefully learn more about what makes technology so
exciting now and you know, just have a good conversation.
(42:06):
I'm really wearing my CTO hat because why would As
a product leader, I don't need to be here. I
should be off talking to the customer. As an engineering manager,
I shouldn't be here. I should be off helping my
team talking to them. But the CTO I should be
understanding what's happening out there in the general world. I
should be sharing stories and experiences of my own company.
I should be talking to other thought leaders about what
kind of you know, what they're seeing in the market,
(42:28):
how they're thinking of technology, getting getting to learn more
about the flutter ecosystem. You know, this is open source projects.
Like I mentioned earlier, this is really up the alley
of CTOs. What makes it special. As companies scale, that's
get that's get this changes right, CTO has become a
different thing. Some CTOs just recruit. They're only focused on
engineering recruiting because that's the need of the build that
(42:50):
the company is scaling at such speed, that's the challenge.
Some CTOs have a small team that like only works
on new product development. They do a lot of different jobs,
but you know, mostly they should be there to kind
of be more of the general high level view of
the architecture where it's going. Understand if there's a news
article about AI, how to relate that to the business,
(43:11):
Tell your CEO about it. And that's that's kind of
like those bullet points between product being prioritization, engineering management
being kind of how to grow a team, manage a team,
keep a team successful, and CTO being kind of the
high level making sure that we're one step ahead of
the competition, understanding where the market is and getting the
message out there for our company, and understanding what the
(43:32):
message is from others. That's how I break it up
the three jobs.
Speaker 2 (43:35):
Yeah, very very enlightening. Gralth. I mean your point of
view is mean again, I'm just thinking as you're speaking,
and a lot of what I'm thinking is I mean,
ad also depends on which stage you are in as well, right,
I mean, you know, if you're a like day one
to say, first twelve months, some of the components change.
(43:56):
If you're a little more mature, you know, your priorities change,
and then the roles are the proportion of what you
do with the three components that you mentioned change as well,
so you've got to be aware of it. But at
the end of the day, I also think, I mean,
you know, you do what you're good at. You know,
it also depends on the person. You know, if it's Ralph,
you do it this way. If it's somebody else, you know,
(44:19):
they might prefer doing it another way. But super good
overarching principle, So thank you for that. Anything else you
would like to tell the audience, Ralph about Tiger I,
any help you want from the community to, you know,
take a look at your AI analyst. I mean, can
they play around with it? I mean anything else that
you would like the community to do.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
Yeah, that's a really good point. So we don't have
anything that the community can publicly play around with. But
one thing we do have is we do have a
demo and it's pretty cool. So I would say, you know,
most products can't be demoed right now with Tiger I.
Part of the tiger ice core technology is a simulator.
It helps you forecast the future, kind of build out
future scenario is we can use that simulator to build
(45:02):
synthetic data, which means that you know, if you're working
at a company or if you have a data team
in particular, I think some folks you know might be
on the data side, we can basically help you all
with pretty much the full ETL stack, which for mid
market companies could be a real headache saver. So everywhere
from the cold storage to the ETL to forming the
(45:25):
data model, all the way up to answering the AI questions,
that's really where we see Tiger now. And anyone that's
in that kind of space in that market. You know,
i'd love to see, you know, reaching out to me
scheduling and download checking out our software, kind of playing
around with it, seeing if it meets their needs. For
the community that doesn't have that type of role, though,
for the people that aren't in finance, you know, another
(45:46):
thing to note is we are really pushing hard on finance. Now.
This isn't on the website, but you know, I would
say to your audience if anyone's in the finance space
as well, or does a finance like job, that's a
place we're really interested in right now. We're just finishing
our nets integrations some really cool stuff outside of that, though,
I think on the open source side, this is really
exciting stuff for me. If you are on a project
(46:07):
that needs a local database like duck dB, I'd definitely
love for you all to check out a duc dB
dart binding see if you like them, give them a try.
Open Some issues on the board were under active development
there I would say one thing I could use a
temperature check for. So this one's a unique one, but hey,
I'll throw it out to the development community. We ended
up developing a pretty robust graphic capability inside of Tiger
(46:31):
Eye as well. We didn't mean to because there was
fl chart, which is like a pretty reasonable library for charting,
but fl chart has like weird, not weird, but it
has limitations that the author is not going to fix
anytime soon, and we couldn't wait for like, for instance,
we needed like a funnel where you could turn a
bar chart on its side, and you know, fl chart
just didn't support that. So you know, like also our
(46:54):
charting library, it supports millions of data points. We had
some speed issues and some customers we have have millions
of data points. We're not sure if we want to
open source it yet, but I'm just throwing out there
if anyone's interested in the open source Flutter graphic library
and has an interest there, the more data I get,
the more likely will be to open source it and
support it. So I just want to throw that out
(47:15):
there to your audience.
Speaker 2 (47:16):
Super super So, I mean our audience includes all sorts
of people, So we'll be sure to give a shout
out to the flooded audience to see if somebody wants
to knock at your door, and I'll be sure to
publish all the contact information.
Speaker 1 (47:28):
Well, thank you very much, Anthony. It was really nice
getting to know you better. I didn't I didn't know
you were in AE, for instance. That was really fun
to learn and really really fun chatting with you today.
Speaker 2 (47:37):
Likewise, thanks so much for coming. I wish you and
the team the very best with Tiger.
Speaker 1 (47:42):
I thank you same to you. Take care, take care.
Speaker 2 (47:44):
Bye.
This is the Startup Still Say Podcast. Thank you for
tuning in. Do us a favor like subscribe on YouTube
or LinkedIn, and be sure to give us your feedback.
Hope you enjoy this episode.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hello everyone, welcome to a brand new episode of Startups
Still Say. This is Anthony Prakash, your host, and I'm
thrilled to be joined today by Ralph Godie from Tiger.
