Avoiding burnout while on the leadership path - Marta Jasinska

00:00

Stepping into a CTO role in a scaleup, you really feel like you're moving away from just being a technical leader to being a business leader. You are really moved away from the day-to-day problems of how the application behaves, do we have any incidents, to projecting and strategy and discussing your next move with the board and investors, and it's very much business leadership role with some elements of technical leadership.

00:30

How have the incentives that have guided your decision making changed since the very beginning?

00:39

Yeah. I think the first job I ever took, I was still at university. I was still day studies, so I spent six to eight hours at university every day. And I'll be honest with you, I was bored. I was looking for something to do that's going to take me out of school, take me out of classes and let me use the skills that I'm gathering in university in a practical way. I remember this was the summer two years before graduation, I'd been very [inaudible 00:01:10] like, "I really want to find a job. I really want to do something practical."

01:14

So the first thing was, "I want to find a place where I'm not going to be bored, I'm going to be challenged. I want to fit it around my university time." I didn't even think about compensation. So I signed a contract that was paying me an amount of money every month. And I remember this was the first time I was actually getting paid to code. And I remember thinking, "Okay, if I work long enough, I will afford a new fridge for my apartment and I can put some food and beers inside." And that was my motivation. That was all I cared about.

01:44

So that was how I started. This was my starting point. What's interesting then is when I graduated, the second job I got was still in gaming industry. My first job was in mobile games before smartphones. My second job was in gaming industry and it was in UK, in Brighton, and it required me to move to another country. And I was very naive about negotiating my salary at the time, because when you move countries, it's really hard to know what the reality of living in the country is going to be. But me being naive actually translated to me having a very high demand on my base salary because I just purely translated whatever you could get in Poland into pounds. So I actually ended up being quite well paid for my entryway junior engineer job down in Brighton.

02:31

And I really enjoyed learning in Brighton, the company was called [inaudible 00:02:37]. They were very supportive there, there was a lot of things that they offered beyond just compensation. There were free lunches, free drinks, free outings with the team, things like that that I just didn't have in my previous company. So I started thinking about this thing beyond just money. I was thinking about what else can company offer me? And the fact that a nice office, a laptop that's high-powered laptop, those things that would matter to me as well. And I was moving from different companies around that time. I was looking for that, I was looking for slick onboarding, a team where I feel we are not going to be scrambling for money in the team.

03:15

And the base salary became secondary concern because I wasn't worried about money at the time, and it's all well until you realize that gaming is not a great industry to keep a job for long. I was made redundant quite quickly when my studio folded a project I was working on and fired everybody. And then I became very quickly looking for a job and compensation became very important. Again, I just moved to the new country, I've been here a couple of months and I was really worried about paying rent. So again, going back from, "Everything is great. I'm paid really well and I'm looking for company that can offer me free gaming nights and parties and back on the street looking for any job that's going to pay my rent." And that's when I moved to eCommerce type of jobs. I went away from gaming and creative work after three years of doing that, moved into "adult jobs" like consultancy and eCommerce back and engineering jobs.

04:17

And that's the period of time where I started shifting from just being a junior on to mid-level engineer, but actually team-leading architectural jobs as well. And I realized that, A, you get paid much more again if you can prove yourself at the technical level. Also, B, I realized going back to the feeling I had during university, I do get bored quite easily. So when I think about what keeps me at the job or what would prompt me to move to another job is that I want to find something that is interesting, it's a problem that I'm going to enjoy solving. I do like a challenge, I do like a problem where I can wrap my head around it and really try to find a solution. And in my early days in eCommerce, it was about finding technical problems that are interesting.

05:04

At the time, things like DevOps and CICD were becoming quite predominant across all the companies, so we've been learning a lot about that. Microservices was another trend and also a lot of things for me to learn from that perspective. But then also slowly ways of work working, like Scrum and Agile ways of working were becoming an interesting problem for me. And I noticed that I'm shifting away from technical problems towards people problems. And I started finding excitement, not just in solving technical issues and building new features and new services, but also working with people and solving, how can I... I used to say, "How can I do more damage group of people rather than just myself? How can I make a group of people much more impactful?"

