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Ep 121: Decision-making in Leadership (Listen)

Alishahal Macknojia
University of Houston
Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

featuring Sandra Johnson, Founder, CEO & CTO, Global Mobile Finance, Inc., Cary (35.7° N, 78.7° W)

Most people do not envision themselves in the positions they end up later in life. The same held true for Dr. Sandra Johnson. In our conversation, we talked about Dr. Johnson’s journey from her undergraduate years to being a CEO, engineer, patent creator, and one of Inc. Magazine’s top 100 women entrepreneurs of 2020.

Dr. Sandra Johnson is CEO of both Global Mobile Finance, Inc. and SKJ Visioneering where she bridges the gaps between the blockchain technology and mobile app development for sub-Saharan African markets. She graduated from Southern University and A&M College in Baton Rouge, Louisiana with a bachelor’s in electrical engineering. She received her master’s degree from Stanford University and PhD from Rice University. She was the first African American woman to receive a PhD in computer engineering in the United States. She was also an IBM technical leader and is an IEEE fellow. In our conversation, we discussed how her engineering background and time spent at IBM helped her become successful later in her career.

During her college years and beyond, her engineering education has taught her how to think about approaching a problem from a broad perspective. She has applied the experiences she gained in her college and post-graduate years to all aspects of her life, not only to engineering problems. I especially enjoyed hearing about her long career at IBM during the height of IBM innovations and her part in the design team that developed the prototype for the IBM Scalable Parallel Processor (SP2), which is the base machine for the Deep Blue chess machine.

In her current career as an entrepreneur, her focus is on giving back to the community and creating a deep impact; specifically, she wants to use her technology background to help the people in sub-Saharan Africa and developing countries. To achieve her goal to this end, after leaving IBM, she started her own global remittance company to make money transfers to Africa more secure, cheaper, and easier.

She also talked about the importance of networking and having a mentor for career development. Connecting with people in positions of power helped her advance her career to the next phase. It gave her more mobility and insight into what she wanted to do in her career. These past experiences led her to search for new mentors with entrepreneurial experience when she left IBM and started her own company.

Dr. Johnson’s advice to students interested in a similar career path is that “they should go for it” if they are passionate about it. If you have an interest and passion, then you can develop the STEM skills needed for emerging technologies to expand your future horizon. With a genuine passion, Dr. Johnson encourages anyone who decides to pursue this field and says that “the world is your playground.”

Highlights from the interview:

Everyone’s family, community, and life circumstances create an initial role for them in society. What was expected of you growing up? And did you stick to it? Or did you stray from it?

What was expected of me from my family is that I go to college, get a good job, make a better life for myself, and make a positive contribution to the community. From my perspective, I did live up to that.

You were named among top 100 women entrepreneurs of 2020 by Inc. Magazine. You are an entrepreneur, CEO, consultant, innovator, and patent creator. When did you first envision yourself in any of these positions?

I never really envisioned myself in any of these positions. I walked into them without even putting up a plan in place to make it happen. When I first arrived at IBM, after I graduated from Rice University, I was in the research division, at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, just outside of New York City. I did some work that was initially an extension of my PhD thesis at Rice; I had some preliminary results, and I sat down with my manager to review the results. He said he believed that my work was patentable. Very surprised, I drew up a patent application based upon that work, and it did eventually become a patent. I can share with you many more examples like that, where I walked into without even planning. I was just doing what I thought was interesting and exciting work, work that was satisfying to me, and it happened to be innovative and creative as well.

How do you think college years, and engineering background specifically, benefited you the most?

During college and especially Ph. D, you are trained on how to think to look at all the angles of an issue. The process of learning how to think about approaching any topic from a broad perspective was the most valuable experience that I learned. And I have applied that to all aspects of my life, not just education.

How did you validate the market for your product or service, and what was the assessment that made you think ” I’m ready and confident enough to pursue this full time.”?

I have worked for IBM for 26 years. My last role at IBM was Chief Technology Officer for Central, East, and West Africa. I lived in Nairobi, Kenya. In that role, and the one before that, where I was in Dubai for two years, I spent three years traveling around the Middle East and Africa. Traveling to many different countries, learning about the cultures, meeting with C-level technology executives and business executives made me think about what I wanted to do next in my career. I really wanted to focus on leveraging my technology skills to help the people of sub-Saharan Africa specifically, but even more generally, people in developing countries and make an impact. I came to the conclusion that if I could not find another role that will enable me to do that and have a significant influence within IBM, then I would be willing to leave IBM and become an entrepreneur to make that happen. When I lived in Nairobi, I used mobile money; when I came home for a vacation and tried to send money back to that part of the world or other countries, I experienced the pain of remittance. When I used mobile money in Nairobi, Kenya, it was like a financial account or a cash app associated with a mobile telephone phone service, not backed by a bank because more people have mobile phones there than bank accounts. So, I put two and two together; remittance where the money is transferred into the mobile money accounts of the recipients, and that’s how I got the idea of starting my own company.

What was the scariest moment in your career? And what was the solution?

