Albert Wang - Co-Founder & CEO at Bearworks: Entrepreneurship, Fundamentals of Product Development, Working with Investors to Find Your Next Role, and Customer Research

Albert Wang  00:00

Being an entrepreneur is stressful. But you're having a ton of fun, right? You're meeting so many interesting people. And that, I think, you know, when we look back on our lives and our careers, I don't think it'll be just counting score of how many wins and losses, it'll be all those memories that we've generated.

Callan Harrington  00:24

You're listening to That Worked, a show that breaks down the careers of top founders and executives and pulls out those key items that led to their success. I'm your host, Callan Harrington, founder of Flashgrowth, and I couldn't be more excited that you're here. Welcome back, everyone, to a another episode of That Worked. We have a great episode for you this week. I'm joined by Albert Wang. Albert is the co-founder and CEO of Bearworks. Bearworks is a revenue intelligence startup that supercharges sales teams to be more productive, leverage insight, and feel more connected. Albert was previously VP of product at Materialize, and director of product at Datadog through their IPO. Prior to Datadog, Albert co-founded Persist, an on-demand virtual assistant service, was the first employee at Crunchyroll, the world's largest Asian video streaming service. And has worked at Data Miner and Yahoo. He's seen a ton of success. He's a Harvard Business School alum. And it was interesting to hear his takeaways from his time there. We dove into product development, and how to conduct customer research. And the part I love the most was talking about what makes entrepreneurship great. It's a lot of work. And from time to time, I question why I do it. But I also can't imagine doing anything else. Albert gave his perspective on why he started a company and I thought it was excellent. So with that, let's get to the show. Albert, welcome to the show.

Albert Wang  02:07

Thanks, Callan. It's super great to be here.

Callan Harrington  02:08

Yeah, I'm excited to have you tell us a little bit about what is Bearworks. What are you guys doing?

Albert Wang  02:13

Yeah. So Bearworks is a modern data platform. Our goal is to enable business users to better answers for most questions and leverage their business data. The longer answer is that Bearworks is a low code platform that enables go-to-market teams like sales, rev ops, leaders to transform their complex datasets into practical insights for revenue growth without all the engineering headaches associated.

Callan Harrington  02:40

Gotcha. So, now are you guys more on the sales side? The rev ops side? Both? What does that look like?

Albert Wang  02:45

Good question. So we are focused on sales to start. But our big thesis is around rev ops that, you know, today's world is not as easy as it used to be, and sales is so complex that it actually transforms across boundaries, you have to go across sales and marketing, across sales and finance, across sales and product. And so rev ops is a big trend that we're super big believers in that we're leveraging. And so we're targeting to rev ops users, but sales to start.

Callan Harrington  03:15

Gotcha. What led you to found this company in particular?

Albert Wang  03:18

I'd say it's a culmination of my career. So going way back, I had a bit of consumer internet experience, and then switched into enterprise software and product management. And enterprise is all about solving practical problems, about building a successful business, and helping businesses be successful. But the consumer aspect is about building something that people want, something that you enjoy using. And, you know, you think about what makes a company successful or not, you know, we're all drowning in data. It's, you know, 2023, we're all using SaaS, but are we actually using it and leveraging it? So it's kind of one of the origin stories is I was a product leader at an enterprise SaaS company, and we were tracking the health of our top customers. And this was a lot of qualitative and quantitative data that was just aggregated in different spreadsheets, we'd have executive reviews, all the leaders across the company would get together every week. And this was just really manual, kind of very in the weeds discussion that would have to take place. And so why is it so you know, when it's your own data, why is it so stuck and siloed? That's kind of the origin story.

Callan Harrington  04:35

Makes sense. I know that pain very well. And in the challenges, none of the systems have this out of the box, you either have to export everything into Excel, and then build all of your functions in there, or you have to push everything to a BI platform and a CRO or a VP of sales. Let me not generalize all of them, let me put myself in that category, I'm not going to write a SQL statement in order to get all this information  out of the BI tools. So is that a big challenge you guys are taking on?