05:49

So what's interesting is when I realized that, and I realized that about myself, it became about seeking those challenges, a mixture of people and tech challenges. I was actually able to stay in the same company for quite a long time, four years at the time, in a place called Shopzilla. It was the longest I stayed in a company for a while, like only one more place I stayed for so long. And the reason why I was able to stay there for so long is because of that every six months, there was something more interesting for me to jump on. And there were other companies coming to me with opportunities, bigger salary bonuses, things like that, and I didn't necessarily jump on any of those opportunities because there was enough for me to do in Shopzilla.

06:28

And beyond the people challenge, what also was interesting about Shopzilla is the cultural challenge. Shopzilla is an American company with an office in London when I had my little team, but there was also a team in India that I got to go out to New Delhi and set up a team from scratch. And then I was working across LA office, London office, and New Delhi office, and that introduced a whole new set of challenges and problems for me as well, and ability to travel and meet people from different cultures and work with them and see how they solve technical problems and people problems and learn from them and adapt my ways of working was another perk, another benefit. So again, it was about money, then it was about challenges, and then it was about opportunity to seek other people and learn from them.

07:13

So growing as an individual, growing as a leader and learning. And then it became hard to juggle all of those different things and I had to start making some hard decisions. I had to be, "Well, am I going to be hands on coding forever? Am I going to focus on architecture and technical leadership? Am I going to become a people manager?" And when I decided that I want to continue working with teams and continue creating most impactful teams, that was the moment when I realized I need to start looking for another opportunity again. It wasn't about compensation, it was about creating opportunity for me to focus on what I want to be really good at. So step away from company where I know the code base, and I can still go in and change the code base. And the team still released me to do technical direction, move to a place where I don't know anything about the technology stack and really try to become the best manager I can become in that context.

08:07

Sounds like when you are making these decisions to move from one company to another, you're thinking less about what work you are going to be doing per se, but more about who you'll become?

08:20

Yeah, I like to think that I'm very purposeful about my career and maybe some of this may be retrospectively as well. Some of this may sound much more thoughtful than it actually when it happened, but I do think that every step, whether it was within a company or moving from one company to another, I wanted them to be meaningful for me. I always think about, how do I change myself? How do I grow in my career in my development? And I know different people think about this differently. Some people are looking for the most impactful organization or project they can work on in a given moment, whereas I like to see this as a single career that goes across different organizations and different technology stacks and different projects. So, yeah, I've been trying to build on top of those different opportunities. And I definitely think about how they relate to each other, whether what I'm doing next is significantly different to what I've been doing before, is it a step in the right direction? For me, I've been quite purposeful about this.

09:20

You've also got a fascinating background in that each one of the companies that you joined, you grew within. And that's not necessarily typical. You may choose on your working journey to advance to your career by moving from one place to another, but in your case, it looks like you've made a really quite deliberate choice to grow within a company rather than switch between them. Is that fair?

09:49

Again, yeah, it's fair although it's probably more deliberate on retrospective than it was in a given point in time. Like I mentioned, within Shopzilla, I was given those opportunities and I was able to grow my career and that's why I stayed there for so long. In other places, for whatever reason, either the opportunities weren't there or...

10:11

When I joined PhotoBox, and I was working there just for two years, I almost grew too quickly and became an engineering director within a year's time when I was there because an opportunity was presented to me, but the amount of work and change that cost for me actually led me to burnout and I needed to take a break. And if you look at my next step, I'm taking a side step, I'm taking a engineering director role. So the same level, but in a different company, smaller company to calm things down a bit and see if I can grow again. So, yeah, sometimes it works really nicely, but it really depends on the speed and the context of the company you're operating in and whether you are ready for the opportunity or not.

10:55

Burnout is different for every everyone and it has different symptoms, and sometimes it can be really difficult to tell whether you're experiencing burnout or not. When did you first notice it?