Most financial institutions across Africa and Middle East that are IBM customers have very high-end services that use IBM servers for most of their major banking needs. There was a situation where the system of one of these banks went down, and they couldn’t figure out what was going on. It was scary. It got to the point where the president of the country started calling IBM to say what’s going on. We, being IBM, worked with a team to do root cause analysis and concluded that the IBM has the skills to solve this problem for various corners of the world. So, we had to get on the phone and call the IBM people literally from every corner of the Earth to get on a plane and go to this country as soon as possible. Finally, they worked through the problem and resolved the issue. That one was a little fearful because if we did not resolve that issue within some reasonable period, the banking operation would have gone to a halt for several days.

Did you have any mentors that you worked with either right out of college, or when you first started your business?

In my interview trip to the IBM Research Center, I had a female host, who greeted me at the door; she put my interview schedule together and ensured that I was moving along throughout the day. She eventually became my mentor. I did not know at the time that she was a highly regarded researcher in a different field. And she went on to become the first female IBM fellow and also the first female to win the ACM Turing Award, which is the highest award you can get in computing. So, even before I started working there, I had her as a mentor. When I arrived at IBM, I also connected with a few others who were in positions of power and influence to make things happen for me, especially when I encountered obstacles. Given that experience, once I left and started my own company, I also searched for mentors with experience in entrepreneurship. And I did connect with a couple of them who have been very helpful.

Can you give an example of any current or past projects you have worked on?

I can give a brief description of the one that was probably the most fun. It was when I worked with a team of about 30 people on a research project called Vulcan, which eventually became an IBM server product. I was part of a sub-team of that project, which was designed to be a very powerful supercomputer and targeted to be one of the fastest in the world. I worked on the design of one of its subsystems. Once a research project reaches a certain point, then it is productized; i.e., we work with the developers to turn it into a product. There was a team within the research project who took that product and added just a few accelerators to it to make it a chess machine, called the Deep Blue chess machine, which played with the world chess champion two separate times. The first time, the human won. The second time, the machine won. IBM attempted to get Garry Kasparov to a third match. But he said no. I think he was smart enough to realize that in a couple of years between the two matches, the machine became more powerful. It was just raw computation looking at the moves back and forth; 12, 13, 14 moves straight, and another couple of years, it would be able to go deeper and faster than any human can. Kasparov knew that and didn’t want to lose again. It was fun working on that project.

How is technology reshaping the work that you do? Do you foresee any changes coming in the next five or 10 years?

I am definitely leveraging technology; what I do is a mobile app. But I am also leveraging analytics. Looking at customer behavior to gain insights to make predictions for the customer for additional remittances or for suggestions. Part of what this app does is to enable the sender, which is our customer, to contribute to a nonprofit organization that focuses on transforming lives from a list that we provide, take a percentage of the transfer fee, and deposit it into an account that they can control. And then save that money for the recipients, future milestone events, like starting a business or going to school. Much of that is driven by analytics, by looking at customer behavior, to make suggestions to the customer. We are leveraging quite a bit of technology as part of the process, in addition to a basic mobile app technology, and I can see even more insightful results from analytics in the future. The other thing is that right now, we are partnering with a b2b, business-to-business, that already has a global payments network. In the future, we want to look at the blockchain technology to leverage that to create our own global payments network, but that’s something we want to do in the future and it’s not part of the solution at this time. These are just a couple of examples of how we are leveraging technology.

What do you think is the biggest issue facing your industry?

I think the biggest issue is that FinTech companies are coming into this space. There are players that have been around a long time, like Western Union and MoneyGram. But FinTechs are coming in and providing faster and cheaper service. So, the business is becoming more of a commodity, and profits and gains that “the old timers” may have benefited from may not necessarily be sustained. When a business becomes a commodity, you address the issue of revenue and margins and build a value on top of that commodity. That is what we are doing; we are building the value of developing the customer, the relationship with the customer, and the customer experience.

Do you think it is beneficial for college students who want to become entrepreneurs to join the accelerator programs such as AngelPad and Y Combinator?

I think it is beneficial to connect with entities that will provide you with the guidance and direction that you need. A lot of it depends upon the experience of the founders. So, for example, I have been in corporate America for 26 years, and what I learned in those 26 years enables me to teach in an accelerator program. So, it really depends on the experiences of the founders as well. Many accelerators, and incubators to some extent, require some amount of equity in your company, whether is 4–5%, sometimes 10–15%. But, you can get a similar amount of information, education, and knowledge through programs that are free. It may require some due diligence to find them. I have been in three accelerated programs, and none of them have required that I give up equity. What I learned in those free programs and in those that do require equity are approximately the same. So, I would encourage anyone to focus on the knowledge that they need, but also on getting that knowledge without paying, without the cost of giving up equity in your company, because there are programs out there that enable you to do that. You just have to find them.

What advice would you give to students interested in your field?

If they are interested in my field and they have a passion for it, they should go for it. Electrical and computer engineering is a wide-open field. When I think about the technology of the future on the horizon, there is a critical need for individuals with these types of skills, with STEM skills in general. The world is your plate, your playground. So, if you have an interest and passion for it, go for it and have fun.

Do you have anything else you would like to mention?

I have a few closing words I would like to share. First of all, know your purpose and then do that well, even if it has nothing to do with what you went to school for, or what you’re in school for. Also, please do relax, have some balance, but by doing something that you are passionate and excited about. Chances are your purpose is associated with that. You will be happier, you will probably have less health-related issues associated with work, and as a result, you will be a more productive, positive contributor to the society. So, find your purpose and then pursue that and be happy.

Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee. This article only aims to share personal opinions and learnings and does not constitute the interviewee’s current or former employer(s)’ position on any of the topics discussed.

Jimmy Ren
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia (39.9° N, 75.1° W)

featuring Rick Song, Co-founder & CEO, Persona, San Francisco (37.7° N, 122.4° W)

Becoming a Forbes 30 Under 30 doesn’t necessarily mean the person went on a well-crafted path, driven with unlimited inspiration and drive to achieve a dream they had since they were a child. Instead, Rick Song, co-founder and CEO of Persona, a start-up that offers a comprehensive and automated identity and verification software, stayed grounded and explored the opportunities he had while staying open and friendly to those around him. Something I know many people worry about is the fact that they don’t see themselves anywhere, but Rick’s story reassures people that staying open to pursuing new opportunities along with sharing genuine connections with people will get you to where you want to be.

Currently, Rick is pursuing the opportunity to transform an industry with new ways for organizations to uniquely verify a customer’s identity to prevent fraud and ensure trust and safety in any transaction. He grew up in Texas and attended the Texas Academy of Math and Science (TAMS) before moving on to graduate from Rice University in 2013 with a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, and Economics. He moved on to serve as an engineering fellow at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (Kleiner Perkins). There, he gained some experience and eventually joined Square Capital the following year, where he spent five years working as an engineering manager working on underwriting, fraud, and identity. During this time, his passion for the identity space grew, and in 2018, he left Square to co-found Persona with room-mate, best friend, and CTO Charles Yeh. As CEO, he oversees many responsibilities: most importantly, building the right team to do continue to fulfill their company’s mission. Rick primarily focuses in on creating an effective team that not only gets the job done, but also getting people who have a positive impact on the company’s culture and values. By having happy and enthusiastic people at work, it encourages new employees to feel the same and produces an environment that allows for the company to flourish. Rick also focuses on producing sales and product direction, and most importantly dealing with the issues that may come up as Persona continues to grow.

When I first heard about Rick, the first couple of words under his description were “Forbes 30 under 30”. As a freshman in college who had no idea about what he wanted to do, the prospect of speaking to him was immediately intimidating. Someone with so much success at that age seemed like they would have each detail of their future worked out. But by the first minute of our conversation, I could tell that Rick isn’t the type to tediously plan out his life. Instead, he stood by his principles passed down to him by his parents like treating others with kindness, leaving the door open for new horizons to explore.

Various relationships in his life helped shaped him on the path where he is now. His parents also passed down to him the importance of relationships with people, an idea that has served Rick well throughout his profession. Without a doubt, treating others with respect and kindness is essential to what Rick believes in. Each small act of kindness in the interactions he shared contributes to where he is today and towards the person he is now.

Looking back, his close relationships with his computer science professors led him to join the Kleiner Perkins Fellows Program, which led him to Square Capital. There, he grew new relationships with his mentors, who constantly challenged him to do better while offering important lessons about leadership along the way. In turn, his decision to start Persona came alongside his strong relationship with his roommate, who helped convince him to take the enormous risk of starting a company.

In retrospect, Rick’s career wasn’t exactly clear. His original goal was to move into finance and graduate, but quickly shifted towards software engineering. At Square, he grew as an engineer, a leader, and as a human being, and also discovered a deep passion for the challenges in the identity space. This, alongside the support and mentorship from his peers and colleagues alike, gave way for him to start Persona.

By appreciating life at the moment and not forcing the future to happen, Rick offered refreshing insight into what I believe everyone should remember to appreciate. Life is short, and the real interactions you have with other people should be something you are proud of. And in the midst of the tumultuous times of a new pandemic that we could have never foreseen, Rick’s message about the importance of solid human interactions stands more clear than ever.

P.S. Rick (rick@persona.com) is hiring

Highlights from the Interview:

Is there anything that your parents taught you that sticks out in your mind?

The value of hard work, without a doubt. My mom, in particular, felt it very important that we grew up being social. Another thing I think a lot of was about being a good person. It is incredibly impactful just to be a good person. It’s not easy, and good is obviously a very subjective thing. But I think there is something really important about being kind. In addition, getting far in career or being happy is much more about the people around you than anything else. It’s not about your job, it’s not about your money. A huge emphasis is on being healthy, and just taking care of yourself, which I’m still not very good at. And lastly, I would say that they taught me to be kind, which has had an enormous impact. Looking back, it just astounds me how these small interactions throughout my life have had such meaningful impact on any success I’ve had up to now.

What helped you take the step to become an engineer? What inspired you to continue along that path instead of going straight into economics?

There were two professors in the computer science department that I was relatively close with. It was actually, I believe, one of them who actually recommended me for the Kleiner Perkins Fellows program the first year that it was created. The firm suggested that I apply, and I decided, “Why not? I’ll go for it.” And one thing led to another and I wound up out here.

I could’ve gone into another internship in high-frequency trading. I think at the time, the industry was in somewhat of a decline, but it wasn’t quite as bad as it currently is. That was my original path, but I ended up taking this one because I was like, “What are the chances that I would get to work at a tech company?” I didn’t even really know what tech was, but I decided to just go for it.

Could you talk about how your mentors impacted you? Specifically, what aspects of your professional career have they left a mark on?