Albert Wang  05:09

I think that is it's a very hard challenge. But we're hoping to tackle it bit by bit. Getting a data person, a data engineer, who understands SQL really well, understands the nuances of joins and inner queries and moving windows, and also who is a sales leader, also a marketing leader... How many people out there in the world are going to be able to hire? And so to that point, can you get someone in today's job market, right, that is a SQL, data expert, and also domain specific expert, is extremely difficult. And so we believe that the future of data is to be more decentralized. And sure, you're going to come out of college, you know, knowing the basics of programming, but are you going to be truly an expert? I think that's going to be a challenge for all of us.

Callan Harrington  06:01

Yeah, it makes complete sense. So starting out your career, at your first job on LinkedIn, you have as the description, "Top Secret stuff. I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you." Walk us through that one.

Albert Wang  06:14

So, it was 2004.  You'd graduated from college, really excited and wanting a change and difference. And you end up at a defense contractor and you know, there's doing all these really exciting things. Actually, around data. I think I can talk about that now. It was a bit of data work and data intelligence. I guess I'll, I'll keep it- I'll stop it there. But I think what was great for me was learning the foundations, learning the fundamentals of engineering, right? You come out of school, and, you know, think you're ready to change the world. And the reality of data is not as clean, right? You have to get it in the right format, you have to talk to your customers, understand what you're building. And the thing I learned from that first job was more about myself, I'd say. It was more about that kind of self interest and intellectual curiosity. It is kind of difficult to share publicly, because I still don't know what about our customer I can reveal.

Callan Harrington  07:21

One of the things that I'm curious about, you mentioned that- is that what kind of led you into product? So you started out as a software engineer, and then looking at kind of your career you moved into product. Was that what led to that? More of that kind of curiosity, trying to figure things out, roadmapping, and things like that? Or am I way off base on that?

Albert Wang  07:37

Okay, so great question. So, after Yahoo, I moved over to Crunchyroll, I was the first full employee, and the company grew super rapidly. We were a bunch of engineers, that all went to school together. I joined because the co-founders were serial entrepreneurs. And having that engineering background, you think you can build everything, you can solve things yourself. But the reality is, business is so much more than that. Right? It's how many big successful companies have we seen that are just technical technology innovations, right? There's there's often the customer aspect, the sales and marketing aspect, product... So, Callan, to your point, I think building the most technically interesting software is not as interesting as building something that people use. Right? Why do people use it? And that was a big part of my shift to product. It was talking to customers to understand what really needs to get built, understanding how your product is differentiated from competitors'. I think that is the most exciting and most stressful part of product, as I'm sure you know, it's literally business. It's continually fluid constantly changing. And the variety is exciting, but it also keeps you up at night.

Callan Harrington  09:07

How do you navigate that? What is your kind of process for navigating that?

Albert Wang  09:11

So, I'd say as a product person, my secret sauce is around understanding the market, but also just listening to customers. I think it's very common in enterprise software, just kind of being empathetic to the user really listening, asking questions like you're doing now. And being curious, right? I think the interesting thing about enterprise software is it's so creative. Going back to your your previous questions about what we learned before, all those examples, all those past tasks, you know, whether an undergrad or your first job out of school, they add backup because these are real tasks that somebody hired and was willing to pay somebody to do, right? So it had to get done. And that is a challenge of product management, because you have to do your requirements gathering to talk to user and collect data. But how do you convince your team that that's the most important thing that needs to be done? How do you get an engineer to internalize this problem and actually get excited about it, rather than just hand them a spec and say, here's what the feature will do? Because there's so much more to detect nowadays, right about that user delight, I think is super hard. And so yeah, like I said, the first thing is just really listening, getting a handle, I think, going back to the consumer software, because we're startup side. The other aspect is just around testing and iteration, right, coming up with hypotheses and getting user feedback, right? It's going to be a bunch of hypotheses. But you're going to learn along the way. That's one big difference I've learned between enterprise and consumer is that in the consumer world, you're often just throwing spaghetti on the wall and seeing what sticks, right? Because consumer tastes are so fickle, they change very rapidly.

