YouSaid · the spoken record

Padmasree Warrior

lines on the record: 29
first: 2022-07-12
most recent: 2022-07-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“At Fable, for example, we have a ritual every Friday, we do something called FICA, which is based off of the Swedish coffee time ritual, but we morphed it and made it our own. And we basically have one hour and it's virtual, we're a remote team. The only rule for FECA is we talk about everything other than work. And so somebody poses a question and we take turns hosting. Today's question, for example, is if you're traveling in a plane, would you prefer an aisle seat or a window seat? And why? What does that say about you? So topics like this, right? So I think it's really important that we create safe spaces at work for people to share who they are, a little bit about who they are as a person. So that's something that has really shaped, I would say, the core of my leadership is that in building teams, I think that's one thing I truly believe in.”
2022-07-12 · Masters of Scale · Harness the passion of internal factions, w/Padmasree Warrior of Fable, Cisco, Motorola · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're reading with other people who like to read the same thing. And by the way, I think a big value proposition for Fable is my best friend may not like to read the same book I like to read. I'm a big sci-fi fan. Most of my friends are not, you know. And so if I tell them, let's read Dune before we watch the movie. They're all going to groan and grumble. So how do I find other sci-fi lovers who want to read a very intense long book like Dune before the new movie came out? So that's kind of what Fable offers is like to connect with that community that you're passionate about.”
2022-07-12 · Masters of Scale · Harness the passion of internal factions, w/Padmasree Warrior of Fable, Cisco, Motorola · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I left Neo, I wanted to do something meaningful with the mobile, you know, mobile has sort of been in my blood for a long, long time. As I was searching the wellness and the health space broadly, I kept coming across lots and lots of reports and data that was pointing out to how mental wellness is on the decline. And, you know, I was like, wow, this is interesting. What could we do to help people cope with it, right? So instead of doom scrolling, could you have a social platform that is meaningful and useful and is fun to be on? So yeah, I wanted to create a fun social platform where people could form communities to read together, share insights with each other, and have fun at the same time.”
2022-07-12 · Masters of Scale · Harness the passion of internal factions, w/Padmasree Warrior of Fable, Cisco, Motorola · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have to be careful beyond that point where you don't create this inequality in the first hundred by the rest of the company. So I think that's a very tricky transition you have to make as you're scaling. So if you keep the environment positive, people actually love working and then they're happy because they feel very productive and they feel that being productive is very rewarding.”
2022-07-12 · Masters of Scale · Harness the passion of internal factions, w/Padmasree Warrior of Fable, Cisco, Motorola · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think the big transition is when you go from like 100 to maybe a thousand people, that's the transition you have to be careful because you have a tendency for the first hundred people to become a click and the people that come later definitely feel like you don't know them as well. And so I went through that transition at NEO, where obviously I knew the first hundred people really well because I hired most of them.”
2022-07-12 · Masters of Scale · Harness the passion of internal factions, w/Padmasree Warrior of Fable, Cisco, Motorola · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is the most important thing to do prioritizing things, whether it's a segment of the market we are going after or building a new product, you know, what should the product do, how you build the product, maybe there's different ways of doing that, but the outcome of what that product should be, the definition had to be really clear.”
2022-07-12 · Masters of Scale · Harness the passion of internal factions, w/Padmasree Warrior of Fable, Cisco, Motorola · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The most important thing, I think, at that scale to do is to make sure people are aligned. You can't have different agendas. And that's so hard to manage. I think when you have so many people, such a large organization, it's hard to get your arms around everything that's happening, right? And so although you have different levels of reporting structures and management, I think a singular thing that I had to do that was so hard but so important to do was to make sure everyone was aligned. Like people were really clear what the goal was for the whole organization. And so defining the what is really important and how people get there, you leave it up to the team, right? Like because they know the best way to get there, but we had to all be aligned on the what we are going to get to. That was, by the way, very hard for me to learn. I had to learn how to do that. How do you communicate? How do you make it really crystal clear to people?”
2022-07-12 · Masters of Scale · Harness the passion of internal factions, w/Padmasree Warrior of Fable, Cisco, Motorola · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What we found in NEO is because we were building a car and developing software, the amount of pressure on a team, like for example, for the first few months, it'll be the”
2022-07-12 · Masters of Scale · Harness the passion of internal factions, w/Padmasree Warrior of Fable, Cisco, Motorola · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Neo, when I went there, it's a raw startup. And we were at the same time building up teams in China, in Silicon Valley, and in Germany. And so the China team is building the physical car, the US team is building all the tech, the software, firmware that went inside the car, and the team in Germany was doing all of the design. So I think I totally underestimate me. Maybe all of us underestimated how difficult it is. AWA startup. B, build a car startup, C, build an electric car startup, and then do it across three different continents. A was insane.”