I I've known Ralph for a couple of years. I've
had an opportunity to listen to Ralph recently at an event,
and since then I've been trying to get Ralph on
(00:33):
our podcast. So I'm super happy that Ralph is taking
the time to talk to us about his journey, more importantly,
what he's up to these days. He's a co founder
of a company called Tiger, and he will talk to
us about Tiger on many more things along his superb
entrepreneurial journey he has been on. So first of all, Ralph,
welcome to the show. Thank you very much for inviting me, Anthony,
(00:55):
nice to be here. Awesome. So just for the audience, Ralph,
and why didn't you kick us off with a little
bit about yourself, You know, things that they should know
at a high level. We'll obviously go through everything that
you've been on on all the learnings in your journey.
So what do you go to alf?
Speaker 1 (01:10):
Thank you. My name is Ralph Goody. I'm the CTO
and co founder of Tiger. This is my second company.
My first company was named Plagrid. It sold to Autodesk
about five six years ago. So this has been a
really fun journey for me. I didn't expect to be
an entrepreneur, or certainly to be a second time founder.
(01:32):
I started my career in research, actually at the Johns
Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, where I was a researcher and
also I did a lot of like very low level
grunt tasks like set up source control systems on Unix machines.
It was a really fun job. I really enjoyed it.
(01:52):
I eventually got to do some map optimization after that.
You know, I was working in suburban Maryland, that's where
John's Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratories based. My friend invited me
out to interview at Sony. This was at the time
Sony Erickson was around before the iPhone, and so Sony
Erickson used to make the best films, right before the
(02:13):
iPhone and I interviewed out at Sony Rickson. I ended
up loving California. I could go rock climbing, I could
eat delicious vegan burritos. The work was interesting to me.
It was I worked on Android one point zero with
Sony and Google as a collaboration, so I joined Sony.
I worked there for about a year and a half.
It was when they launched the iPhone. My background also,
(02:35):
I was working at the cell phone company while the
iPhone was being launched. I actually got to watch a
company respond to the iPhone's launch, which was exciting and
really taught me a lot when building my own company
as well, how to build how to build a product
team I did do. After working for Sony for a bit,
I had a really great opportunity to work at Pixar,
(02:56):
where I worked on Cars two, Toys three, and Brave.
I'm credited on Cars two. I'm really proud of It's
my children's favorite movie, which is kind of crazy considering,
you know, Cars two is not not my personal favorite
Pixar movie, but it is all, you know, all three
of my children's favorite movie right now. So I'm very
proud to have done that. In the past. I had
(03:17):
a great job there, I had a great boss, I
had a great team. It was it was a really
good experience for me, and the only reason I left
Pixar was to start start playing with at the time
my partner now my wife, and three of my best friends.
Actually we all started a construction software company called Playing
Great built it from us, you know, us five co
founders to about four hundred, five hundred people at the
(03:40):
time of the acquisition by Autodesk. Still, you know, a
great journey. A lot of people that were joined us
during that journey are still working at Autodesk. It was
really quite an experience going from a kind of zero
to one hundred million dollar company, and a lot of
those experiences were kind of what led me into Tigrey.
So that's just a little short thing on my background.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
That is such a fascinating background, Ralphi. I'm I honored
that you're also the first guest from Hollywood, I should say,
giving your work in picture and cars and elsewhere. So
that's that's another feather in the podcast. So thank you
for that. So one of the things that I was
really curious to learn about you just as a person
(04:27):
and your fascination for math in general. Is I mean,
were you as a as a kid, were you inspired
by somebody and drawn towards matt or how did that happen?
Speaker 1 (04:37):
I was really lucky on my career in math. I
was actually drawn towards computers as a kid. So my
I you know, I was talking to my dad and
mentioned I learned how to program at about twelve, and
my father corrected me I was actually nine, some studid.
I barely believe that. I think he's just being proud.
But I taught myself CUE basic off of the Doss
C Basic because the helped manual was like a full
(05:00):
functional pro and you would like literally learn to program
from just the help guide. And I really loved it.
There was example code, and so the example code really
gave me a lot. Like you know, I just was
a kid living in the country with Q basic and
a help file, and I I really loved it. I
taught myself Visual Basics. One of my friends' parents had
that gave it to me, and you know, that really
(05:22):
just gave me something to do before the Internet even existed.
I was just having fun designing Windows three point one interfaces.
But the reason I got into math was when I
was in the computer science program, I was very lucky
to have a teacher that really cared about me. And
I was talking about computer science and like the different
(05:42):
careers and this is just advice I got. I liked it.
Was the advice that he gave me was that you know,
computer science was just it was a tool, and that
you wanted to do something with that tool. And it
was really helpful to have some domain experience with which
to buy the tool. And he told me that math
was a good, good area because you know, when you
talk about code or programming, yeah, everyone knows that, right,
(06:06):
Like I can use Excel, right, Like I don't know
how to program. But when you say like Chinese remainder theoryum,
Everyone's eyes like glaze over. And so it was pretty
it was good advice for me back then. It got me.
I was also lucky to have another teacher that when
I wasn't very good at math. Let me really put
it short, I was not good at math until I
got into kind of college and upper level math. And
(06:27):
it wasn't until I learned how to tie together math
concepts with programming that it really started to come together.
For example, I learned matt Lab and so like matt
Lab was like my bridge between mathematics and coding. And
I really ended up loving high level theoretical math. So
I wasn't not a math kid very much. I wasn't
very good at math in high school. I wasn't very
(06:48):
academically skilled at it. But by the time I got
to upper level mathematics, I really loved it. This particularly
abstract algebra and you kind of like fundamental theories of
prime numbers and cryptography. It's just much fun for me.
But you don't get to learn that stuff until later.
I failed math just like everyone else when I was younger.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
I'm actually the opposite. I must say. I was really
good in math in school, and then something happened when
I went to college and everything went away in this
in dis array, right, So I mean I actually did
mechanical engineering, so I did nothing related to computers until
I got a job, which was in the computer science industry.
So life happens, as they say, right, So that's cool.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
That's cool.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
Yeah, So so you're told about math, I mean, how
did how did the whole design aspect come in? Was
that more at Pixar and Sony or somewhere else.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Just going back to that, like teaching myself visual basic.