Callan Harrington  11:08

When you think of customer research, customer interviews and things like that, how do you conduct that? When you think of- Do you have a set question set that you're going into that, and you're kind of normalizing those questions? Is it focused on a particular area? What does that look like?

Albert Wang  11:24

Going back to basics, I guess first thing I started, there's a book by- it's called Don't Make Me Think, I think the author is something Krug. And he has a great set of user interview questions. I think one of the hardest things that you're, you're hinting at is leading the witness, right? Like letting your subtle biases come out to your interviews. So as a result of that, I think setting context understanding your persona, who is this user, right? Is this person, kind of relevant to other enterprise software companies? Okay, fine. What stage? Are they series A, series B, series C? Is this person relative to a fintech? Is this person relative to pre product market fit? Or post product? Is the person a senior? Or is this person a contributing member of the decision making process? The other aspect of the interview is kind of coming in with a few hypotheses that you want to test and really trying your best to ask the same flavor of the question across users, I think. That I think is the fun part, because you could easily become an automaton and just ask the same questions like a survey. But every single time with a user interview, that person is going to push your thinking a little bit, and you want to incorporate that to your process really quickly. You know, I think that's the tricky part that separates experienced product managers from a  kind of person, kind of fresh, because surveys are fantastic. Surveys have absolutely their place in user discovery. But they can also be a crutch, they can be the- that kind of sheet of paper that you like, show that "oh yeah, the survey says that, you know, 70% of users agree with me." Well, okay, fine. But what is it that they didn't say?

Callan Harrington  13:14

That's an interesting point. It's an interesting point, and it's where, if I'm hearing you correctly, it's the best can eliminate their own confirmation bias for the features and such that they want and take into what they're saying. But then also, taking that anecdote but diving deeper into it, and to understand kind of the why, and the root cause of what that is. Where, I don't know, maybe it's something that is already on the roadmap, maybe it's something totally different. Is that correct? Am I understanding that correctly?

Albert Wang  13:40

Yeah, I think that's a great one. It's: what are you trying to achieve with your with your user review? Are you trying to validate your near term roadmap? Are you trying to validate your product strategy? Are you trying to validate your theses around your competitors? There's so much that is going on when you're interviewing a person, right? And it's so easy to let that conversation go with the flow. But with each interview, you're really just trying to at least accomplish one key objective. But you probably like, have secondary or tertiary objectives as well, right? Like you mentioned, validating your kind of long term product strategy, validating your long term roadmap as well. The easiest thing to do that kind of gets everybody off track is to show somebody a mock up, to show somebody a wireframe. But I'm sure you've seen this in your career where everyone has opinions, once you start to see a product. Whereas when you're still talking about a concept, that's the fun part, but it's also dangerous because your discussion could go in different directions, right? Like whatever you have, what you think this this product in your head could be completely different from what it's like in my head. And I think that's super exciting, right? Because you're kind of leveraging this creativity of two people. But the hard part of the interview is getting them to communicate it. So you're on the same wavelength.

Callan Harrington  15:12

It makes sense. And, and and I've seen it quite a bit on the marketing and sales customer interviews as well, when you're trying to understand the pain points, and things like that, or where they're getting information, and trying to remove those biases is really tough. And that makes sense. Switching gears a little bit. So was it after Crunchyroll that you went to business school?

Albert Wang  15:31

That's right. Yeah. So at Crunchyroll I started as a software engineer. I ended up running their ad sales team, after a while and kind of learned the ropes of sales, learn the ropes of ads, and decided that I was having a ton of fun wanted to switch into the business side. But there were a lot of questions, I guess. I was whatever, my late 20s, you don't really know what you want to do with your career. Right? And I actually had to apply to business school twice. So, I applied the first time, didn't know a lot of MBAs, and learned a lot about myself in that process. When you get rejected, and that process, you have to wait a whole year to reapply, you have to dig deep, right? Like what- I have to go back and get more referrals, write a new set of essays. You're questioning yourself quite a bit there. But yeah, so decided to switch from one side of engineering to the other side of the business, by way of business school. And like I mentioned, business school, for me, was about the people.