11:08

I'll be very, very honest. I think I noticed it for the first time when I was sitting in a bathroom in our office. And I felt like just sitting there and realized I'm crying for no reason. Like, you're sitting and suddenly you realize that tears are coming down your face. And I was thinking, "There's something very, very wrong about how I feel about being here, being in this office, and working through the problems that I'm working through." And that got me really thinking about where is this anxiety and stress is coming from and why do I feel that way? But it took quite a lot for me to realize that I'm going through it.

11:41

What did you do in that moment to self reflect?

11:44

In that particular moment? Lots of cold water on my face and I did manage to make it through the day. I had some meetings I had to attend on the day that I couldn't just not go to, but it definitely gave me a pulse. I took some time off afterwards. I took a longer break, and yeah, I started thinking about, what could I change? And my first thought wasn't to go and look for another job, frankly, that was the last thing I thought about. Just the thought of putting myself out there to look for another job was a really intimidating. So it was about posing, it was about creating some space for me to think, disengage from work. I talked to my manager as well. I made him aware that this is a problem, but that introspective thinking and the time I gave myself actually led me to make a decision to then put myself back on the market. And I guess I'd to look for a role that's not going to put my career backwards, but it's not going to be as challenging as much as this one was.

12:39

When you look back on it now, were there any signs before then that you missed that you could have caught earlier?

12:45

Yeah, I think it's always this, you get a little bit cynical, you get a little bit disengaged, and I definitely had that period of time before I got to that bring. You know that the meetings are not going your way, you start almost disengaging from that problem. You stop being part of the solution, you start just commenting about the issues. And I definitely had a moment like that to me and some other people who were trying to drive change in certain direction in the organization. I remember there were moments where I stopped trying to push change forward and I started feeling like it's impossible to change, and I started becoming quite cynical. And I think I could have... I would pick it up now much sooner, because of that, I know that I'm naturally quite eager to drive change, to engage people in change. I'm really enjoying that. The moment I start feeling quite cynical about it, it's usually a sign that something is not working.

13:44

When you went through that self-reflection after the event and you then decided to make a change, what was that like? What process did you go through? I

13:57

I wouldn't call it a process, again, it wasn't as maybe thought through at the time as I wish it was. I looked through opportunities that were on the market. I met some people, I started talking to different companies, and I really wanted to... Before I even make a decision to move on, to be honest, I wanted to see, what are my opportunities? What are the types of opportunities I could consider. And I think there were two flavors that I looked at, and they were bigger company or same size or bigger company to the one I was already in. And pretty much address it and start again at the same level in the same type of organization and see if I can do it again, or smaller companies and earliest stages that I could take this experience and try to help them not burn out another director or help them to get to a better place based on my experience.

14:49

And I seriously considered both. When you go back to, I guess, salary and rewards that you get, obviously those bigger companies were offering packages that were maybe much more enticing interesting, but I actually ended up going with a smaller company and helping it scale. And reflecting back, definitely one of best decisions I've ever made in my career, it helps me really grow to the next level. But it wasn't an obvious choice at the time, I remember feeling a bit, "Is this going to work? Am I taking a step back? Is this the right [inaudible 00:15:21] for me?"

15:20

How did it unfold at MOO?

15:20

MOO is that company that I joined. It was a smaller company that was about to scale up. It was about to go to a big change. I joined them as... It was supposed to be an easy job, web development director with maybe 15 director reports, less than half of what I had earlier. And I remember thinking, "Yeah, I can handle it a year. I'm going to just chill, it's going to be great." What I've learned is in scaleup, start of things can change very, very quickly. And one person moving on may trigger quite a big organizational change, and that person for me was Mike who hired me. He was my manager at the time. He decided to move on I think three months after I joined. He reassured me it wasn't me.

16:08

He reassured me there were other reasons. And then with him, some other people left; people who've been there for a while, people who built that platform and that team from scratch. And suddenly I found myself in a position where a lot of the problems around how the platform operates, how we deploy the production, how we work became my problem, not because I wanted them to be my problems, it was because there was nobody else to pick them up. And I naturally lean in into those situations, so I did. And I spent a lot of time working with our platform team, making sure that our platform is ready for peaks and sales that were coming up, work with engineers, trying to figure out what are the skills gaps and how can we grow this team and make sure that we can do the right thing.

16:54

And I was lucky enough to be part of the team that was hiring our first CTO, Mary, who joined I think three months after all of this unfolded. So I had three months of trying to keep the tech team together and trying to get the platform up and running. And then after Mary joined, again, we had a lot of big things to push through on the backlog. And again, I naturally lean into areas where there weren't maybe people providing with leadership. So that's how I ended up running the cloud migration project, moving us from data center with AWS. Not really my expertise and experience, but I did enjoy the challenge. It was really great building the team out, building the processes, actually doing the project work. I worked with data engineering, I worked with a bunch of other engineering teams as well, very quickly.

17:44

It created space for me to both be challenged and explore new skills and new opportunities while also supporting teams that were quite naturally easily supported by me, so that when Mary was moving on, there was an opportunity for me to fill in the CTO role first in the interim. And then in a full time...

18:06

And again, stepping into a CTO role in a scaleup, you really feel like you're moving away from just being a technical leader to being a business leader. You are really moved away from the day-to-day problems of how the application behaves, do we have any incidents, to projecting and strategy with discussing your real next move with the board and investors. And it's very much business leadership role with some elements of technical leadership, which again, I enjoyed quite a lot to the point that I was started leaning in quite heavily into the product team ways of working and things like that. So by the end of my time with MOO, I was actually CTDO running across the product team, as well as the engineering and I guess technology teams as a whole. So within four short years, my easy gig where I was supposed to chill for a year became one of the biggest jobs I ever had in my career.

19:07

How did the challenge differ at MOO to how it had been before? And why did that challenge feel so productive and invigorating as opposed to so difficult like it was before?

19:27

I think it's the ability to make impact, like feeling that I can actually make decisions and execute on the plan so then making my [inaudible 00:19:32]. And I was given a lot of freedom by my manager, by the executive team, by the board. At every level, there was quite a lot of opportunity for me to carve out my own path for me and my team. And also the thing that I just mentioned, leaning out and looking at what other teams are doing, this was encouraged. It wasn't something that I would be punished for.

19:55

And I find myself really enjoying that whenever I feel things are going really well and I have some time and some head space to worry about the bigger problem, there was always something else for me to get involved in and it was welcomed. And it was two-ways street, we have people from other parts of organization joining us and working with us on our plans on the platform strategy as well. So I really found that collaboration, but also the fact that any individual couldn't make impact as long as they were willing to lean in and become a part of a solution rather than just sitting on the sidelines.

20:33

It sounds like freedom on a wide birth gave you the fuel and the energy not to be burnt out, whereas before it was less to do with how hard you're working or anything and more to do with just where that energy was being directed.

20:54

I think that's that. I also think that as I grew as a leader, I've learned much better how to express what I'm trying to achieve to different stakeholders, to different people. When I became director for the first time, I felt like there was a lot that I had to still learn about how to make the case for the right plan. And I was very strong on doing this with architects and engineers. The technology team was quite behind any plan that I put forward, but I don't think I was ready to have these conversations with our exec team, with our board. And I think it's freedom, but it's freedom, but I earned by learning how to work with people that are not necessarily coming out from technical background. I think that was a big learning for me when I consulted.

21:39

How did you know when it was the right time to think about doing something different?

21:44

Oh, you never know. I was laughed at, I take on too much and it's never the right time and I just somehow make it work. I don't think if there's an easy way to tell when it's ready. I usually pick up more and new challenges before I'm ready to be honest.

22:00

How did it manifest itself at the end of your time with MOO?

22:04

Yeah, it's interesting. It was very weird time. So I realized I'm ready to move on from MOO in late 2019, maybe early 2020. At that time, our technology team was doing really well. I had VP of engineering, Claire, who's a good friend of mine still, and she's been running this team quite well. So a lot of my attention was more on product development, ways of working, agile coaching. And I remember reflecting on it and thinking it is interesting, but I am missing the problems that I was able to be part of solving when I was closer to the technology. What I really enjoyed about being at MOO is that our technology was not just about web and the customer-facing applications, but we also had a lot of manufacturing technology.