2022-07-12 · Masters of Scale · Harness the passion of internal factions, w/Padmasree Warrior of Fable, Cisco, Motorola · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's always this tension of what is more important? Is it more important to keep the current business going, or is it more important to disrupt yourself? It's a classical tension that always exists. I don't know if there is a right answer, by the way, but this was just something we struggled always.”
2022-07-12 · Masters of Scale · Harness the passion of internal factions, w/Padmasree Warrior of Fable, Cisco, Motorola · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was controversial, although it was a model that Cisco used several times. You know, it's like anything, right? Sort of like a decision you have to make if someone's going to leave your company to go start a company, what would you do as a parent company to keep that talent inside and leverage that innovation inside? Or are you better off letting them go, start a company, and then maybe pay more to acquire them back in? I think these are not easy decisions and there are no black and white right or wrong answers, but that was just something that Cisco did, I would say quite successfully many times.”
2022-07-12 · Masters of Scale · Harness the passion of internal factions, w/Padmasree Warrior of Fable, Cisco, Motorola · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Doesn't go, so it creates a lot of tension within the engineering teams that are all working to benefit the parent company. So that's the negative side of it.”
2022-07-12 · Masters of Scale · Harness the passion of internal factions, w/Padmasree Warrior of Fable, Cisco, Motorola · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Idea of the spin in was when a group of people have a great idea, could we just fund them and keep them in the family? There are startups, they have a comp structure that's different than the main parent company, and they're rewarded in building that idea out. But the funding all comes exclusively from the parent company. So it's sort of like a captive startup, if you will. And if they meet certain milestones, the parent company reserves the right to acquire them back into the company. So that at a high level in an abstracted way, a description of what the spin-in was. The advantage of that was that you kept the innovation and you kept those ideas inside the family of the bigger company. You had right of first review cell to acquire that innovation back into the company, to integrate that. The negative side of it, if it's the same people keep doing the spin in, it's sort of like those people create a lot of wealth for themselves. And, you know, who decides who goes into the spin and who.”
2022-07-12 · Masters of Scale · Harness the passion of internal factions, w/Padmasree Warrior of Fable, Cisco, Motorola · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is one of the reasons why I started to talk about bring your whole self to work. So, for example, we would do all hands meeting town hall meetings in addition to just having a one-way transmission of here are our goals, this is what we did, this is how we performed. We would also show pictures, for example, of all the babies born that month for all of the team members, or if somebody was celebrating a special occasion, if they wanted to share pictures, we would collect all of that and show that. And so these were all things that reflected who people really were as part of the organization. And it wasn't just for me to know them, but it was also for people to know each other.”
2022-07-12 · Masters of Scale · Harness the passion of internal factions, w/Padmasree Warrior of Fable, Cisco, Motorola · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you're playing a game of golf, rightly, you're always trying to be better than yourself. And so the competition is necessarily how do you improve your current product and how do you meet the customer's need better versus like compete with that team and do what they're doing but do it better. Having two teams pit against each other is unhealthy, but having teams figuring out how they can be so much better than themselves and how do you do the next feature faster? How do you get to understand the customer need a lot better, really outwardly focused, I think is the way to create that competitive energy in a positive way.”
2022-07-12 · Masters of Scale · Harness the passion of internal factions, w/Padmasree Warrior of Fable, Cisco, Motorola · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And our chief marketing officer at that time took a look at it and we came up with this brilliant idea to call it Razor. And it did change the trajectory of that company back then in a positive way.”
2022-07-12 · Masters of Scale · Harness the passion of internal factions, w/Padmasree Warrior of Fable, Cisco, Motorola · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Started to work on how do we make a phone thin like a credit card. And the goal was you could just slip it into your pocket and it would be flat and smooth.”
2022-07-12 · Masters of Scale · Harness the passion of internal factions, w/Padmasree Warrior of Fable, Cisco, Motorola · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was somebody in a research lab that was thinking about how do we make a very thin phone that was foldable. If you remember, we've been in the industry long enough. Cell phones were brick model before that. And Motorola was making the flip phone, but they were thick. And an engineer in a research lab started to work on how do I microminate all of this electronics and make something really thin.”
2022-07-12 · Masters of Scale · Harness the passion of internal factions, w/Padmasree Warrior of Fable, Cisco, Motorola · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think this is the biggest challenge any large company has with teams where you do want some competition in the sense you want it to be healthy, to feel the sense of urgency. I always try to take the approach that let's focus on what the market is wanting and where the market is going and directing the team's attention to be outwardly focused, not necessarily do better than that other internal team.”