I actually like just kind of you know, I'm I'm
an amateur artist. I'm not like very good, but you know,
I work out it. It's very fun for me and
the aspects, you know, when I was at Pixar, I
was very lucky to be able to sit in art classes,
like everyone can join our classes. When I worked at Pixar, Yeah,
so I got to like work like seek our classes
(07:57):
by real artists, so I know, like I'm not them,
but I really enjoy it. And the interface, like you
user experiences. I'm so into user experience. I think it's
because it's like a personal passion of mine being able
to try to drive something towards simplicity and usefulness, kind
of work through the edges. It's really fun for me.
So on the design aspect, I for plan Grid did
(08:20):
pretty much all the initial user experience and design I did.
I was lucky to have some co founders that were
really good editors and did do some parts of it too.
But I was very lucky to have been able to
build the design team and build the product team and
been able to design a lot of the core products.
I'm lucky at Tiger I have hired an amazing designer
to work with. So you know, for me personally, I
(08:40):
like to hire people better than me, and thankfully I've
got a designer that's much better than me that I
work with it now. But I just love his designs.
It's fun for me.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
Yeah, that is always a smart approach to get somebody
smarter than you on the team. Right, So let's double
click on plan Grid right before we get into Tiger
Eye itself, because I think your foundation for Tiger Eye
came from your years of experience working with working on
plan Grid, all the issues that you had to deal
with with planning and number.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
Crunching and things like that.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
So for the audience, Ralph, I mean, can you just
take us through how plan Grid came about, How did
you become a co founder with your now partner in life,
and how is that journey as a whole for.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
You, Clangrid, What a special journey that was. Really, you know,
the more years to go by, the more you can
kind of reflect upon really a special experience. Were very
it was just we were very lucky. Like that's the
thing to say, We're lucky. We worked hard, We're in
the right place the right time. You know. That just
doesn't happen very often. It's a big component of luck. Here.
(09:45):
I've had one had just been launched brand new. I
had deep graphics experience from Pixar, particularly around EPs and
PDF files. I'm like a world expert in pdf files,
so weird thing, like who wants No one even wants
that being an expert in p files, But here I am.
I've researched pdf files. And I meet a woman at
(10:05):
a punk venue, you know, watching a really great show,
and we hit it off, and I want to impress her,
and she's like, I've got this, my friend. We're doing
a startup blueprints on an iPad, and I said, hey,
I can put blueprints on an iPad for you. And
it turns out it was actually quite hard. At the time,
the iPad one was a very limited in its graphics abilities,
(10:26):
and blueprints are huge. They're physically large, forty two by
thirty inches, right, So when you do the measurements for
dpi right went about two hundred dots fringe try to
get a good scan going. It's just a lot of
memory and a lot of space these things take up,
which was My specialty was dealing with that, so I
put some It wasn't like anything too advanced I applied,
but just kind of general off the shelf, good, good
(10:48):
graphics algorithms and was able to produce a blueprint render
that's still at the heart of audit ask solution as
far as I can tell. And it was, you know,
light years ahead of a competition. For instance, on the
iPad one playing is the only thing that could view blueprints.
For about two to three years that we had only
(11:09):
viewer right Auto Acrobat and Crash you know, the built
in preview crash at a memory. Eventually, you know, hardware
got better, software got better, you know, five years in
that wasn't We had other features that kind of kept
us ahead, but the core of the product was a
blueprint viewer and the idea of version control and blueprints
because construction blueprints changed really frequently. So we brought in
(11:31):
a few version control concepts from you know, computer science,
and we leafed that together with like issue tracking and
then having issues on the different versions, and then deploying
that to the field really fast, having cross platform annotations.
It was a very user friendly, a very loved product.
We had a very high NPS score, you know, four
point nine stars, two thousand reviews on the app Store,
(11:55):
a really passionate user base, and construction in the field.
You know, this was a product that was meant for people.
You know, there's all kinds of ways to say people
that wore boots, people that people that had to shower
at night, you know, after a long day's worth of work, right,
there's all kinds of ways to say it, but people
in the field is the most simple ways say it. Like,
we tried to build software for folks that were hard
(12:17):
hats to the job every day, and it was it
was really I'm a constantly an honor and a privilege
to be able to serve the work those folks working
that hard, like it was inspiring, you know as I
look back to it, and I'm really proud of what
we build as a team. The fun note is we
also are able to build a really strong company culture.
You know, at Playing Grid, we were well known to
(12:38):
have a very strong team. There's probably about ten successful
startups that were all from alumni at Playing Grid. Some
of them, you know, they're advertising on one oh one
when you drive into San Francisco. People that have met
at Playing Grid are at a company with those folks,
and you know, I think are going to be more
successful than Playing Grid was a long term which is
I'm I think that's probably what I'm most proud of
(12:59):
when I think else for the Playing Guard journeys, that
we were able to build a place where people could
connect build even more successful things in the future. And
it was really, you know, as I said a few times,
a special place based out of seventeenth a mission that
was where our office was right above Thrift Town. Really
good burritos in the area. We had great places to eat,
great bars, great neighborhood to be in. And you know,
(13:24):
I think the industry has changed quite a bit from
what it was back when we started. I still friends
in the industry, they're good friends of mine, and you know,
I'm glad we we I think got to help move
the industry forward into the digitization era. You know, it's
a different era now. That was like kind of the
mobile digitization are now we're in obviously the AI era.
There's different challenges in construction than there were when we
(13:44):
were doing Playing Grid, But for its time, it was
you know, something really proud of them, something that thankfully
made a lot of people very successful.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Yeah, that's super inspiring. And you know, like you said,
I mean being in the right place at the right
time that very important with the iPad. And I was
also connecting in my head about you know how important
design is, right because in those early days of using technology,
like on a flat screen, and people who are not
(14:14):
really technology savvy, right, I mean like the construction workers.
I mean maybe today in today's world, everybody is mean,
but in those days for you to first of all
get that adoption and then from a design perspective, make
it intuitive enough to say okay, I mean if they
say nope, I don't want to use this, I want
to use something else. I mean, you've got to cater
to that audience. So I see how it all comes
(14:36):
together for you. So super cool, Ralph. So let's shift
gears a little bit. I mean, so with your current company,
so maybe not there yet. So with plan grid you
sold that to Autodesk, and you were there for the
transition for a little bit with Autodesk. And what are
(14:59):
you thinking about Tiger II right back then? Or when
did you start kind of thinking of oh what what
what should we do next?