My mentor and former manager [Andy Kimball] had such a big impact because he constantly took bets on me. He gave me larger and large scope projects and always had confidence in me. These, days, I often talk a lot about the difference in being a manager and a leader. I think many folks always believe that management is leadership, and it’s just not. These days we look towards these titles to effectively grant some form of a leadership. Whereas leadership, as Andy taught me, is recognized. Your team will recognize you as a leader. You will know that you are a leader.

Andy gave me a lot of opportunities as I developed to be able to consistently become more of a leader. In this way, I had the chance to interact, hopefully, with almost everyone on that team in some meaningful way. He also taught me a lot about what it means to be a really great engineer. He’d taught me a lot about what it means to actually develop and grow, which is a very different kind of mindset from what I would consider the standard Silicon Valley mindset of growth. He also taught me about what it means to be a great engineer in the technical sense as well, as opposed to a lot of folks who are always focused on the next fancy technology, building something cool, and other things like that. He focused on drilling the fundamentals, great infrastructure, and great abstractions, some things that he always talked about. That, and also not over-engineering problems.

Lastly, he taught me, similarly to my mom, about being a good person. I think that with him, you just want to follow him because he represents so much of who you would like to be and grow into. So I ascribed so much of my career towards him in that sense. I still keep in pretty close-contact with him.

What skills do you think you use from college to fulfill your role and what’s asked of you?

Naturally, the foundational engineering skills I built up in college definitely helped me, but it doesn’t end there. The moment you graduate you realize everything you’ve learned was actually incredibly remedial, and that suddenly you have to constantly really push yourself to constantly improve at just the fundamentals of your engineering. Software engineering is just hard. So I’d say it was really important to learn various things from other folks.

Success for a startup oftentimes is mostly luck, frankly. But at the same time if you’re not good, you won’t catch that luck. And with all that, I’d say one of the critical skills to have is self-awareness. The fundamental thing about startups is to think about why people want yo work with you. I think in college you gain a lot of that perspective because you suddenly realize where you are. I think that keeps me grounded.

What advice would you give for someone in computer science or someone wanting to kind of build their own startup?

I would say number one, find a problem that you really do enjoy a lot. It won’t necessarily mean that there’s a startup there, and there is always an element of luck. For many folks who studied computer science 20 years ago, they got very lucky that it is blowing up right now. Back then it was not attractive whatsoever and it wasn’t a very well-paying job. I think you should find something that you enjoy, which is very helpful.

Number two, find people you know and work in a place longer than you think is comfortable. Build meaningful connections with other folks. These people, if you do well, may join you or help you. Find people like that, it will be the most important thing. I do not believe it’s possible to do a good startup without folks like that, and I think you have to find them out.

Three, be kind with people all along the way. Do something that sometimes doesn’t look always great for your self in the short-term. I think Steve Jobs said it first: you can’t connect the dots looking forward, you only can connect them looking back, but you got to make sure that the dots are there. And the only way to do that is by doing the right thing over and over and over. And that’s what sets up a trail of dots that will one day magically connect. 

Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability.

Berk Alp Yakıcı
Rice University
Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

featuring James Grinage, Rotational Product Manager, Facebook, New York (40.7° N, 74.0° W)

James Grinage received his bachelor of science in electrical engineering from Rice University in 2018. After graduation, he worked as CEO of Cherrypick Analytics, a startup he cofounded during his studies at Rice that provided sports analytics using machine learning and computer vision. He started his current position as a rotational product manager at Facebook in 2019. In our conversation, we talked about his interests in entrepreneurship and product management, as well as his transition from working on a startup to working at Facebook. We concluded our conversation by talking about his advice to college students who are interested in product management roles.

One of the important takeaways from our conversation is that the mindsets that make a successful product manager and entrepreneur are similar. In his current role, James makes use of the experience he gained through his entrepreneurial endeavors in the past. He makes sure that “the current work issues are being executed on” as he looks through the “full bird’s-eye view of the ecosystem” to ensure that “it makes sense…to be working on the things [they’re] currently working on.” Further, he adds that being a product manager is “a lot of reading and learning and listening.”

Another important takeaway is the difference between product managers and project managers. In his daily job as a product manager, James writes product briefs, which entails “what is the problem [they are] focusing on, why is it a problem, how does it impact the consumer…what is the proposed solution, and what are next steps.” His job is really fast paced and involves a never-ending momentum, as he attends numerous meetings and “still find[s] time to sit down and do deep thinking and properly come up with these new ideas and document everything.” Whereas, according to James, project management involves more team and resource management rather than “deep strategy and thinking.”

James emphasizes the amount of experience students can potentially gain through extracurricular activities. He encourages students to “build things outside of school,” especially when it comes to preparing for a product management role. These “things” do not necessarily have to be tangible products that require coding. To him, a successful product manager should “validate that the problem exists by pretotyping it first.” The documentation process is equally important, so students should “get into the habit of documenting [their] ideas and explaining what the problem is, what the solution is, and the steps [they are] going to take to test the solution.”

James recommends the book Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup by Bill Aulet to those who would like to pursue a career in entrepreneurship and learn more about the thought process that makes a successful product manager.

Highlights from the interview

I want to know what was expected of you when you were a child or high-schooler, and did you basically adhere or stray away from that?