Callan Harrington  16:46

Sorry, real quick, can we go back to that? For the listeners that don't know, we're talking about Harvard Business School. Which is really interesting, because when somebody first hears that, it might be okay, well, you didn't get into Harvard Business School. So that makes sense. But what's interesting is, you did end up getting in. What did you need to do in order to make yourself competitive enough to get in that second time?

Albert Wang  17:10

That's a great question. I think I learned a lot about myself, I definitely learned a lot about what makes yourself different from other people. And you have to- whether you talk about the skills that you want to achieve, talk about the skills that make you different from other people, talk about the plan for your career path, right? I think, any school today, a big challenge of education is that there's just so many people competing for so few spots. And for me, it wasn't about the standardized test, it was all about that essay and recommendation, and making myself look different. I think that was a big moment of self reflection for me.

Callan Harrington  17:54

When you got to business school, what was it like for you?

Albert Wang  17:56

It was new. For the listeners, I grew up in California, I spent my whole career until then, in Northern and Southern California. So the cold weather in Boston was new to me. Having to get, you know, a down jacket. But I think the big reason for me personally, going back to your previous question was about people. Right? For me, it makes sense in retrospect, but how do you get the most as a team? How do you get a team to work together? And so that was a big aspect of what I was interested in, in graduate school. It was about understanding businesses, what makes successful businesses different from the ones that are not as successful? What makes leaders successful? And one of the things I learned is, you know, you see a lot of these really successful business leaders. And yeah, there's, they're really smart, and they work really hard. But at the end of the day, we're all human, we all have our strengths and weaknesses. And HBS is pretty famous for relying exclusively on the case study. And, for me, a big lesson I learned was, if you and I were presented with a similar situation, as you know, this CEO, would you have done things any differently? And oftentimes, the answer is, no, probably not. They made a pretty reasonable decision, you would have taken that similarly. And so it gave me a lot more confidence, and confidence to realize, oh, you know, that world out there is not as scary and complex as people make it believe. I think the lesson for me later on was what they don't tell you about school. Right? How did they- the people aspect, how did you get people to perform? How do they think differently and uniquely? The role of the MBA today is a bit controversial, right? There's so many people coming out of even high school that say, "oh, I don't need to go to college. I don't need to go to graduate school." And it's a great point. Right? Does that education- is that ROI there, when it's so expensive? But the principles that you learn from graduate school, that principles of leadership, of running a business, about being aligned organizationally, I think it definitely opened my eyes, I guess, as a kind of a naive little engineer going in.

Callan Harrington  20:27

To that point, how did that impact your kind of your first job as you got out of business school?

Albert Wang  20:32

There's a common quote, I'm sure you've heard, which is, "you have to be careful about hiring a Harvard MBA because they're gonna come out of business school and think they could run your business better than you can." Because you come out a little bit egotistical, after seeing all these all these CEOs. You know, I think I got lucky, right? The tech scene was booming, then. And so having that experience, but I really had to relearn the ropes. I was new to enterprise software. And so you still have to go back to first principles, right? And you have to learn the basics, like we talked about. I had to learn- they don't teach you how to do a user interview in graduate school. They don't teach you how to do- I guess they do have a class on pricing, but they don't actually teach you how to do actual competitive differentiation, right? Because I think the great thing about startups and technology is it moves so much faster than what happens in the classroom.

Callan Harrington  21:28

Absolutely. Do you remember the first time you had that moment of, whoa, this was harder than I would expect? I mean, I gotta assume you went into the first role with a good amount of confidence. What was that first moment where it was: this is hard, I underestimated whatever this may be.

Albert Wang  21:45

I think it's a very personal for me, the hardest thing is still scaling an organization. I think getting from a five person to a fifty, person to a hundred person. There's a lot of complexities. You know, once you get to the fifty and hundred  person organizations, you can- you have to start to think about OKRs, and organizational alignments, and making sure that our cross team objectives are good. I think when you're at the ten to twenty person objective, you're thinking about your territories of your teams, and what are the key responsibilities, and making sure that they're aligned amongst your contributors. You're thinking about career path and career development. That, I think, continues to be the area I'm  working on and learning.

Callan Harrington  22:37

Yeah, stage fit, stage development, the ability to grow in each different stage. And also, you know, I think it's also important that people look at it from the standpoint of, do I even like this stage, right? Just because the company has grown and you're in a higher position, you could be in a higher position, evolve, be good for that position, and be miserable as kind of that company grows and scales.

Albert Wang  22:57

Yeah, I agree. I think today's being a manager is so much harder today. Because people come to jobs, looking for a career. They're looking not just for the reputation and the compensation, but also who am I going to learn from? And what am I gonna learn from you? And I think that kind of personalized coaching is not even just coaching. It's that that player-coach, kind of well-being mentality, I think, is becoming more prevalent in the kind of new hires that I'm seeing.

Callan Harrington  23:34

Yeah, I think what I've seen is a lot of the new hires, they want to have a big impact, and they want to learn from somebody. And if those two things aren't there, they're gonna go find it somewhere else. I've seen a lot of that. That's probably over the past five years, maybe even longer, though. Are you seeing something similar? Or you see something different?

Albert Wang  23:50

Oh, absolutely. It's wild. I mean, you know, the last few months, I've been interviewing a bunch of CROs and I think, that has, without a doubt, made the job of a leader so much harder, because it's not only just are you a fit, in terms of your day to day tasks, but how does my career path flow? And how does that fit with my particular skill sets, I think, is actually a great topic that resonates with a lot of executives. Actually, there's even a blog post from General Catalyst about this, about the future of work. I think it's such a great topic, right? Because during COVID, when we were all sent to work from home, you know, one on one conversations were all zoom. Nobody knew what was happening. Right? With your- you'd see your touch points, but you wouldn't see what's going on. And, you know, some people would overwork themselves until three in the morning. Some people were- their talents were taking the most use of and that kind of coaching was a big lack. And now that we're back to work work, you know, back to the office, I think it's safe to say that we're not going to just return back to what it was like in 2019. Right? The future of work has fundamentally changed with remote work and everything.

Callan Harrington  25:11

I believe that. My personal belief is, if you can't create a remote environment, you're at a significant disadvantage. And I'm not saying you know, don't have a hybrid environment or anything like that. I'm not a remote environment, purist by any means. But you're putting yourself at a big disadvantage from a recruiting perspective, if you will only take people locally, and in my opinion, is not necessarily the obvious ones, right? When you think of, I may be able to get all the talent in the world in New York, but can my company at this stage afford all of the talent that's in New York, that's out there? Where somebody may be willing, that's in a smaller city, they don't have to make as much, they don't necessarily care if they make as much, but also put that and vice-versa. That person may also- can also live in Ohio, for example. And they're not taking anything less than New York or San Francisco money. So, everything has changed. And I think that the companies that don't adapt to that are at a significant disadvantage.

Albert Wang  26:08

One of our investors did a study on their portfolio. And they found that early stage businesses that leveraged distributed teams were actually found to grow faster and more rapidly, because we don't know why we're guessing it's because of this plethora of talent. I think it's such a fascinating topic, right? In terms of competitiveness of cities, competitiveness of Silicon Valley, of the United States, right? Is there something different? And on the one hand, going back to school, what is the purpose of a university? Right? It is to share knowledge, and to meet people, and exchanges ideas. And on the other hand, there's great talent everywhere. So, how do you get people to work productively and creatively, yet also give them that freedom to not have to live in a high cost locale?

Callan Harrington  27:06

Yeah, it's a difficult challenge. I mean, I think you have to have tight processes, and you have to have things in place, you have to have things in place that bring people together, right? And that might be quarterly on-sites and things like that, where you still can get some of that, but it's definitely a balance. And those numbers don't surprise me at all, in an early stage company, in particular, because a rockstar person at an early stage company is gonna have an outsized impact. That's purely anecdotal, just from you know, my experience, but I'm not surprised to hear that. You know, one of the things I'm curious about to that point, in particular, I had read that you turned down some other VP of product jobs in order to be the first product manager at Datadog. What led to that decision, in particular?

Albert Wang  27:49

Just for the record, to set it straight, I wasn't the first product manager, I was on a first cohort of product managers. So there are a couple of us. But yeah, so that was a that's an interesting discussion, because at the time, Datadog was still a fast growing, but private company, and they weren't as well known outside their space. And so I actually, like you said, had a bunch of other VP offers. And an investor actually told me to take a second look. And, you know, they didn't share any anything confidential, but they were like, you should definitely take a look at data dog. And once I joined, that's when I realized, well, they have been growing, basically doubling every eighteen months for the previous three years. And so it was literally a definition of a rocket ship. And I've reflected back on that quite often. Because from the outside, there's no way I would have known. I was very, very lucky to have been guided there by my network by an investor who was in the know, right? Because even though I had thought I had experience, right, running companies and looking at different businesses, investors are constantly out there understanding the market understanding differences, and so it's a very synergistic relationship for everybody, I think.

Callan Harrington  29:14

Totally agree with that. I think investors are great resources for not even just, I mean definitely for making connections, and I'm a huge believer in networking to find your next. I'm- now, I'm biased. I've never- I have never gotten a job that I've applied for, not one time. Every single job I've ever had came from networking, and all the first clients I had for my business all came from my network and networking. So I'm definitely biased, but investors are one that I think are... I don't want to say underutilized, that's like making an investor appear commodity, but the viewpoints that they kind of have both into what's going on within a company, what's going on within the market, right? So as you're kind of planning your next thing, and you're thinking of you know, do I want join a later stage company? Do I want to join an early stage company? Getting an understanding of how the investors are thinking on what that investment landscape looks like. Super important, right? If you think of all the people that joined, you know, later stage company right now thinking that that was going to IPO in a few years. Now, I don't know if any investor could have predicted that anyway. But, you know, that's totally different.

Albert Wang  30:21

Yeah, I think that's a great point, right? The good question I've learned is to ask an investor for the recommendations of companies they aren't in, or companies- deals that they missed, right? I think investors will give you, going back to data, they'll give you great, they're gonna be in the know, for their own portfolio, but they're naturally going to be biased, right. And so, on the other hand, investors, we shouldn't overgeneralize. Investors aren't just one type of person, right? There's different flavors of investors and different types of people, right? It's a relationship. And so, you know, some investors are very thesis driven. And some investors are very people oriented. Some investors are late stage. Some people are data investors, or even data's to broad, right? Some people are finance data, some people are marketing data investors. And so getting a sense of, of that person, what they're interested in. I think, going back to your point about networking connections, right, investors are also that's their job is to, to meet people meet interesting people. And so that's been a huge lesson for me, you know, not just networking as a transactional aspect, but actually figuring out what type of person you click with and developing that relationship with over time. Because, you know, oftentimes investors are thinking about businesses that they wish would exist. And so they're looking to incubate, or trying to get a business started, make a team together, and there's just so many- as the middle that's going to be an interesting conversation, you're gonna learn about something new, in some way or another from talking to investors.

Callan Harrington  31:52

I completely agree with that. So, a question that's on my mind is: you had a really successful run at Datadog, you were there it went public. After that, it looks like you joined an early stage company with Materialize, which also seemed to be a company that was growing pretty quickly. Why found a company? Why go through and start that company from scratch? Because you could have easily went to- I have to assume, now I'm assuming, correct me if I'm wrong on this, but just having that Datadog exit and IPO, successful IPO, $24 billion market cap as of I think today, you probably could go most anywhere you want and negotiate a great comp package, equity plan, everything else. Why found a company?

Albert Wang  32:37

That wasa lot of deep, late night conversations with with my wife. Materialize and Datadog are both fantastic companies, amazing people, learning so much. And for me, I think part of it is just around that itch. Around wanting to push myself to see what you're capable of. Part of that is about thinking about the problem space for so long, and just really getting excited about the domain. Right? It's kind of what pushed me over the edge personally, was we're currently working in the data space. And like many large spaces out there, it just so deep and so broad. I know that I'm motivated by A) building something that people use, but B) that kind of intellectual curiosity, right? There's so many interesting problems and challenges that even if we solve one, there's gonna be at least ten more behind that door. What I'd say, as I'm sure you know, Callan, right? Being an entrepreneur is stressful. But you're having a ton of fun, right? You're meeting so many interesting people. And, that I think, you know, when we look back at our lives and our careers, what I don't think it'll be just counting score of how many wins and losses, it will be all those memories that we've generated. And, you know, I guess I'm only at the beginning of it, right? We're- many people have joked we're in the honeymoon phase still. So, you know, I guess I'm still able to smile and laugh about what I'm going through.

Callan Harrington  34:15

But it is one of those things where you almost have to keep that mindset. And not even just founding or starting a company. But if you're going to be an executive in early stage company, you have to have that release. You have to be able to kind of laugh at a certain situation. Now, you can't just you know, have a bad situation and laugh in front of your whole team. Right? That's totally different. But you have to have something, because you're on the razor's edge at all times. That's something I think was probably the biggest thing I realized in being an executive at early stage startup was that you know the full burn, you know everything that's going on, and when you first I think, look at that, it's like, whoa, these are risky. These are really, really risky. And I had to really prioritize a lot of things kind of outside of work in order to make sure that I can handle the stress that comes with it. Well, how do you do that? How do you manage that stress just in general?

Albert Wang  35:11

My wife and I, we have- we're both doing a startup, and we have two young kids. So I think-

Callan Harrington  35:16

Oh, okay, so you have got the full picture right now!

Albert Wang  35:19

We've got our hands full. Yeah. So we've got our natural stress release, it's just the rest of our life. But I think you make a great point, right? That's where I think product management is so similar to entrepreneurialism, and doing a startup. Because, you know, we have what we learned in the past. We have our skill sets of what we're good at. But what keeps me up at night is what am I missing? What are my blind spots? What am I forgetting? And not only that, it's about what do I feel good about? Double down. Like going double down, kind of investigating, and investing in further, and pushing the gas on. I think you spoke to Vikas, right? And he mentioned he's an advisor. You know, he said, being a CEO is all about capital allocation. Right? Whether it's about money, or time, or resources, mindshare, that's fundamentally the job that we have to do.

Callan Harrington  36:18

It's 100%. It's no different than an executive in a large organization as well. Larger. Not even- Doesn't have to be a large organization. If you could have a conversation with your younger self, age up to you, what would that conversation be? What advice would you give?

Albert Wang  36:31

I've been thinking about this one. So I think there's a quote actually my- the beginning of business school, I had a professor, his name is Rawi Abdelal. He's actually an international relationships professor. But it's a quote from NASCAR. And his quote is basically, goes to the effect of, "you're not racing if you're not crashing." Right? And I think that's a great one for me. I think MBAs kind of by definition, are a little bit risk averse. They're actually not often the most risk seeking people. But the gist of that quote is, you should know what that razor's edge is, you should feel, know where you're at, know where that boundary is, kind of constantly push yourself to get there. I think that has been a big lesson to learning myself and kind of pushing my boundaries.

Callan Harrington  37:19

I didn't expect a NASCAR quote to be the one that actually put a lot of what I've been thinking into perspective as well, but it totally nailed it.

Albert Wang  37:29

I have to find the exact quote. I totally butchered it. I'm sure.

Callan Harrington  37:33

It is. It's that pushing to make mistakes. And- because then you're going to learn from those mistakes. Albert, this has been great. I think you gave so much good advice today. I appreciate you coming on the show.

Albert Wang  37:46

I had a ton of fun. Thank you for having me.

Callan Harrington  37:49

Absolutely.  I hope you enjoyed Albert and I's conversation. To me, one of the best parts of being an entrepreneur is all the interesting people that you meet. I didn't expect that when I started, but it's by far one of my favorite parts of the job. If you want to learn more about Albert, you could find him on LinkedIn in the show notes. Also, if you liked this episode, you could find me on LinkedIn to let me know. And if you really want to support the show, a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify is very much appreciated. Thanks for listening, and I'll see everybody next week.