Speaker 1 (15:08):
Would say that I have you know, you're always kind
of thinking about the next thing, or at least a
few of the next things as an entrepreneur. Certainly wasn't
working on Tiger I at that point, right, of course not,
but you know, kind of thinking about it. What are
the problems that we have at Autodesk, right, what are
the problems with integration? Right? These were all inspirations that
kind of landed us where we landed. So I think
(15:31):
that probably the best thing to say is, like, there's
I always had a challenge at plane Grid around data.
When we built the company. This was when Luker was
first released, red Shift was first there, Like there was
the concept of insights like this was very new, Like
mixed panel was like brand new. Still Amplitude was still
you know one of my friends' companies who's now you know,
(15:52):
power to them. They're so successful right now, I'm so
proud of them. Were kicking ass. Like these products were
still so new it it wasn't like that then, And
so you had to build a team to do any
type of data insights, right, like a full team. And
we built this amazing team like PhDs, great leadership, great individuals,
and they started like trying to like do stuff with
(16:14):
our data, right, Like where's the hot leads? How are
the customers connected? What's our arr you know, like let's
share the data and all the shit. So I think
pretty common stuff. Every company kind of went through the
same type of journey with you know, ETL and kind
of where we landed. And that team was like ten
people is expensive, and they didn't really like their work,
and you know, truly it could have been management. I
could have maybe tried to be a better boss. But
(16:36):
eventually it's like an analyst, right, It's like a ticket
crunching machine, right, like what's my like segmentation breakdown and
my growth? Right? And then like someone with the PhD
would like try to answer that with SQL and like
return the results. It wasn't a very satisfying job for them,
and they eventually left and they're like leading the data
science teams at BREX and like very successful folks, doing
great things with their career. But when they left, they
(16:58):
kind of left a bunch of like dashboards and around
not quite assembled fully, you know, and so like you know,
they're on to their next jobs, right, they weren't worried
about their old dashboards, And I started to notice when
I was a board member different companies that the same
kind of thing would pop up, Like it's just a
bunch of dashboards laying around and you know they weren't
really fused together well that there was a lot of
(17:18):
work to put them together too. So this was something
we kind of started to put together at both Autodesk
and at Plaine Grid was during the transition. You know,
there's like two salesforce environments. You know, people were trying
to sell to the same companies, right, Like, it was
kind of hard to coordinate some basic things around back
office in particular CRM, ERP marketing type stuff like knowing
(17:40):
what campaigns were successful was mysterious somehow, Like it was
still very difficult, and this for most companies. So these
were some of the challenges we saw during you know,
some of the challenges we saw during the transition that
kind of helped inspire us for what's next. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:54):
Yes, it's so spart on, you know, I mean for
those of who you who don't know, I mean I
come from twenty years of go to market and when
I saw Tiger Eye, you're putting together something like this
and with all the features that you've listed, I mean,
it was, you know, I look forward to what you
guys were building, because I mean, you're you're so right.
You know, I used to be an account manager, a
(18:16):
client partner for some of the largest accounts out there.
The week that I would dread is the week I
did forecasting, right, because it is it is fifty percent
math I mean and fifty percent gut field, right, I mean,
and you're so worried about the gut field that you're
putting out there saying, oh my god, is my forecast
going to be right?
Speaker 1 (18:35):
Right?
Speaker 2 (18:36):
And then the same thing I mean, when you're running
a product. I mean, I've seen saying Okay, you spent
one hundred thousand dollars on this campaign. What is the
real impact of this hundred thousand dollars from the campaign?
People will say, okay, we got these ten leads, I mean,
and it stops there, right, I mean, nobody is quantifying
it beyond the ten leads and saying okay, I mean,
how are we taking this forward? What result to what dollars?
(18:59):
Is it a result in? Nothing like that? So I
totally appreciate what you're doing, I mean, and in a
way correct me if I'm wrong. Ralph, I mean you
were actually trying to build a new category with Tiger I, right,
I mean you would not classify this as a CRM
or you know, another go to market tool which captures
leads and things like that. Where do you see Tiger
(19:20):
I fitting into that whole realm of things?
Speaker 1 (19:22):
That's a great question right now. It was actually kind
of surprising that business intelligence was where we landed. You know,
I don't wonder if it's like I got to like
check can I say rich for business intelligence out loud?
And particularly the go to market space. We what the
learning was as we started the company and from our
last one was that like democratized data was great for
(19:43):
like a certain generation, right, but then it had some
type of like inverse effect where it got so democratized
it's like just a bunch of stuff around, and it
was hard to get the answers of like what's really happening?
And so you end up with these companies that are like,
you know, basically just ask them the question like where
we at over and over again out into like basically nothingness,
(20:03):
you know what I mean, Like they just keep asking
that same question, keep getting the same results back. And
so what we tried to do is bring together both
the business intelligence space with obviously artificial intelligence combo artificial intelligence,
both the current generation of artificial intelligence. Now it's generative
AI is what most people mean when they say AI,
as well as predictive artificial intelligence and machine learning, which
(20:26):
is what people would have meant, you know, a few
years ago when people said AI. So we bring all
those things together into a very like tailor made go
to market erp business intelligence solution. The advantage of this
is it like from out of the box, you get
a lot more functionality. You don't really have to hire
a team of people to try to customize it. Like
(20:48):
these things end up being a pattern at every company
we work with. We've noticed that there's just a very
strong pattern of what kind of graphs people are looking
for the connections they need to make between their you know,
the whole quote to cash kind of you know, or
even before that, what about like just touch to cash right,
Like we were trying to work on Basically that's what
most people use business intelligence for in the go to
(21:08):
market space. We're basically trying to get people the information
and you a lot faster so they can make better
strategic decisions. AI unlocks a lot of superpowers that we
didn't have before. Like certainly it's you know, we we're
we feel like we're far ahead of the competition right now.
I mean that's just because the competition is still trying
to release products and we have something we can demo.
(21:31):
You know, we're always keeping an eye because there's a
lot of marketing message out there on what business you know,
what AI is doing in the business world, but we
haven't seen much when it comes to real agent technology.
And that's that's what the core of our product is
is is an agent analyst that can answer basic questions
around your data and then also answer more complicated questions
(21:52):
about growth of next year, what happens if I add
three sales reps to Maryland? You know what I mean.
These are very challenging things to model and do scenario
analysis on. That's what our product's meant for, not the
basic stuff, but the more complicated stuff. Of course, we
have to answer the basic stuff really easily to answer
the complicated stuff, so we do that too, got it?
Speaker 2 (22:11):
And I also noticed with the Holy AI Analyst, I mean,
you're kind of giving the freedom of choice to pick
which LM your customers want to use. So you're kind
of marrying let's say, tigerize own proprietary technology that you've
developed with all your knowledge on this data, with the
BI tools and all of that, bringing in whichever the
(22:34):
customer is comfortable with, and kind of bringing the best
of both worlds so to speak, right, I mean, is
that a right way to put it?
Speaker 1 (22:42):
Oh? Yeah, absolutely. One of our lessons from Planegrid as
well was the needs of enterprise customers. You know, Tiger
as an enterprise product built for enterprise companies, enterprise and
mid market companies that are growing very fast, and because
of this, they might have already chosen the model they
want to work with or maybe partner with, you know,
Open AI or and Thropic already or Google, you know,
(23:03):
and we want to be able to take advantage of
working with the data teams that, you know, the work
they've already done, and be able to integrate with whatever
solutions the customers already chosen that fits them. That being said,
you know a lot of our current customers just you know,
you use the default setting if you will, right, They
don't really need much customiz issue. I think most people's
(23:25):
journeys around AI and business is still very new. Actually,
it's it's like happening right now as we speak. Got it.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
And for the sake of our friends from the Flood community,
those of you, those of whom have not listened to
your story from you know, Flood of Silicon Valley as
you are preparing to build a brand new company, a
brand new technology, right, I mean, how did you land
on Flood?
Speaker 1 (23:49):
My gosh, man, Flutter. It's good. I get like freedom
to talk about how much I love Flutter, and it's
okay people want to hear it, right because normally this
would stop a conversation with like a normal person and
it doesn't want to talk about like butter. I Actually,
so this was like almost as we were trying to
learn about, you know, what the challenges of businesses were.
During integration, I also knew about a core tech problem
(24:11):
that I personally experienced, which was cross platform development. It
was really a nightmare at playing Grid. Really, I mean,
just gosh, the wasted time developing the same feature on iOS,
on Android, on web, on Windows Native. And then also
we had a very robust back end. They could also
export data would often need parity issues. We had like
(24:31):
a whole project manager just managing the coordination of a
simple feature development between all the platforms. We had this
matrix of feature parody across them all, and then every
team started developing its own culture, you know, like the
iOS culture is like, oh, we're so much better than
the Android developers, and YadA YadA. It's really just a
total waste of time. Like I couldn't believe the effort
(24:53):
that was just thrown away. And I didn't think personally
that the native interface was giving me that much, you
know what I mean. I mean, like, sure, it's like
kind of nicer, and I like iOS. I like Android
apps stuff like Android. But you know Spotify is pretty
good looking, right, It's like Spotify on every platform, right,
Even Apple does development on Android. Now, Apple Music is
like also on Android, looks great in its own weird
(25:15):
little Apple UX. So I kind of felt like, you know,
even chat gpt has its own kind of UX. It's
not really iOS when you're using it, it's its own
little chat chpt world. And so I felt like that
would be the approach I wanted to do, but I
didn't know the tech stack to use. So I tried
two major approaches. I tried web and you know, React
(25:36):
native and all that, and I really hated it for
like a million reasons that I don't know if anyone
wants to hear about, but it which wasn't fast enough.
I don't like the programming paradigms. I don't think web
is meant to build apps. I think web technologies were
meant for documents, and they're great at documents, they weren't
meant for like an enterprise app. I don't want to write,
and like everything comes back to the dom. Like I'm
a I learned web very early. I'm a good web developer,
(25:58):
and so like all the technology still have dom leaking
through it. Even you know, web assembly is really cool.
I love the tech, but you know, most of the
UI you're still gonna end up writing in the dom, right,
You're just gonna end up calling unless you re implement
it all on web assembly, which then sparked my interest
in like, what do video games do? Video games already
do this, right, they already share code. So I found
(26:18):
some video game toolkits. One immediate guy was what I
was really interested in. I wrote, I wrote a CRM,
a very simple CRM in immediate gooey and c an
immediate gooey with a direct to open gl and it
was like pretty hard, and I worked with a designer.
I was like, hey, man, can you make this look
like a business happen? Like take immediate gooy and like
build me like widgets with it. And he's like, I'm sorry,
(26:41):
I can't. You know, I tried my best. This is
as good as I get. While this was all happening,
one of my old friends from Sony posted a paper
and it was a white paper on how they were
developing their new Sony worked with one of the automobile
manufacturers in Japan to develop a new interface for their cars,
and so it was, you know, as a friend of mine,
really good talented, low level engineer. So I just was
(27:02):
reading the paper and it was like, okay, they're using
this technology Flutter, and they've it's so low level that
you can strip out all the widgets and it writes
directly to the frame you know, right, can work right
with the frame buffer, so you can get really good
performance and graphics effects and shaders and stuff, and it's
totally cross platform. And then I was like, whoa, that's
really close to her I want And I started looking
(27:24):
at how the widget tree works, and you know, the
uni directional and data flow of the state structures, and like,
I just for me personally as somebody that's been writing
UI since Visual Studios one point zero. I've done QT,
I've done mac iOS, Android, Swift, Objective C Mac, I've
done so many toolkits it's nauseating. And this is to
me the best. This is like the best I've ever
(27:45):
seen on developing front and systems, and it's proven itself out.
We've built a lot of products, and Flutter I think
probably you know, i'd say we're probably probably built. I
don't know who else is built what, but I'd say
I would say, without anyone stand it, I'd say we
built probably one of the more complicated, if not the
most complicated Flutter app out there, because we've you know,
we've dealt with every challenge Flutter pretty much had. Yeah,
(28:08):
it's been it's been awesome, man, I've really loved it.
So that's why i'd say about Flutter, it's like I've
you know, I always want there to be a lot
of development on Flutter in the future, so I've got
my wish list. But even when I first came across Flutter,
like a year or two ago, it was already so
close to being perfect, and you know that's it's still
it's still something I love and a technology we're really
we're really close to.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
Yeah, thank you for that. I mean I would attest
to everything that you said. I mean, you know, yes,
I mean there isn't I mean, it's it's not going
to check all the boxes, but everybody, but I think
it checks most of the boxes that you need, especially
for a use case like yours. And I think, I mean,
your implementation of Flutter is one of the more complicated
implementations from at least what I saw, So I think
(28:50):
everybody should take a look at what you guys have
done with tigeraie, which is pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
So thank you, Anthony. I have one other throat there.
Just just remember we do we also do open source work.
Open sources really important to us as a company. But
we want to we want to make sure that we
support what we launched, so we're ticketed slow. Our first
open source launch was duck Dart dB. Dart's the lower
level language that Flutters built upon very well, as you
all know, I mean, your audience, you know, they're they're
(29:16):
they're they're in the know, and dark duck dB is
DUCTYB bindings really high quality ones that work directly with
dart at a low level. And the advantage of DUCTV
is like a super sql light. You know, it's does
everything sq light can do, but it is much more.
It's much more built for analytics, can handle you know,
millions of data rows and doing kind of more complicated
(29:38):
comp calculations on them, which you know tiger ide does
a lot of that. So I just want to throw
that out there too. Is we also have some open
source start tools perfect.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
I'll be sure to tell the audience about that when
we post this. So switching gears a little bit, Ralph,
I know you did not set out to be an entrepreneur,
but here you are too companies later, I see you're
also supporting a bunch of folks in why combinator or
you were right? I mean, so, what what are the
(30:08):
top things that I mean you you think you know
people are doing. I mean, nowadays this obviously ten x
more startups than what it was even ten years ago, right,
I mean, so many coming through the funnel, so many successful.
But I mean in your experience and y combinator, I mean,
what are the things that you know just really stood
out to you that you take away as learnings, any
(30:30):
any inputs for founders, Ralph from your perspective.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
Thank you for that. I was a visiting partner y
Combinator for almost a year is a very I was
very proud of that experience. Was a great experience for me.
We still we still work really closely with them, and
we're very proud to have Gary Gary on our board
who also heads up y Combinator. So I'm not an
active investor right now, but I was an active angel investor,
and you know, my partner and I've given a few
(30:56):
talks the recent why I see classes, So I'll try
to summarize a little bit of what I see. You know,
in general, for people that want to apply to y See,
there's some good advice I can give you. It's very straightforward.
You should generally apply with a co founder. Companies are
best done in partnerships. It's good to know your partner
that you're doing that you're doing in company with for
(31:17):
longer than a little while. The way you've met the person,
how long you've known them, is really important. It's a
big difference from somebody that was a roommate in college
with their co founder and you know, build things with
them for years and good friends versus somebody that met recently.
It really makes a big difference when you're interviewing them.
So to try to if you're going to find a
co founder, try to find someone you know and love
(31:38):
and build a relationship with them. It's important anyways. If
you're successful, that's going to be very important for you regardless,
and it's important to have a co founder. The reason
for that is from the investment standpoint, like things happen
all the time, you know, like it's just that's the world.
Like things happen. It's tough life, life's always moving, things
always changing, and because of that, you if you only
have one co founder, it can actually be rather risky.
(32:00):
There's many public stories where there's like one co founder
that's always publicly you know, there's all kinds of stories
in the news about one person that you associate all
success of a company too. But that's normally not at
all what most companies are like. And those companies you
know are questionably like that as well. Most of them
requires a whole group of people, a bunch of people
behind the scenes to make a company workout. So it's
(32:21):
really important for you to have a good partner to
do this with, as well as a good network where
you're going to be recruiting from. Right these these questions
aren't going to come up while you're trying to build
a company, So it's good when you're applying to y
Combinat or other good startup accelerators to already have that
kind of covered out. This is just I'll give like
I don't know, I'm giving a range of advice because
the challenge with advice is you really like it changes rapidly,
(32:44):
like as a company scales or where you're at. So
this is the initial advice is for people that are
trying to get into startups. Yeah, boy is it really
nowadays are so interesting with I know right now is
a time where you don't have to be a ten
X engineer to do a startup, you know, like it
used to be that was the thing, like find it
tenex engineer and then have a good business idea if
the idea is that AI has changed that and you
(33:05):
can actually build like a product a lot quicker now
even with just like being a one X engineer with
a good idea, I still see that strong engineers make
better companies. So my personal position is that you should
find a strong engineering partner. But you know that's you know,
like I could talk more about I'll leave the sense
to find a good, strong engineering partner and then go
(33:27):
to a company with them. I would say most funding
is around AI nowadays, like eighty percent, Like eighty percent
is around AI, and then the rest of the twenty
percent is around like literal curing cancer drugs. Like it's
basically like you're either curing cancer or you're doing something
in AI. Maybe there's some problems in between, you know,
especially if you personally have experience in it. So that's
(33:48):
the next most important point is you should have personal
experience and whatever problem you're solving, you shouldn't just try
to solve general problems like that's not going to be
fun for you. You're probably not going to be successful
at it. You should probably have something you care deeply
about that you've experienced, and that that's always where you
should try to start a company around. It comes off
stronger when you're pitching, comes off stronger when you're building
(34:10):
the product. It comes off stronger when you're working way
too many hours and you're tired and you still got
to work on it. It's nice to have something you
really care about. So that's a little bit of my
advice for if you haven't yet applied.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
Yeah, great, great input. I mean, and you know, like
you said, you know you'll have plenty of advice, but
it's always the best advice that stays top of mind.