I’ll start off by saying, I’m a first generation college student, and I grew up just my mom and me, my dad wasn’t around, so a lot of what was expected of me was everything related to school, related to sports, and related to also being the “man of the house” early on. But I think the biggest thing for me was that my mom always put a big emphasis on school and specifically being an engineer. My mom grew up in Mexico, and from her understanding, the people that end up living the best lives were engineers. They had the best work-life balance. She assigned a lot of prestige to that. So early on I was always told, you should be an engineer and I would say I adhered to that, but partially because I was always in love with math and math was just something that came easy to me, so it just made sense for me to be an engineer. Once I got to college, originally I started as a computer science major, but eventually I switched to electrical engineering. So, I would say I stayed along the path.

Did you ever envision yourself as an entrepreneur? How did you end up actually continuing to work on Cherrypick Analytics after graduating?

This is going to sound ridiculous, but I like control, I like when my opinion has a lot of weight, so I always felt that entrepreneurship was the ultimate form of—this sounds bad—of power, but also at the same time being able to direct yourself in any direction you want, right? And it gives you a lot of flexibility. So, when I was younger, I never imagined it; I always imagined going into industry. It wasn’t until my sophomore year, like towards the middle portion of my sophomore year, where I started to imagine what it would be like to be an entrepreneur, and I started to catch the startup bug. And then me and friends would always just talk about different ideas, and it was a common thing to sit around at Rice, and just talk about different ideas, and then basically go back and forth on whether or not it’s a good idea, what it would take for it to be successful. Eventually I started to take entrepreneurship classes at Rice. The first half went over what it takes to start a company, and the second half went over what it takes to raise money. So, second part was funding, first part was strategy. And that got me excited, and that’s when I started to formulate an idea for a company with a friend at Rice. He didn’t take that class, but he ended up taking another entrepreneurship class, so a lot of our thought processes were around, “Oh, if we want to be entrepreneurs, we need to be educated about it.” We also started reading a lot of books. There is great one that [professor] Hesam Panahi gave us called Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup.

We pitched our senior design project as Cherrypick Analytics so that we could work on our startup while taking the senior design class. We got to a point where we felt like we found a pretty decent product market fit throughout senior year, and we made the conscious decision to not apply to any industry jobs. This was essentially the moral contract that me and my cofounder made at the time was, “All right, we’re not going to apply to any jobs; this is what we’re going to do,” and then we just gave it everything we had throughout senior year. We hit summertime, or we hit graduation, we rented an apartment, and we found other roommates so that we could live as cheaply as possible…And then we did that for as long as possible. I mean, essentially we did it for about a year.

So now, as a rotational product manager [at Facebook], what is the essential difference between a regular product manager? I know that you have relocated recently, so I’m assuming it’s like changing teams, but can you define it more?

As a rotational product manager, you rotate across three different teams every six months…for example, I was just on Facebook Portal, which is a hardware device that Facebook makes to do video calling with friends and family. Most people don’t know about it, but I requested to be on a hardware team because having an electrical engineering background, I am interested in a physical product, so I thought it would be fun to work on hardware, especially because it’s very different to work on hardware from software. But yeah, to answer your question, three six-month rotations, so I was in San Francisco working on Portal, now I’m in New York working on Instagram Shopping and Facebook Marketplace, and then in July I’ll be in New York again…then at the end of the program, I roll off onto one team, and stay on that team indefinitely. But the whole point of the program is to condense a lot of growth into a short period of time. Your classic route for being a PM is, you start on a team and you stay on that team for a long, long time, and then something major happens that requires you to find a new team. But the issue with that is you learn the techniques and the strategies just for one area…So that’s the hypothesis that Facebook is working off of, that by exposing you to three different areas, you will have this new formed idea of what it means to be a product manager.

How easy is the transition between the teams, especially considering that you only work there six months at a time for the team?

Starting on a new team is always hard, mainly because—it depends on the problem space, but part of the onboarding process is…as a product manager, you need to know everybody. So I joined this team early January, that first two weeks, and even today I had a meeting where I met somebody for the first time. But you have to get a lay of the land, and you have to understand the space holistically from every angle—so from finance, from legal, from privacy, from policy, from engineering, from design, from research, from quantitative research, from all of these areas that you don’t necessarily know even exist, you have to meet all these people so that you’re aware of all the hoops you need to jump through when you go through the process of ideating a new feature, or a new product, and then getting the green lights from all those people, executing on it from an engineering and design standpoint, and then shipping it to all of your customers. So, it’s difficult in the sense that it’s a lot of reading and learning and listening. You just have to be a sponge and just take in as much information as possible so that you can move fast, because like you said, you only have six months, and at the end of the six months, they measure how much impact you had on the team. So if you take two months to onboard, you only have four months left to execute, so a lot of it is just fast-paced, meet as many people as you can. If you look at my calendar, my calendar is just booked all day long, of just back-to-back meetings. So, it’s difficult, because also in combination with that, a lot of being a product manager is writing. You need to write what we call product briefs, so you need to write a strategy for your team, and then within the strategy of different work streams, and you need to write product briefs for each of those work streams. And a product brief just entails—what is the problem that we’re focusing on, why is it a problem, how does it impact the consumer, how does it impact Facebook, what is the proposed solution, and what are next steps. So having to meet everybody, and then still find time to sit down and do deep thinking and properly come up with these new ideas and document everything, is—it can be really tiring, but also it’s so fun, so, I really can’t complain.

From your experiences, what are some misconceptions about your job, or product managers in general?