22:56

And our business was quite complicated. There was B2B aspect of it, but our small business customers were very different to large business customers. So there was a lot of interesting problems to solve within technology. But once I moved myself so far away from these problems, I wasn't really participating in solutions for the right reasons. There were right people solving these problems, they didn't really need me anymore. So I remember thinking, yeah, more could probably go on without me and do really, really well, and I'm probably ready for something else. And that's just before the pandemic started.

23:31

So when pandemic started, MOO, as a business, was going through it just everybody else. It was quite tough for physical product businesses, especially B2B ones where our products, business cards, leaflets were not really great for the early lockdowns times. I remember sticking around a little bit longer to support the team through that, but at the same time, I started meeting other people. I started putting myself out there and trying to figure out what would be the next interesting problem for me to solve. And that's how I met Aron, CEO of Bloom & Wild in June 2020.

24:08

When you began putting yourself out there, what did that practically entail for you? Did it entail sharing things with people that were close to you? Did it entail speaking to companies directly? How did you go about that process? Because it's quite murky and not necessarily clear for people who are at the high level.

24:33

I mean, I'm very privileged in that I worked in an industry that at least today still has quite a lot of openings and roles, especially if you're willing to be flexible. Like if you're willing to say, "Hey, I can work on backend or front and I can be a leader. I can be flexible as long as the problem space is interesting." I think we are very lucky that technology as an industry still offers so many jobs at so many different levels. As a woman leader in technology, there are networks and there are conversations that I get to be part of just by the nature of being a female leader, because it's still a rare thing. And it's still quite exciting for CEOs and founders, especially in tech scaleups, to have somebody me come in and say, "Hey, not only I take care of diversity boxes, but I can also actually lead your technology team. I actually know what I'm doing, I have experience, I have the know-how."

25:36

So I think I'm very privileged from that perspective, which is weird because part of that privilege comes from the fact that I'm from underrepresented group in our industry. So when I want to put myself out there and start looking for a job, it's actually very simple for me. I just open my LinkedIn and go through my messages and I get a lot of recruiter messages every day, or like you said, I talk to my friends. There are people in my network who are very close to me that I met through those years, who I know that if I just mentioned how I will be interested at looking at somewhat something else, they will point me in the right direction. So there are many ways you can do it, but I think it's quite easy for somebody in my position to find the next job. The problem becomes, how do you make a decision? How do you know which one is the right one for you?

26:24

How did you work that out when you decided to join Bloom?

26:28

Well, I talked to Aron about it, I was very honest. I'm always very honest when I talk with people who'd like to work with me. I tell them that I get bored easily, I tell them what am I trying to achieve in my career, and I tell them what problem would be interesting. And I found myself really enjoying engagement where people were giving me the same level of honesty. "Hey, this is where the company is at right now. This is what we know, this is what we don't know. This is where we think you would fit in." And really doing that chemistry check on whether there is some understanding, whether I'm getting founders who understand the role of technology, they understand what technology can do for them, but also founders who can say, "Hey, I honestly don't know. I'm looking for somebody to help me."

27:17

I always look for that level of honesty. I want somebody to be able to explain to me why they think I'm the right fit for what they're looking for. And yeah, with Aron, especially, we had a really good rapport. I found it very interesting that as a CEO, founder of a physical product company, he cared so much about what technology means for this business. He sees technology as a massive point of difference and he knows what he wants on his platform. He knows what good looks like, not just for the product that he ships to the customers, the flowers, but also about the experience of the app, experience of the web. There's so much care put into that just directly from his perspective. And I also enjoy his vision for the future.

28:04

I think we are very aligned, and I think we always say this, we are very aligned on where we think the platform should go and we can disagree and debate on how we going to get there. And I enjoyed that dynamic, I enjoyed knowing where we want to get to and enjoyed working out how we going to get there together.

28:22

So spending time with the founder CEO was really important, finding that honest chemistry is there and the trust is there. And then verifying the trust through the interviews with other people in the company, making sure that what I'm hearing back from engineers, from product managers, from engineering managers, much as that vision that I was presented with. So I spent a lot of time talking to a lot of people over the summer of 2020. And yeah, I decided to go with the company that I felt had the most promise for the technology stack, the most caring, and the most honest leadership team. And meeting everybody on that team, I really enjoyed that. And you noticed nowhere where I mentioned a lovey or bonuses or money, right? At certain stage, you get to the point where you don't make these decisions based on the package anymore.

29:16

As you navigate this journey and as you decide which challenges excite you, it strikes me that you're picking the challenges that are weighty and that will give you something to drive towards. But at the same time, you want to balance those challenges with ones that you know that fall within your sphere of competence somehow. How do you assess that and work out whether the challenge that you are thinking about working on next is within your sphere of competence, but still challenging you at the same time?

29:53

Yeah. There's no exact science, but there's definitely a balance to it. And the way I like to frame it in my head is, it cannot be just about me stretching and learning, I want to make sure that I'm bringing value from day one. And in order to do that, I need to have some experience and some skills that are going to be valuable from day one. And it can be different, depending on the team, depending on the situation, it may be my technical skills, it may be my ability to translate business talk into technology talk, it may be my people management skills, whatever it is, there must be something that I can apply to the problem from day one. I want to make sure that I'm having an impact early on. But it cannot be just having an impact, it cannot be just I come in and I know exactly what to do.

30:38

I tried it with MOO, and it didn't work because very quickly things change around me, but also... I chose at MOO to engage with bigger problems really quickly. I know that I need to find things that go beyond just what I know, and I learned that about me at MOO. So I know it has to be a balance. I don't have an exact science, five bullet points here, five bullet points there, but I always think about what's going to be the impact I can bring early on and what is the thing that I'm going to be stretching and what is the thing I'm going to be learning about in this time?

31:12

Have you ever doubted whether you are on the right track?

31:15

Oh yeah, many times. Many times, especially around the time you make a change. I usually say that I accepted this job offer or I accepted this change to my career level. And usually three to four months in I go, "Oh boy, I don't really know if I know what I'm doing." I think they believed everything I told them during the interview process, but now I have this problem of I actually have to do this. Definitely, I have of that.

31:44

And even on a bigger scale, I sometimes think whether the decisions I made over time, are they still pointing me in the are direction? So there's a short [inaudible 00:31:53] of, "Am I sure I made the right choice, short stem, but also looking back, was this the right thing to become a manager and not an architect? What did it do for me? How did I go back then to being more technical and not just people managing? Was this the right choice? Was this the right choice to lean in and worry about DevOps where I could have just focused on all design and people management?" There's a lot of that reflection as well as I go through my career.

32:21

How have you found a healthy relationship between self-reflection and going too deep on your learning? At times, your learning will have been so fierce and severe and your growth through these scaleup companies will have been so intense that that level of self-awareness required is huge. But with it comes this requirement for you to be able to tame it in certain areas. How have you balanced both making sure that you're self reflecting and enabling your own personal growth, but at the same time, not self sabotaging in a way?

33:10

No, that's interesting question. I think it's important to give yourself time to consider things like that. What I mean by this, it's very easy to just keep running after the next thing. And keep running and keep challenging yourself and keep pushing for the next, whatever it is, next big project, next step up in your career path. And I think it's important you give yourself time to take a step back and be like, "Am I happy right now? What makes me happy about my job right now? Am I happy on a Monday morning? Am I happy on Friday evening? And what are the different things that are making me happy about these moments?" I don't have a one answer that fits all, but I do think that you need to ask yourself these questions, almost become your own coach.

33:57

I also use coaching. I have a coach that I meet with directly and regularly and he will ask me those questions. And he'll be like, "What makes you excited about where you are today, and how do you think about yourself in the future? And reflecting back, what are the big wins that you want to take with you?" But not everybody has access to a coach, and I think a lot of those questions you can ask yourself, but you need to make time for this. Whether you're making time to meet with somebody who's going to ask those questions or whether you're doing it yourself, giving yourself permission almost to reflect back on these things and maybe plan out your next step based on those reflection, I think it's really important.

34:33

What are you optimizing for? Is it happiness, joy, excitement?

34:39

Probably I have a very weird satisfaction. Looking back, I liked to be satisfied with the impact I had and the learnings that I picked up. And if I'm thinking about happiness, it's my happiness, but also happiness of my team. I love those moments when you look at the team and you think, "It's working. They're engaging with the problem, they're working together. If I disappear tomorrow, they'll be fine," that kind of moments? So I'm optimizing for creating moments of little satisfaction, where I feel like, "I did this thing, it had an impact on the team, had an impact on the project, and I feel like I've learned something and I'm grown. Those are the moments that I really enjoy.

35:20

How would you describe your relationship with work?

35:24

It really depends on who you ask. So I think it's very healthy. My mom disagrees and she thinks I work too much. I really enjoy my work, and I think that's the thing. I'm in a very privileged and I think quite unusual position. Again, I think in tech industry, we're quite spoiled, right? A lot of us in tech are problem solvers and our job every day is to solve problems like, who gets to have a job like that? And it's an industry that has a lot of openings and there's a lot of problems for us to solve, so it's such a great place to be at if you enjoy that career. And I'm definitely like that. I always say this, "Whatever happens, I have good days and bad days."

36:06

I really enjoy my work and I don't think I would be as happy if I just suddenly stopped. I try not to think about retirement. I think I'm just going to work across the world, so I don't know what I'm going to do when I retire. But yes, I really enjoy it. My career let me meet people that I would never meet, go to places that I would never go to, and yeah, engage with interesting problems that I wouldn't find on my own. And I think because of that, it sometimes doesn't feel like work, it sometimes feels like a really great hobby that you get paid to do. And then there are bad days where it's really hard and you have to push yourself through them and almost remind yourself, "I really love my job and I'm going to make it through this day and I'll make it through this week. And then I'm going to get a break and then I'm going to enjoy my work again." It's being able to recharge afterwards.

36:57

Was building technology companies what she expected you to do?

37:01

Definitely not. The reason why I'm laughing is my family has a long history of, I guess, literature people. We have a lot of teachers and some writers. When I was a kid, I really wanted to be a painter or a comic book illustrator. And that horrified my parents, they did not want that career for me either. But my mom was always saying, "Maybe a journalist if you're really ambitious, that career." And when I floated the idea of doing... I have a master's degree in software design and architecture, and I was saying, "Mom, I really think I should go to university for that." I didn't know what a compiler is when I went to the university. I was the only person in our university studies group that never wrote a code line of code in my life. I was 19 and I was discovering this whole new world. So my whole family was quite surprised, it was very surprising move for them. I think it was surprising for me how much I enjoyed it as well.

38:02

Was it surprising to them in a good sense or a bad sense?

38:08

So when you go and somehow manage to get in to study software design and architecture at the university and you have no idea how to do that, what happens is that the first year is really hard for you. So I barely, barely made it through the first set of exams and first set of tests I had to do there. And I remember my parents being really worried about how hard they have to work to make it through, and them being like, "You can change your mind. You can switch to different directions, you can have different subjects and we're going to support you even if you fall back by a year." And I think they were surprised by how much I didn't want to do it, but I think they were quite worried as well about this. But after that first year, things smoothed over. It became much easier and they saw that I'm enjoying myself. They saw that this is clearly something I'm really passionate about. And yeah, now I don't think they would have it any other way.

39:03

Art is an expression of the human condition and it's amazing to almost hear it go full circle. And as you come through and up your career, the thing that you're drawn towards are those human relationships and solving those problems that are not existential, but are more challenging and more human.

39:32

Yeah. I think it's very, very, very good of you to notice. Yeah, I definitely thought a lot about how I was thinking about painting an illustration. There's a very similar thought process. I'm quite analytical even when I do my art, and yeah, I apply a lot of that kind of thinking when I think about organizational design or project delivery and engineering my work.

39:56

I've loved learning about your story.

40:00

Thank you.

40:03

Thank you so much for sharing it.