So whatever you've said is super applicable. And even though
you didn't answer the question on engineering, that's what I
was going to next, right, I mean, because you have
that sort of really good mix of you know, being
(34:45):
a CTO Gralphi, you've been a product leader as well,
and you've been an engineering leader. One of the things
I've seen in a lot of these startups, I mean,
all of them gets kind of muddied, right, each of
their roles, I mean kind of gets mix step. People
don't know whether they're doing product management versus engineering and
(35:06):
what suffers the output eventually suffers, right, I mean, you've
kind of been through or one all of these different hats.
I mean, what is your point of view on where
do you draw the line? You know, where when do
you need to bring in, say somebody from engineering to
start with, and when do you need a chief product officer.
(35:29):
What are your thoughts on that in general?
Speaker 1 (35:31):
Well, you know, one thing to notice is that my
thoughts on this is still evolving. So even after a
decade at Planing Grid, you know, three years of Tiger I,
it's still like I'm learning daily. As it comes to
this topic on how to how to be aware, the
most important thing is to try to be aware of
the different hats you're wearing so that you can better
compartmentalize and understand the job you're trying to do. Like,
(35:52):
I'm doing a much different job when I'm product leader
than when I'm engineering manager when I'm CTO. They're actually
like very independent jobs I do. But normally at most startups,
we don't have the luxury of hiring a bunch of people,
so you end up doing a lot of this. Yeah,
you're wearing all these hats at once, I find I
bet this is natural for pretty much everybody that you
have to wear one of the hats more often depending
(36:14):
on the day of the month. Right, you just got
to pay attention where am I week, this month, this day,
what do I need to do today? And let me
I'll give you a few I've got I've got a
rubric here. I've been working on this for a bit,
so I got a rubric here on how to handle
this products. I'll do product first. I've learned this again
over and over again. If your pre product market fit,
don't hire product managers. That's just like I should have
(36:37):
learned this already. I've tried it a few times. I've
hired some really smart people that are very talented, and
I loved working with them. I just don't think it's
very satisfying for them. I don't think it's very satisfying
for the company. Founders have got to own product and
in a strong way, like like with the capital O
for own until you hit product market fit. You've got
(36:58):
to be in the customer conversations. You have to it
close to your chest. You can't let it drift off.
And if you try to hire products too early, they're
just not going to be happy, even if you hire
the best person possible. So that's one of my lessons
is to wait till you've got product market fits to
hire products and then Okay, how do you know what
job you're doing when you're doing product. I got this
(37:18):
from a leader in the past when I was personally
having trouble figure out what the hell product? It's prioritization, Like,
that's the number one thing product does. Like, that's the
simplest thing you could boil it down to is prioritization.
And the reason that's so important is because product doesn't
actually say what's right and wrong. That's like a weird thing.
Product says what should go ahead of the other things.
(37:38):
And of course what often becomes part of product's job
as well as what the heck are we talking about?
What do we call this concept? What are a few
of this you know, what are called users stories or
the solutions that this product solves? Right, if we were
to talk about this product when it launches, how do
we talk about this thing? So product kind of organizes
the order of those things based upon and this is
(38:00):
is very strongly I believe in this a Cartesian coordinate system,
very simple to vectors. How hard is this to build?
How valuable will it be for my customers? And then
my best trick to early product managers and early founders
that are dealing with engineering challenges is you take that
Cartesian coordinate system, how much value is this going to
(38:20):
bring to our company? And how hard is this to build?
You plot your features on it, and I guarantee when
you're having challenges, you'll start notice that your engineers they
won't be estimating how hard it is. They'll be like
guessing about how good this would be for the market.
And then for some reason, you're like other co founder
that's like a business person is guessing how hard it
is to build. Like they're both not doing their jobs.
(38:42):
Like the engine needs to estimate, the co founder needs
to say how important it is. And your job in
product is to try to bring those together and find
the optimum way.
Speaker 2 (38:49):
The low hanging fruit to like move the company forward. Beautiful, beautiful.
I'm going to look it up myself. I mean, I
mean I was thinking it doesn't have to be necessarily
for product managers, just for prioritizeization in general. Right, I
mean that model is going to be super useful. So
and well, said Ralph. I mean, I mean a light
bult off went off in my head about how important
(39:11):
prioritization is. Right, And of course you're speaking to the market,
you're speaking to the customer to understand what is more
important for them to actually help with that prioritization, which
is the flip side to it. And then you go
build it right. I mean that's why I think your
point on product market fit is also super important as
to how it overlaps right.
Speaker 1 (39:33):
Totally right. I'm glad, thank you for that. For that,
I'll give you two more to finish your question. The
engineering management and CTR engineering management is when you are
trying to hire, fire and manage your team. So it's
bringing in the talent. It's sometimes you know, helping the
talent out. It's figuring out what projects are doing next.
(39:53):
It's figuring out what projects they want to do, figuring
out what they're confused about, what they're inspired about, where
their blockers are, you know, what the names of their
kids are, what they do in their free time, what
they want to be in their career right, where they
want to go, and how to help them get there.
It's it's it's tricky to run both product hat and
management hat because you've really got to like you can't
(40:14):
be like bullet point bulletpoint bulletpoint, like where's my feature,
where's this? How do I build this? You do have
to actually add a little space to understand the person
and make sure that you're not going to have someone
just quit out of nowhere, because that's going to impact
your product development too. If like you don't realize that
somebody doesn't really like their job, or you might not
realize that somebody's you know, been looking for a while
to find a new job, and you know, you just
(40:36):
you just assume that you thought they were happy because
you were spending too much time having fun working with them,
right to not really get at the core issue. Are
they feeling satisfied with their career or is this company
pointing them where they want to go? So engineering management's
like I think, now this gets a little bit more controversial,
but also it tends to be you can be a
player coach and engineering management. You can still code a bit.
(41:00):
You can still be an architects those especially for early stage,
those jobs sometimes split up later. On coding, you got
to be careful on You've got to code the stuff
no one wants to do, the CICD, the tools, you know,
the kind of ugly stuff. You can't do the cool stuff.
And you can only code if you're an engineering manager,
if you've got the time. You can't block your team.
You can't write bag code because it's embarrassing, right, You're
(41:22):
just gonna embarrass yourself, but you do have an opportunity
to still be a player coach as an engage manager.
It's a very special job. I love it. And then
finally my last job, I'll tell you about the CTO job.
This one's the most weird. So it's the funnest to
talk about. CTOs do any portion of everything I just said,
so product and engineering management, all the things I've said.
CTOs could easily have that in their purview. They're either
(41:44):
going to be direct management, which is what I am,
so I manage the entire team and all the functions,
or they're going to be more of a leadership capacity
where they might not manage anyone directly, but they might
still plan for the future. When I'm talking to you
right now and getting to you know, share with your
audience and hopefully learn more about what makes technology so
exciting now and you know, just have a good conversation.
(42:06):
I'm really wearing my CTO hat because why would As
a product leader, I don't need to be here. I
should be off talking to the customer. As an engineering manager,
I shouldn't be here. I should be off helping my
team talking to them. But the CTO I should be
understanding what's happening out there in the general world. I
should be sharing stories and experiences of my own company.
I should be talking to other thought leaders about what
kind of you know, what they're seeing in the market,
(42:28):
how they're thinking of technology, getting getting to learn more
about the flutter ecosystem. You know, this is open source projects.
Like I mentioned earlier, this is really up the alley
of CTOs. What makes it special. As companies scale, that's
get that's get this changes right, CTO has become a
different thing. Some CTOs just recruit. They're only focused on
engineering recruiting because that's the need of the build that
(42:50):
the company is scaling at such speed, that's the challenge.
Some CTOs have a small team that like only works
on new product development. They do a lot of different jobs,
but you know, mostly they should be there to kind
of be more of the general high level view of
the architecture where it's going. Understand if there's a news
article about AI, how to relate that to the business,
(43:11):
Tell your CEO about it. And that's that's kind of
like those bullet points between product being prioritization, engineering management
being kind of how to grow a team, manage a team,
keep a team successful, and CTO being kind of the
high level making sure that we're one step ahead of
the competition, understanding where the market is and getting the
message out there for our company, and understanding what the
(43:32):
message is from others. That's how I break it up
the three jobs.
Speaker 2 (43:35):
Yeah, very very enlightening. Gralth. I mean your point of
view is mean again, I'm just thinking as you're speaking,
and a lot of what I'm thinking is I mean,
ad also depends on which stage you are in as well, right,
I mean, you know, if you're a like day one
to say, first twelve months, some of the components change.
(43:56):
If you're a little more mature, you know, your priorities change,
and then the roles are the proportion of what you
do with the three components that you mentioned change as well,
so you've got to be aware of it. But at
the end of the day, I also think, I mean,
you know, you do what you're good at. You know,
it also depends on the person. You know, if it's Ralph,
you do it this way. If it's somebody else, you know,
(44:19):
they might prefer doing it another way. But super good
overarching principle, So thank you for that. Anything else you
would like to tell the audience, Ralph about Tiger I,
any help you want from the community to, you know,
take a look at your AI analyst. I mean, can
they play around with it? I mean anything else that
you would like the community to do.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
Yeah, that's a really good point. So we don't have
anything that the community can publicly play around with. But
one thing we do have is we do have a
demo and it's pretty cool. So I would say, you know,
most products can't be demoed right now with Tiger I.
Part of the tiger ice core technology is a simulator.
It helps you forecast the future, kind of build out
future scenario is we can use that simulator to build
(45:02):
synthetic data, which means that you know, if you're working
at a company or if you have a data team
in particular, I think some folks you know might be
on the data side, we can basically help you all
with pretty much the full ETL stack, which for mid
market companies could be a real headache saver. So everywhere
from the cold storage to the ETL to forming the
(45:25):
data model, all the way up to answering the AI questions,
that's really where we see Tiger now. And anyone that's
in that kind of space in that market. You know,
i'd love to see, you know, reaching out to me
scheduling and download checking out our software, kind of playing
around with it, seeing if it meets their needs. For
the community that doesn't have that type of role, though,
for the people that aren't in finance, you know, another
(45:46):
thing to note is we are really pushing hard on finance. Now.
This isn't on the website, but you know, I would
say to your audience if anyone's in the finance space
as well, or does a finance like job, that's a
place we're really interested in right now. We're just finishing
our nets integrations some really cool stuff outside of that, though,
I think on the open source side, this is really
exciting stuff for me. If you are on a project
(46:07):
that needs a local database like duck dB, I'd definitely
love for you all to check out a duc dB
dart binding see if you like them, give them a try.
Open Some issues on the board were under active development
there I would say one thing I could use a
temperature check for. So this one's a unique one, but hey,
I'll throw it out to the development community. We ended
up developing a pretty robust graphic capability inside of Tiger
(46:31):
Eye as well. We didn't mean to because there was
fl chart, which is like a pretty reasonable library for charting,
but fl chart has like weird, not weird, but it
has limitations that the author is not going to fix
anytime soon, and we couldn't wait for like, for instance,
we needed like a funnel where you could turn a
bar chart on its side, and you know, fl chart
just didn't support that. So you know, like also our
(46:54):
charting library, it supports millions of data points. We had
some speed issues and some customers we have have millions
of data points. We're not sure if we want to
open source it yet, but I'm just throwing out there
if anyone's interested in the open source Flutter graphic library
and has an interest there, the more data I get,
the more likely will be to open source it and
support it. So I just want to throw that out
(47:15):
there to your audience.
Speaker 2 (47:16):
Super super So, I mean our audience includes all sorts
of people, So we'll be sure to give a shout
out to the flooded audience to see if somebody wants
to knock at your door, and I'll be sure to
publish all the contact information.
Speaker 1 (47:28):
Well, thank you very much, Anthony. It was really nice
getting to know you better. I didn't I didn't know
you were in AE, for instance. That was really fun
to learn and really really fun chatting with you today.
Speaker 2 (47:37):
Likewise, thanks so much for coming. I wish you and
the team the very best with Tiger.
Speaker 1 (47:42):
I thank you same to you. Take care, take care.
Speaker 2 (47:44):
Bye.
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