I think a common misconception, and this is just in general…people conflate project management and product management, which is a very—they are very different in my opinion. The way I would define project management is, you have a set goal—you have a deliverable, and then you have the team that’s going to execute on that deliverable, and it’s your job to make sure everybody is doing the right thing. So it’s a lot of micromanaging of other people doing tasks; it’s not a lot of deep strategy and thinking, whereas product management is a combination of project management, but also having a holistic view of the product. You have to have your hundred-foot view of the project and make sure that the current work issues are being executed on, so that’s the project management lens, but then you also have to have that ten-thousand-foot view, the full bird’s-eye view of the ecosystem, and you need to make sure that…does it make sense for us to be working on the things we’re currently working on, where are we going in the next six months, where are we going in the next year, what is our strategy for getting to those places in the next six months and the next year, and then, yeah, and convincing people of that strategy. So that’s the first one is the misconception of project management, product management. Other things, it’s different at every company, I would also say. So, another misconception is that you have to code to be a product manager. That is not the case, at least not a Facebook. At Google it is, but at Facebook product managers don’t code.

What skills do you find utilizing in your current position, and what can college students do to help them actually prepare for becoming a product manager?

I would say the first thing is being able to break down a problem to the core. I think a common issue people have is they’ll think about an idea and they’ll start with the solution. They’ll start with like, “Oh, it would be really cool if you could do this.” But they don’t think about the underlying problem, like, “Why is it cool that you can do this?” It’s cool—like for example, why is it cool that I can call an Uber and go from A to B? It’s…cool because beforehand, I would have either had to walk, which takes a long time, and there’s issues with weather, and prior to that, the other solution is if you’re not in a big city like New York where you could call a cab, you have to take public transit, or you have to get a friend to drive you, or you have to deal with these other solutions that effectively are super cumbersome. So I would say entrepreneurship allows you to really think about people problems first.

You need to start with the problem and then think about the solutions. From being here at Facebook, the best product managers are the ones that start with the problem and then think about the solution. There are product managers that just start with the solution, and then you have to go through all the steps of making up what the problem is in order to go in that direction, but that’s—it doesn’t lead to a good outcome. So that would be the first one…and then the second one is being able to MVP something…coming up with the most basic version of the solution, and thinking about, what is the way we can properly test this without having to build out the full feature set. And I think this is something I see an issue a lot. I had a friend that just made a fitness tracking app, and he built out the full suite of features, like the whole thing, and then started beta testing, which is realistically the worst thing you could do. What you should do is find—what is the number one problem you’re trying to solve, build the only feature, the main feature that solves that problem, don’t build anything else, don’t make it pretty, just make a robust solution around that, and then test that. And then as issues, other issues or requests come in, you build out the feature set. So having that mentality as a product manager is super helpful, because it allows you to execute on projects super fast, whereas I’ve seen other product managers that have a team build out the full solution, when in reality, 85 percent of that solution hasn’t been verified by people problems.

What can a college student do that could help them prepare for your current position?

Build something. I feel like there are a few things. One is build things outside of school. Come up with ideas and build them. You don’t need to build it from a coding standpoint. It could just be an idea that you want to test, and not every MVP needs to be tested through code; it can be tested manually. So, for example…doing food delivery on campus, technically the end solution ideally would be an app where you could request…[food]…and then somebody goes and gets it. Yes, that would be the most ideal solution, but to first test it, really what you should do is you should create an email account or a Facebook page, because it’s so easy to do, and post that page into all of the relevant Facebook pages…then update and say, “Hey, we’re doing delivery service from this time to this time, message us if you want us to get you something, and then do Venmo for the transaction,” right? You can—and then this gets into the topic that I think the book talks about, pretotyping versus prototyping. So, doing that, actually going out of your way to start something new, and like I said…I think people get caught up in this false understanding that they have to build out the full solution, but in reality you should validate that the problem exists by pretotyping it first, or prototyping it, but if you prototype it, it should be very, very minimal.

Entrepreneurship classes help. I think another thing that’s important is, if you do have an idea, making sure you talk to customers and get into the habit of documenting your ideas and explaining what the problem is, what the solution is, and the steps you’re going to take to test the solution. Documenting that to get a product manager role would be super helpful, because…you can show in your interview, you can bring it and be like, “This is the stuff I would do before even going out there and starting; I would fully think through the whole process.”

Did anything I asked spark anything else that you want to mention, or do you want to mention anything else to college students?

I would just say that, for the computer science majors, and electrical engineers, and most engineering majors in general, I think people don’t realize how fun and exciting it is to be a product manager. They get caught up in all of the prestige and success that can come from being a software engineer, which by all means is fantastic and it—the reason why it has that aura about it is because it’s real, there’s a reason that Silicon Valley is founded by software engineers, right? I think that nobody is fully aware of what it means to be a product manager, and not a lot of students end up becoming product managers. There’s not that much awareness, so my main takeaway, or feedback, is I hope people look into it more, apply to more PM internships, especially because getting a PM role without doing a PM internship in undergrad is incredibly hard, really, really hard… So, I would just say that if you are interested, you should definitely do an internship in it, because once you get out of undergrad and you start working in an industry, say as a software engineer, it’s so much harder to switch over from a software engineer to a product manager. So, it’s worth getting a taste of it when you’re in undergrad because it’s easier to get a taste of it then, and it still keeps the door open in the future in case you want to go back to it.

Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee.

featuring Mahmut Ünlü, founder and CEO of ÜNLÜ & Co, Istanbul (41.0° N, 28.9° E)

Mahmut Ünlü is the chairman and CEO of ÜNLÜ & Co, a financial services group in Istanbul and Turkey’s leading provider of investment advisory and asset management products and services. He earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology and his MBA from Rice University. He started his career at a merchant bank in corporate finance then moved to Turkey’s first investment bank and set up their corporate finance, research, and international capital market businesses. In 1996, he co-founded Dundas ÜNLÜ and developed it into the leading investment advisory and asset group in Turkey. After forming a strategic partnership with Standard Bank Group London Holdings and later acquiring controlling stakes, he established ÜNLÜ & Co in 2012.

I interviewed Mr. Ünlü at ÜNLÜ & Co headquarters in Maslak, İstanbul.During our conversation, we covered a variety of topics, including his first entrepreneurial endeavor when he was a child, his decision to start a business,and details about ÜNLÜ & Co’s work ethic and culture, as well as its aim to understand upcoming generations and how businesses should adapt for them. We finished the interview with Mr. Ünlü’s advice to students interested in investment banking, including the importance of having interpersonal and analytical skills.

From his early years, Mr. Ünlü’s intention was to be different from the others in his business field; he always looked for new opportunities, tried to increase his knowledge, and learned from his experiences. He told me, “In investment banking, your capital is your brain and your knowledge.” For me,this message has almost universal application beyond investment banking—you could apply it to other businesses or use it just as a motto for life. Even during the crisis and inflation days in Turkey, he saw opportunities and potential for his long-term plans. Even though investment banking was new to Turkey, he became successful in the industry. From his experience, you can clearly see the importance of using your knowledge and reasoning to look for new opportunities.

Creating a strong work ethic and positive company culture is also important to Mr. Ünlü. For him, ÜNLÜ & Co should attract and keep good people (both clients and employees) and keep them happy and motivated, even during disagreements or market fluctuations. In this industry, clients,partners, and employees have to be aggressive to get the best deal, but it is vital to keep a collegiate atmosphere. For me, a key part of Mr. Ünlü’s success in creating this environment is motivating various groups for the same purpose,while emphasizing the importance of understanding ethical aspects. Moreover,his focus on understanding and attracting the upcoming generation shows his value of creating a positive company culture. He emphasized the significance of adapting with different generations in order to improve the quality of business and to reach a better global vision and position in the future.

A final point we discussed was the specific skills a person utilizes in finance field. For Mr. Ünlü, interpersonal and analytical skills are crucial in this industry; the nature of the industry means conflicts can occur daily, and there is consistent competition among the institutions. In his position, for the optimal outcome, he has to make the right decision for any given situation in a short amount of time. He has to consider all the advantages and disadvantages during a negotiation and make a good deal for both sides. For these reasons, you should learn the laws and the tax codes, hone your analytical and interpersonal skills, and develop the ability to negotiate in order to become successful in investment banking.

Highlights from the interview

When did you first envision yourself in the finance field?

I didn’t envision myself anywhere. I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I studied engineering because that was the thing to do, but I never wanted to be an engineer. Both of my parents worked in a bank, and I liked banking, so I did my MBA at Rice University to be able to become an investment banker. But actually, I always wanted to be an entrepreneur, to start my own business.

My first entrepreneurial endeavor was when I was seven years old. I sold old comic books. It was a very good business. I went on a trip to Tarsus with my family, and I brought along a stack of comic books. When I was there, I saw that people were selling comics in front of the mosque, so I said, oh good, they are making money; I should make some money as well. I started selling my books. People started buying. I was getting cash for it, but then I realized my books were going so I wouldn’t have any books to read, so I decided, instead of selling, I said you can buy it for 1 lira, or you can read it for 25 kurus. Everyone started reading, because it is cheaper. Once you read it you don’t have to own it. So, I started accumulating capital. Eventually, after a month I had acquired everyone’s books, and everyone was reading my books. I made 20 liras, and I came back with twenty times as many books that I brought along on the trip. That was my first entrepreneurial experience. It showed me that if I can find a way to do things differently than others then I could make myself a good business. Ever since that day, I studied what my parents told me, but I always wanted to be an entrepreneur.

What led you to your current position and what does this position entail?

I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but it is difficult to be an entrepreneur in banking without capital. Banking is about money and you are supposed to have money to do banking. But the good thing about investment banking is that for some parts of it, your capital is your brain and your knowledge. I met another investment banker when I was working at Yatırım bank in 1994, and we worked together for couple of years in the bank. Then we decided that there is an opportunity in the Turkish market for advising people in mergers and acquisitions. Those were days of crisis and boom and bust cycles, high inflation, high devaluation. Even today we have high inflation but in those days, it was hundred and twenty percent. It was very difficult days, but we still felt that Turkey had potential that should attract capital. So, together we left the bank, in December 1995 and January 1996 we started our business. We decided that investment banking had a future. We first started with mergers and acquisitions advisory, because, as I said it required less capital but throughout the years we have grown our business to what it is today, which is a full investment banking and asset management business. We are still very active on the investment side. We are number one in mergers and acquisitions advisory in Turkey. We are number one in equity capital markets. We are one of the top five places in debt capital market business. We are one of the top players in terms of brokering international institutional clients investing in Turkish stock exchange. We have a wealth management business, which is growing very rapidly. On the asset management side we have mutual funds, private equity funds, distress debt funds, as well as a venture capital fund that invest in early tech companies. We started with four people and no capital, now we have close to four hundred people in all the businesses that I described to you, and we have capital now.

Do you think there are any misconceptions about your job?

Not as far as I am concerned. I don’t know, I mean, misconceptions from whose perspective is a question I would ask. I think it is very clear that we are trying to build investment banking in Turkey. When we compare it to when we first started twenty two years ago, people understand our business much better now. In those days they didn’t know any investment banks, but now after twenty-two years, and especially since middle of 2000 when Turkey became an attractive market for investments by international companies and institutions. The concept of investment banking has become more clear to the Turks, so there is less misconceptions about what we do today.

What are the skills you find yourself utilizing the most in your position?

Well, it changed from time to time, throughout my career, obviously as you advance to CEO and chairman of the business. Now what I utilize most is my interpersonal skills, diplomacy, still analytical skills obviously, in banking you have to be analytical in your approach to issues and problems, finding solutions. Those are probably the skills that I use the most. Earlier on analytics were more important than diplomacy and interpersonal skills. Now it has been switching in terms of their place as far as what I do today.

What has been your favorite project or your experience so far?

My most favorite project is my company. Starting from a very small team to become Turkey’s leading investment banking and asset management group. I am still very excited. Now our goal is to take it even further to become a regional player, to expand, hopefully once hostilities in our region subside, we want to expand in our region, as well as in major markets, major financial markets. We have an office in New York. We are in the process of opening an office in London, and we have a representative office in Singapore. As a base of business, we are currently only in Turkey, but we want to expand to places like Egypt, other larger countries in our geography.

What do you think that makes your company stand out as a great place to work?

You should ask the people. I think it is our culture. We are success driven but we are not overly aggressive towards each other. We are aggressive outside, you know, getting business and completing successful transactions, but we have—I would like to think that we have—a collegiate atmosphere where people complement each other. We also pay attention, we understand very clearly that our most important asset is our people and we try to take care of our people. So, I think as generations change we do have challenges obviously, in terms of achieving to be a great place to work but we spend a lot of time and energy on that as well. Like we now have Millennials, and we are anxiously waiting for the Z Generation as well. We do spend a lot of time and energy in senior management to understand the new generations that join the work place. We have to adapt ourselves in order to be a long-standing business. Our aim is to be around in hundred years time as well. So, we cannot just focus on what we have done well with this current existing generation; we have to know what the new generation wants.

How are science and technology reshaping the work you do?

Well, it is affecting some parts of our business. On the trading side, it has become very technological. For instance, in our brokerage business a lot of the businesses are coming through now through machine orders, or lots of algo-traders now, trade through algorithms instead of taking advice from brokers, so that is one side. One thing that is approaching, it has started in the U.S. not so much in Turkey yet, is our wealth management business, robo-advisory is becoming more popular. Obviously, it is something we will have to integrate into our business as well. On the investment banking side, still mostly done in the classical ways but now, I briefly mentioned about block-chain technologies, security coins become more commonplace, a way of raising capital. Obviously, that is something we will need to integrate into our service offering on that side. And then all the operational systems obviously, they are all technologically driven and as our business grows more, horizontally getting into different business lines as well as regionally, technological integration is key. Especially on the businesses like the wealth management business we already employ a lot of technology. A lot of our clients now trade through iPads, or mobile phones, all those things. If you can’t adapt to those changes, even if you are best at what you do you may not be able to compete moving forward, so we spend time on where we should be. Obviously, Turkey is a follower for use of technology as far as our business is concerned but it is coming to Turkey, so we need to pick and choose the way we need to enhance our technical capabilities.

What do you think is the biggest issue facing your industry?

There are many issues. Most critical thing any bank faces in our line of business is to attract and keep good people, so that is a challenge that has always been around. Getting the good people, keeping them happy, motivated, retaining them and compensating them properly, so that is one challenge. Two is, what you do in emerging markets where there are macro drivers which affect banking. All these ups and downs in the economy have a major impact on investment banking, because investment banking is a business that actually grows during stable periods of times, so maybe it is not a challenge if you do it in the U.S. There the challenges are more related to changing nature of competition. But in ours, it is mostly the macro factors that affect our business, and when the markets are good you deal with competition, regional and local competition in Turkey.

What advice would you give a student interested in your field?

They first need to decide if they like to do what we do, because it is a very demanding business. Especially when you first start, you spend 18-20 hours a day on the job even at the office or on your own. Especially in the advisory side, the investment banking side, but in return I think you need to enjoy it, to do it. Otherwise, it will be like torture. I loved it and I never complained over working hard for long hours. Because it is also rewarding not from a monetary perspective, but it helps you develop a lot of skills that you will actually use in your life either as an entrepreneur or even as a manager of businesses or CEO. You learn analytics, you learn about laws, you learn tax, you develop your interpersonal skills, you learn how to negotiate. Those are skills that investment banking will give you, but in order to get them you need to put in a lot of hours so if you like it, it is great. If you don’t, keep away from it. Focus on happiness rather than money or what is popular.

(Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee.)