2022-07-12 · Masters of Scale · Harness the passion of internal factions, w/Padmasree Warrior of Fable, Cisco, Motorola · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whenever you have large RD teams inside big company, there is always competition between teams. And it's almost impossible to say you can draw clear line between what one team is doing, what the other team is doing. What we have to do as leaders is to make sure that overlap doesn't become complete duplication. In other words, two teams are not building the exact same product. And especially in an enterprise business, you're confusing the user and the customer because now you have two internal teams competing for that customer's business. That becomes very dysfunctional. So I think you have to try very hard to make sure that the competition is for doing new things and not necessarily doing the same thing over.”
2022-07-12 · Masters of Scale · Harness the passion of internal factions, w/Padmasree Warrior of Fable, Cisco, Motorola · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had teams in China, I had teams in India, I had teams all over the US, in South America, all over the world, literally. And everyone was different. There's always this competitive edge between teams, like the team in Bangalore wants to do better than the team in Silicon Valley.”
2022-07-12 · Masters of Scale · Harness the passion of internal factions, w/Padmasree Warrior of Fable, Cisco, Motorola · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Engineers are essentially problem solvers. We are logical thinkers, you know, we like to be given constraints and inputs and we come up with the right set of outputs with that. And we design systems within the constraints that we are given to operate on. That's what great engineers do, right? Like tell me what needs to be get done. Tell me what the constraints are, whether it's budget, time, performance, what targets do I need to go hit. And I'll tell you what the best way to get there is.”
2022-07-12 · Masters of Scale · Harness the passion of internal factions, w/Padmasree Warrior of Fable, Cisco, Motorola · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Realized that I was not being the complete me when I was going to work. I was like putting on this different persona almost. And one day I decided okay This is not okay. I need to be who I truly am. And I started to dress in clothes that I felt comfortable in. Sort of like being in my own skin in some ways might have been symbolic. In some way gave me the courage that I was being true to myself So I think that was something that, in some ways, I was a rebel and I started rebelling to bring my own true authentic self to work.”
2022-07-12 · Masters of Scale · Harness the passion of internal factions, w/Padmasree Warrior of Fable, Cisco, Motorola · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A massive big campus like most tech companies. Very few women The unwritten rule was you dressed in very muted colors Black plans and a gray shirt or blue shirt was the thing. And I grew up in India, as you pointed out, it's a land of chaos and colors and spices. My mom sent me these colorful silk blouses and scarves that she thought I could wear to work and I just like hid them in my closet and I would just continue to wear gray and black.”
2022-07-12 · Masters of Scale · Harness the passion of internal factions, w/Padmasree Warrior of Fable, Cisco, Motorola · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you belong to a community, first you have to go seek to be part of a community. It's not something that's a given, right? Like you have to go find others who share your interest. Actually, what is interesting, and I think this is sort of at the core of what I believe, these communities of interest are traditionally outside of the natural domain of wherever you're working. You know, they tend to be like even at work. It's people who are not necessarily just in engineering. It's people who are doing other things. Maybe you talk about children, you talk about hobbies, you talk about travel, these are things that bond us. And I actually now believe this is instrumental in building a strong culture.”
2022-07-12 · Masters of Scale · Harness the passion of internal factions, w/Padmasree Warrior of Fable, Cisco, Motorola · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fact that I didn't have a built in community forced me to look for allies and build my own community that I could share interests with others. I quickly bonded with other people who shared similar interests as me. I'm interested in theater. I'm interested in music and books and dance. And so a group of us got together and we would talk about these things. And that became my core support community throughout school.”
2022-07-12 · Masters of Scale · Harness the passion of internal factions, w/Padmasree Warrior of Fable, Cisco, Motorola · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“IIDs especially were pretty hardcore male dominated pretty tough academic schools and so there were very very few women in my class there were five of us in a class of 250 undergrads at IIT and I also went from southern India to New Delhi didn't speak a word of Hindi at the time so not only were there no women in my school or in my class for sure but I didn't know the language and it was like completely different food and cultures and everything So yeah, I was intimidating to say the least.”
2022-07-12 · Masters of Scale · Harness the passion of internal factions, w/Padmasree Warrior of Fable, Cisco, Motorola · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Another goblets of fire fell on my foot, and then I screamed in pain, and then my mom obviously was watching all this, and she came running and she saw what I was doing. I was grounded and sent to my room and made to read up everything there is to know about the dangers of playing, literally playing with fire now that I'm an adult and have children of my own, I can see how this totally freaked out my mom.”
2022-07-12 · Masters of Scale · Harness the passion of internal factions, w/Padmasree Warrior of Fable, Cisco, Motorola · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wanted to figure out what happened if you tore off a piece from a plastic bucket and lit fire to it. And I think I was fascinated by the fact that you could turn something solid into a flowing molten piece of glowing fire that would fall in globlets. And I was like hypnotized by this.”
2022-07-12 · Masters of Scale · Harness the passion of internal factions, w/Padmasree Warrior of Fable, Cisco, Motorola · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT