YouSaid · the spoken record

Prashanth Chandrasekar

lines on the record: 77
first: 2022-10-25
most recent: 2022-10-25
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

“Is correct, and I just think that I'm not saying we're not exposed to some of the sort of the things that plague large community websites, which I'll get to here in a second. But I would just say that with objectivity comes this level of like, okay, to set that framework up, and again, the brilliance of our founders back in 2008, they set up a rule set which actually established things like, hey, this is the way in which you ask a great question, right? And in fact, my own experience on Stack Overflow when I first joined was actually a fairly harsh one. When I asked a question, I got slapped on the wrist for asking a question that was not perfectly worded. And that was like a realization for me saying that I'm not a novice user. I'm fairly, you know, I learned to build software as a 12-year-old when my dad got me a computer from Hong Kong. And that's when I started writing code, right? So in that context, it was sort of a jarring experience, but I realized that that was the trade-off that the founders had made to establish this as the very sort of objective.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, the heart of the company is the community, right? So we would not be here if it were not for the community that we served. And that is by far the biggest reason why I joined the company. The impact that we make around the world. And by far the reason why most people joined Stackholeflow to work for us, because it is truly once in a lifetime opportunity to serve that many people in a positive way. So with that opportunity comes obviously a lot of responsibility and complexity to get that right. And for the great thing that we have going at Stack Overflow is that we are a very objective place relative to other social media sites which are a lot more subjective. People have a lot of opinions about various subjects. Whereas here there's typically sort of a right answer and a wrong answer to a technology question. There may be two answers.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was interesting when I joined the company, we were really sort of accelerating our SaaS business both in 2019-2020. We pivoted away from that old talent job listings business that I mentioned as we actually closed that business. One of my probably tougher decisions in the company that I made. But then the team's business really accelerated. And that business now, like I said, has got every possible bank on the platform, every tech company that you can imagine, big retail companies, Microsoft, of course, you name it, right? And all these 15,000 organizations, that momentum attracted a lot of attention. So we got a lot of inbounds from folks in the first call it two years where people were saying, hey, we're hearing about you from companies that we work with. We'd love to sort of figure out how we can invest in you and so on. So we actually did a CRZ investment in the middle of the pandemic, which was done all online for hundreds of Zoom calls and so on. And then as it progressed and we continued to accelerate our”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Leaders to have a voice, an equivalent voice so that they can actually surface the key issues that they believe are sort of causing us to move faster or grow faster. There's a very deliberate effort that I conduct every quarter. We do a quarterly offsite. We ask them very specific questions, what's working, what's not working, what have we learned, how do we hit our overall objective for the year and what's preventing us and what are the biggest challenges we're going to face. Those questions ultimately surface very common themes, which none of those should be entirely surprising to me because if I've done sort of the diligence working very closely with folks on the ground, that should give me confidence to be able to say, okay, this is the right decision. So ultimately it's trusting the people, it's extending quote unquote, smart trust to my leaders so that ultimately they have to bring up the issues that they believe we'll be able to need to go solve, but also having the context from my own vantage point to be able to discern what the right path is.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My process is just as my own style, I am very accessible as a leader. I'm very much on the front line, so to speak, constantly talking to our stackers and employees, constantly talking to customers on a literally on a daily and weekly basis. That gives me a lot of context and confidence that I know what's happening on the ground to be able to say, you know what, I have the ability to actually judge whether or not we need to go down path A or path B. When I make decisions, I'm constantly listening not only to my own leadership team, which is also doing very similar things by engaging with their people, talking to customers, talking to stackers, but I'm also doing tons of skipped levels, et cetera, so that I don't sort of get too far away from the real sort of issues, so to speak, right? Oftentimes when you grow very large, you sort of have a tendency to rely on the layers in between. So with that context and ultimately empowering my”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I've had the pleasure of building what I believe to be a very, very strong team over the past three years. I built out effectively a new leadership team after I joined, which was interesting at doing it. 85% of my tenure as the CEO of this company has been 100% remote, right? Because I joined in late 2019 and the pandemic hit in 2020. So the leaders that report to me, you know, of course, the chief product officer, the chief revenue officer, the chief technology officer, the CFO, the chief people officer, the chief legal officer, and the chief marketing officer. So those are the folks who, all the functions that you can imagine report into me. And all of them have some amazing backgrounds. They're a great leader, very inspirational folks, and have really sort of worked hard to build stack into where we are today. So really, really happy about that.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, wonderful. And then, of course, the go-to market team, which is obviously the largest team because you've got obviously sales folks of multiple kinds for all our products that I've described and also customer success folks and all the supporting cast around that. So that's the order.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I would say it's very similarly, I think our engineering organization is our second largest organization. Of course, you have the entire product, design, our community organization. Don't forget that we have another element in our company that engages directly with our 100 million monthly visitors. So that's an entirely new team that most companies just don't even have, right? Don't worry.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's slightly more on the R&D side because we wanted to make sure that we double down on technology investment during this phase when we were in this investment cycle to build sort of the next generation of products. But it's right over 50%. So call it 55, 45 between R&D and go to market.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You said that Stack Overflow doubled its headcount earlier this year, so you're up to 525. Primarily, it sounds like because big tech has slowed hiring. So there's a lot of talent out there. How have you decided where to put those additional folks?”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're approaching about 525 or so, and that team is, we're headquartered in New York. Our European headquarters is in London, and then we have folks literally all around the world in every possible country you can imagine.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Branding product to help companies engage with technologists so that these technologists are learning which companies are hiring, so they can go and go and apply for them. And then through our advertising products, especially through something like our collectives product, connecting companies and developers and technologists a lot more closely together so they have community curated content that's relevant for a specific topic like let's say it's Google Cloud, one of our collectives, and the community can actually very neatly be able to engage with product folks at Google Cloud, get endorsed for answers that they have on questions that they've got, and really be recognized as the world's best Google Cloud developer as an example, right? But within that subcommunity. So our job is to make sure we promote this sense of learning and learning starts with the question, as we like to say, and we are sort of the workflow folks in that we are enabling just-in-time learning, but people truly have”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The destination for technologists and developers, whether they are current technology developers or the next generation of technology and developers. And that's our vision for our company. And that means being a lot more open about opening the aperture, so to speak, to onboard folks, very young folks even from all around the world to sort of be able to leverage the platform to start early, to start building technology applications on rapid very rapidly, learning continuously because 70% of developers are learning a new language every year, right? And everybody's sort of learning online. So our goal is to make sure that learning is a core theme in how we approach our company in the context of all our products, whether that's our public platform, whether that is through Stack Overflow for Teams, which is obviously through knowledge sharing and breaking down silos within companies, promoting ongoing learning from each other within organizations. And then, of course, through our”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. I think when I joined the company, the company had this amazing community and public platform that it was primarily known for. And it had, I would say, a series of products that had gotten it to where it was in 2019, namely the talent job listings product, the ads business, which is obvious because we are a popular website. And then, of course, a very nascent early SaaS business with Stack Offer Teams. So back then the notion was that we were, when the company first started was very much sort of a place for people to solve a very calm and large problem, which was access to information around technology, right? And it sort of very clearly became into the world's largest knowledge base over a decade or so. But beyond that, what we really believe is that there's an element of taking all that knowledge and really driving a sense of learning for technologists and developers. And that's really where we're going. We want to be.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talk about Stack Overflow of the company, and then I want to talk about where you're going and how you might grow it. Stack Overflow is a really interesting company, right? It has these deep internet community roots. It was started effectively by the community of its two founders. Then it took on investment. It grew. Last year, the whole company was acquired by Process. It's another giant company. You've only been the CEO since 2019, which I guess is not only, it's three years now, but you're reasonably new in the long journey of Stack Overflow. What kind of company is Stack Overflow now? What kind of company did you join and what have you been trying to make it?”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Collaboration, like, you know, this conversation is a real time synchronous conversation, but you also have asynchronous tools like Sack Off of Teams. And then you have design tools and so on and so forth. But there's a very specific number. There are probably thousands of SaaS companies, but we probably use, I don't know, maybe 25, 30 tools very heavily within across our functions. So that's a very small subset of the ecosystem.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would also just quickly say that I think there's probably a core set of tools that every company needs to just keep their business running and operational and high scale and so on. So we evaluate that literally every year. We look at what do we have inside our company, what do we need. And we always talk about having being very thoughtful about costs and so on. But there is a sort of a default next generation tech stack that is formed. I talk about this all the time. You have cloud platform, you have CICD tooling, you have”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so if who's got the better deal, quote unquote, on that. But generally speaking, Donale, I think if you think about our largest verticals, and I mentioned earlier, we have 15,000 organizations on our SaaS business. A large chunk of that have to do with financial services companies. A large chunk of that, obviously there are technology companies in there, but not every company is a SaaS business, right? These are companies looking to transform, solve some really big challenges about hiring and reskilling and onboarding technologists, about how do they drive these large transformations within their companies like cloud transformations or data transformations. And then, of course, they're trying to do all of this in a distributed work environment all around the world with remote and hybrid being sort of the new normal. So those are the problems that we're solving. In fact, I would say SaaS companies, you know, almost I would say they're not the majority of our customers, right? Because those folks are sort of a little bit more further down the line of adopting.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It even out so we have a very big relationship with Microsoft, a very deep one, because we're one of the largest, if not the largest,.NET implementation. Entire stack overflow is built on the.NET stack. So they've been working with them for a long time We are on the Azure platform as an example. We leverage Microsoft Teams for our customers. Most of our customers use either Microsoft Teams or Slack to integrate with Stack Overflow for Teams. Of course, they are customers of ours in the context of Stack Offer Teams, and also they advertise heavily on our platform and so on. So on a net basis, I'm not sure if it's dollar and dollar out, is it exactly the same number?”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is the SAS business has now become the primary revenue driver of the company? In fact, when I joined the company as the CEO back in 2019, that wasn't the case. It was very early in its inception folks that approached me indicated it was great product market fit. This seems to be a real interest from large companies that want to sort of leverage this capability. But it was a lot more focused on things like advertising and even talent job listings back when I joined the company. But over the past three years, we have significantly transformed the company to very specifically focus on building out a high growth SaaS business. All the components that you need in a SaaS business, you know, all the product-led motions, the customer success organizations, the sales development functions, and of course join us from very many popular companies, SaaS companies from all around the world. So I think we've built a great leadership team and also a great team of really great builders who want”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Teams, you have this format that's sort of almost like a self driving mechanism with upvotes and downvotes and badges, et cetera, which really allows you to recognize your subject matter experts to prompt users to update information, keep content health really high, and reuse the knowledge within your company. And that is all of that is the SaaS stack overflow for Teams. And on our public platform, we have a series of advertising-focused products, as I referenced previously.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the internal version of Stack Overflow, and we like to think of ourselves as more than a forum because this is more of a knowledge base. It originally started as a Q&A platform, but has now all sorts of other form factors, longer form content like articles, et cetera, which is why I don't think we used that term particularly. But Stack Overflow for Teams, which is our SaaS product, is leveraged by over 15,000 organizations around the world at very large scale, like Microsoft is an example, has 100,000 employees on our SaaS business or SaaS product where various employees across the company are collaborating and sharing knowledge using the exact same format that those folks have been using for literally over a decade. So there's very high familiarity, but the problem of sharing knowledge within companies has long been unsolved because the information is just floating around in wikis and so on. And it's often out of date. And so really with Stack Over”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To back that out in the most abstract sense stack overflow is a very specific and very focused kind of internet forum. And then you sell the forum software to companies so they can have their own internal version of that forum and you put ads on that forum.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Averaged by developers to build those. On top of that, we have obviously a SaaS business, which is a private version of Stack Overflow that companies use internally to share knowledge and collaborate. And obviously as a function of us being a very popular website, we also have a thriving ads business. So that's effectively us in a nutshell.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Overflows the world's largest software developer and technologist community. We serve close to 100 million monthly visitors from all around the world, which makes us one of the most popular websites in the world, believe by traffic, where I think at the top 50 of all websites in the world, which is obviously a great honor. And the reason why it's so popular is that it's got about 50 million questions and answers on every possible technology topic, everything from programming languages like Python to scripting languages like JavaScript to cloud technologies like AWS and so on. And all of that information has been accessed 50 billion times since our inception back in 2008. That is our public community, our platform, and of course that is free and available to everybody around the world. And that's how people build software applications these days. Any app that's on your phone is an example, I'm sure Stack Overflow is.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm excited to talk to you. There's a lot to talk about. Sakurflow is very important to a lot of people in the decoder audience. So we have some questions. I have the usual decoder stuff. I've got some questions from some engineers I know. A lot to get into. Let's start with the basics though for people who might not know how important Stack Overflow is. What is stack overflow? How does it work?”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About how it works, how the company makes money and how he's growing such a specialized user base while still being welcoming to new users. After all, Stack Overflow has a long reputation of elitism. Prashant himself is a developer and he told me his own first experience on Stack Overflow was a negative one. He took over as CEO about three years ago after a pretty serious moderation controversy that saw several long-time stack overflow moderators quit. Since then, It seems like he stabilized things. We talked a lot about how he measure success on a site that depends on the community being happy and contributing. And why people even participate and moderate on a site like Stack Overflow for free. On top of all of that, Stack Overflow was acquired in June 2021 by Process, a big company that also owns a huge stake in the giant Chinese company Tencent. I want us to know why Prashant”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT