Thank you everyone for tuning into another episode of the Embit podcast, and I'm your host, Seamus Madan. I started this podcast at fifteen years old in December 2020 to bring personal finance education to the next generation. Now I am sixteen years old and the podcast has evolved to interviewing entrepreneurs BCs, GPs, and founders of public companies, all of which are designed to delve into insights that have not been shared elsewhere, for the next generation of those interested in business.
Recently, I ventured into the VC space as a venture fellow at blitzscaling ventures which is backed by the co founder of LinkedIn. And I am interviewing those farther along in their journey to learn more on everything that I and the audience is curious about. If any of the above sounds interesting to you, make sure to subscribe to the podcast and share it with a friend. And now back to the show.
So today, we have a very special guest, Arthur Ramam Murphy, who is formerly a product manager at Microsoft, Netflix, the co founder of multiple startups, including True and Co, Moomoid a try before you buy consumer electronic service and the former director of product for Facebook with more recently the co host of the Good Time Show hosting guests like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Mark and Teresa, the changed smokers, and many more.
So first off, Arthy, thank you for taking the time to join the show. It's a pleasure to have you here today. Shamus, thank you so for having me. I've been a big fan of the podcast, so it's really awesome to be here as guest. I appreciate it. It's great to have you here. So let's first start all the way back with your journey and how you first became interested in the tech ecosystem. Yeah. You mentioned all the roles that I just had, and, you know, some of them are just so long ago.
But, yeah, I think I moved from India over 15 years ago now. I've always been interested in tech and computers. I started learning to write code when I 13, I think. And that got a PC thought it was the best thing ever.
Got really interested there, and they I ended up accidentally picking computer science in the sense, I've always wanted to learn computers, pick it up as a skill set, but I graduated at this perfect window which was post the dotcom recession, like, boom, post, like, crash and pre the 2008 recession. So it was just this, like, perfect window where I ended up graduating where there were lots of jobs out there for tech folks like me I just worked itself out. I just happen to be really lucky.
So I have a master's in software engineering from India, joined Microsoft, was at Microsoft work there for here is working on everything from low level developer tools, the compilers, loaders, binders, that kind of thing, all the way to Xbox, Xbox Live, building tools for indie game developers, things like that. That was in Seattle and then moved over to the Bay Area to work at Netflix. And this was way before original content programming. Netflix even being international.
You know, at that time, it was just like a fairly small company. We just started dipping our toes into original programming with the rest of development and things like that. So that was really fun. Just learned a whole lot being early in that but, yeah, I think my general trajectory is I've always wanted to be in tech. I always wanted to start a company. Didn't quite figure out what the path would look like, but in retrospect, it kind of sort of worked itself out. Gotcha.
And you mentioned computer science. Now I had Eric bond on the podcast a couple months ago. I believe he was a former product manager for Intuit and then Instagram. And what he said during those experiences is it felt like more like you're running a mini company you're running the innovation inside of a large organization. So how did you transfer from computer science, which is arguably very different from the product management phase? That's right. That's a great question.
I think Microsoft just took a chance on us. Ask me and Madan husband. That's kinda how we started working. Were, I think, one of the youngest product managers at Microsoft. Even before we graduated, for me, it was a year before I graduated. I started working full time at Microsoft. And worked in India for a year. And, you know, at that time, it was fairly novel. We didn't quite know what PMs generally did, but we were just students of the field just learned studied a lot.
At that time, there were lots and lots of blogs from other PMs who had, like, described what they Madan so for me, it felt like a good step between, like, being technically competent being an engineer, but also, like, building strategy. Product and being able to figure out, you know, how to launch it, how to plan, post launch, things like that. So I really enjoyed it, like, in again, in retrospect, we had no business being PMs, but it sort of worked itself out.
We were just right place, right time ended up joining Microsoft then. And from there on, product management just became the thing that I started getting really good at. Yeah. Definitely. And you mentioned on a separate podcast how you guys get a lot of Madan emails and replies from people who are just starting out their careers in other countries. They're countries like India who are interested in possibly product management or similar path that you went.
So what would your number one tip for those people in the audience who might be listening to the show to start exploring either that space or spaces that seem of interest to them? I I think there's no one size fits all kind of advice here. If you're looking, especially, I generally try to understand why they wanna be PMs. And it's a very specific skill set, but it's also kind of a generalist role.
A PM, you know, some people describe it as a glue in the company, you know, you're trying to keep everything together, like, all the functional teams together. Others look at it as, like, the job that is the most invisible where you have a set of things that needs to be done, but there's no one person who's, like, responsible for it to do it and enter PMs to go figure that out.
So it product management as a goal as a job just varies a lot even from, like, even within a company, even a company as big as Facebook and company to company for sure. So you I kind of try to understand the motivation of people who are trying to become a PM. For me, at least the peeling part is I love going up and down the stack, so to speak.
I love being in the nitty gritty of, like, building things, writing code, really understanding what people want all the way to scaling this as like, is this a good enough or a viable business? Is this a decision that we should take with respect to profitability or scaling this, you know, 12, 18, 24 months out and, like, trying to build a strategy overall. So I kind of like going from one extreme level of detail to, like, a 30,000 feet view. And the role of a PM just lets me do that.
And so if there are people so one thing I would say is if that's something that's really exciting for you where you don't wanna be at this, like, extreme level of detail alone, You don't wanna be at a high level strategy set inside alone. You wanna go up and down the stack. That could be a PM. Could be a really good way to bridge that.
Yeah. And arguably, it can also be a good way to experience the other side of the 2 job categories because then you'd be able to see in detail what each one entails as a job and figure out which one you like better or if you like doing both of them as well. That's exactly right. And I've seen people who started as a PM and then figured out which functional role they really wanna pick.
I've also seen the reverse, which is they started out as an engineer, and then they realized that They actually love being in product management because, you know, they love, you know, writing specs and talking to customers and really trying to figure out, like, the strategy should look like, or I've seen people go into, like, the operation side of things. And so I've seen, you know, people either migrating towards or migrating away from.
And I feel like you know, you have to figure out what's the right fit for you and what your skillset are and what you're really good at. And, again, like, a pre enroll is not a one size fits all in some it also changes from company to company, but at the level of the project itself, like where the project is at that point. In some cases, a very stable with your product and you're trying to figure out V2 or V3. In sum, you're just trying to figure out product market fit.
So you really need to, like, understand who your customer base is and go talk to them and figure out, like, a trade on the feedback and all of that. So it really depends on what who this person is, what is skill sets are and what they wanna be doing as a part of their career path in trajectory. Gotcha. And you mentioned you joined Facebook a bit earlier, and you were there for around 5 and a half years, I believe.
And then right after Facebook, you decided to join Clubhouse as a head of international expansion. What was that transition like?
And then for other startups, For example, a company's founder I had on the podcast, Spencer Raskoff, the co founder of Picasso, they recently started expanding into international markets for secondary partial home ownership, what are some of the things that startups can do in the early stages or the late stage startups to begin expanding beyond just the US market because there's billions of more people out there in the world and a lot more customers just besides where you are locally based.
Yeah. Great question. Experience from going from Facebook to Clubhouse. I think for me, I lucked out at Facebook because I got to work on a very small team, almost like an incubation project to start with and kind of slowly scale that into a really big successful project. And so I got to really work, you know, to what you said earlier, as a small, well funded startup within a big company, and that was great.
I learned a lot and Facebook, you know, Meta has incredibly smart people, very driven, very motivated, was a good culture fit as such. So that worked out really well from, like, a work aesthetic cannot that standpoint. And then going into Clubhouse, that was much smaller company. When I joined, they just raised a CVC, but very, you know, pre product market fit. And so scaling internationally was almost like a side effect of launching on Android.
And so, you know, they clubhouse ended up on Android, and they figured out, oh my god. Like, we have a lot of these users who are international, and we have no plan on, like, how to go scale. And that's kind of where I entered see. And so at that time, I hadn't, you know, honestly Madan specific international scaling as such in any of my previous jobs.
It was something that I had to learn on the job And I and so for me, I think the biggest thing a lot of companies come to me, a lot of startups talk to me about, like, when should we scale internationally? How do we tap into that next cohort of users? It really depends. And I think you have to kind of ask yourself, is this the right time for you to scale internationally? And there's a lot of different vectors to go look at there. One is what's the stage of the business?
Do you have enough bandwidth to allocate for international? Because the strategy for international is very different from US domestic market as such. You know, which means you have to also start investing in things like localization, you know, your app store app being actually available in all these other languages and demographics as such. You have to think about if it's a, you know, monetization based business, you have to think about things like FX rates and currencies and all of that.
So there's it's not just about tapping into that extra set of, like, this growth of users, which I think is great, but a lot of people just stop at that. You have to kind of go a few steps deep to figure out what is the effort that you truly need to put in on international and what's the outcome that you expect to see and kind of assess the cost versus benefit at the stage of the business that you're in. And it might not be the right decision for where you are.
It might be too early, or, you know, you probably think, you know, you have competitors in different markets. You really need to expand and be aggressive. So it really depends on where you are with the business. The clubhouse itself, like, a lot of what we had to do with international is One, we just had this like crazy growth on Android. We have to figure out which markets, kind of slice and dice all the markets into tier 1, tier 2 markets. You know, which countries would be scaling?
What would the playbook look like? For example, for India, we realized that a lot of our growth came from specific programming in different markets, tackling verticals like Bollywood and cricket and things like that, which is very different from what we've seen in the US. So it required a dedicated team and effort to go target in different markets and be able to win quote and quote in each one of them.
Yeah. You made a great point, especially on learning on the job, because this is a topic that's come up on the show before. The topic of curiosity and experience is the best teacher. I think that's crucial. For example, when I started investing, although I read books on investing I think actually going through the process on investing helped me take away the most out of it. But what are some of the things that people can do to learn most effectively while on the job and stay curious?
I think first thing is to drop the ego and acknowledge to yourself that you are gonna be doing that. It is okay to learn on the job. You probably bring in a bunch of really different skill set that is incredibly valuable and complimentary to the company. And then there are some skill sets that you're going to learn on the and that's okay. I feel like a lot of people have this notion that you have to be you have to come across as if you're, like, really, really good at everything.
And that's okay. You might not quite get there at whatever stage in your career. Others, you know, this is very this feels like very generic kind of cliched advice, but it still holds true. Work with, like, you know, figure out, like, what your skill set is. I try and what I do as part of being a mentor is I try and ask folks to put together a 5 year plan for themselves, like a personal career trajectory plan. Where do you wanna be, you know, and get to as level as as detailed level as possible?
You know, do you expect yourself to be a startup founder, a manager with x number of reports, and you wanna be in this particular functional area. You want to how do you wanna measure how successful you are and write that down and kind of work backwards from their back from that. Right? So for me, then I look at it as, what does it mean to then pick up the skill set and how are you gonna pick them up?
And that could come from the specific functional area, which you're not really good at, you wanna go learn, but you're going to you're you're going to offer a different skill set that other people need in that area. Work with a specific manager who you think is, like, really smart, really good at something or have a specific set of mentors.
I don't believe in one mentor who can basically be that person, be a mentor for you for every aspect of your life, but really look at it as like This person's gonna help you figure out this particular thing. This person's gonna help you figure out this thing. So have a suite of mentors who you can pick and choose which skills that you wanna learn from. Or just get advice from hangout with. And I think good things happen there.
Also, just I think, again, please should advise, but Be curious, like, step up beyond your day job and try and, like, learn other things. Like, what else can be helpful for the company or the business? Can you go pick up other things? That is not a part of your regular day job as such. You know, you've mentioned, like, reading books and things like that. I do a lot of that from, like, reading books. My own show. I get these guests. I learn from every one of them.
I listen to a ton of podcasts, and it's just helpful for me to just learn by just osmosis by just like learning from book. But, yeah, all of these sound cliched. Again, no one particular advice. One size fits all. It really depends on what your learning style is, but as long as it's You're open minded and curious. I think you're just gonna, like, get there pretty quickly. For sure. And as of now, you've obviously over the years built up a very strong reputation in the tech ecosystem.
But when you first came here to the United States, you were brand new to the So what are some of the things that you did to help build out your brand and establish a personal brand? I get asked this a lot. Especially, you know, I came from India. So I, you know, a lot of my friends, this network of people who talk to me, who ping me on Twitter DMs or on, hey. I'm looking to move. I just move. How do you build a brand for yourself?
Again, I think the biggest thing is, like, to tell yourself that it's okay. I feel like some, for some reason, building a brand has become such a negative thing, and building a brand doesn't mean talking about things that you're not good at doing or, you know, falsely representing yourself in a way. I think part of it is, like, really marketing your skillset, kind of raising your hand in telling other people that you're around, you're available. This is what you do.
And so I think everyone's attention span is so limited that you kind of have to you know, do that. Like, raise your hand and put yourself out there. I think for me, I didn't know any of this. When I first moved to the US, I didn't, you know, the 1st country I, you know, I'd never left India before I came to the US. And when I came to the US, I basically moved. And so all of this was basically learning on the job, so to speak.
And so I I would write I, you know, internally when I worked at Microsoft, Facebook, all of these companies, I would make it a point to just write internally and express my views on what we were doing, what we're good at doing, what I learned from customers, whatever it might be, and that helped people kind of internalize who I was or, like, to slot me into Oh, she's good at this kind of thing. I we started, you know, things like the good time show.
I think came out of some, you know, starting to not so much proactively think about building a brand, but kind of pay it forward because we'd learned a lot being outsiders and now being insiders. You know, I'd been through incubators, accelerated programs like combinator, which was incredibly useful for me, but a lot of people have never been exposed to, you know, accelerators like that.
So just trying to basically talk about what I'd learned through this 15 year journey of, like, being an outsider to an insider and kind of talking about it on Instagram. I do a lot of, you know, IG stories and posts and little reels and charts and clips and stuff. So just trying to impart whatever I've learned into helping people trying to figure it out. And they can choose to use any part of it as they see fit, but that's been really helpful.
I think at least for me, it helps me internalize, like, what I I'm doing and what I can be doing better. Other staff, you know, my husband, he, you know, has really strong Twitter presence. Me not much. We learned a lot by just putting ourselves out there on like social media platforms. I think even in our day jobs and stuff, we've kind of taken up investing, angel investing. I pretty prolific at that. I invest in about 8 to 10 companies every year, but advise an equal number every year.
So it's kind of you know, over the last 4 or 5 years, I've really built this portfolio of companies that I'm really excited about. I love working with founders, and, I love just helping them figure out what they're what they need to figure out, what their challenges are, and helping them unblock. So, yeah, just, again, learning on the job and trying to be as useful as possible and trying to figure out what it takes for everybody else to go from outsiders to insiders as we did ourselves.
And to wrap it up here, what do you think are you some of your key takeaways for those either trying to build the reputation from scratch or just starting to enter the tech industry either in product management or studying computer science or anything like that, do you think are your top key takeaways for that? A few things I would recommend people do and get comfortable doing. 1, put yourself out there.
I mean, write more, tweet more, talk about what your skill sets are, and just establish your presence online more. I think that's really, really important and not not a lot of people do that. And if you want to be heard or seen, you need to put yourself out there. 2, Get really good at writing good cold emails. The cold emails, I think, is a lost art.
Some of my best conversations with founders, with mentors, with mentees, have come from really incredibly well written cold emails and, you know, just get good at that. We've done some some, you know, IG shorts, the reels around this stuff. So happy to send that over to. I think the others iterate. Just don't be afraid to just learn and iterate and just course correct as you see fit. As you like putting yourself out there writing more or doing things like that. And last, it's okay to ask.
At the worst case, you will get a no But at least you tried. At least you asked. Most people, I think the hardest thing is to even, like, just get to the point of, like, asking for something. And so, you know, just reach out, knock on doors, write, ask, do the thing. Don't worry about being embarrassed or ashamed. I think that's half the battle.
If you successfully conquer that, then the rest of it is just like at least you're out there and then you can iterate on and get better and continuously improve. But I think most of the battle is just, like, asking for stuff. Absolutely. I totally agree. I think that there's this theory that everyone six steps are fewer away from knowing other or something like that. And I think that's been super helpful.
I know at the beginning of the podcast journey, I was talking to very starter entrepreneurs just starting out their company at the very beginning stages. And then as it progressed, I started meeting more and more people and was able to network with others to help contribute back to them value to them through the podcast and then just network with as many people as I possibly could.
But I think you make a really good point on putting yourself out there, putting the content out there, you know, I've watched this podcast, like, really go from a very, very small kind of podcast setup that you've done to, like, having some really great guests, great conversations. I think you're a fantastic Coast. And so I think part of it is the outreach and the cold emails and all of that, but part of it is you're also able to marry that with, like, actual skill set on the job.
Like, on the podcast itself. So that's been great for me. When I was starting my company, Lumoid, I called email Katrina Lake, who's a founder and CEO of Stitch Fix And, you know, she had no business replying to me. You know, she has a very successful company. There were a couple years from taking it public, but she kind of took the time to respond and we ended up setting up a one on one. I ended up going to her office, and she ended up being an adviser for me.
And to this day, we, you know, continue to keep in touch but that came out of a cold email. And so I can't I can't stress enough the importance of just putting yourself out there and reaching out to people. At the worst case, you know, it just nobody responds to it, and that's fine. It's no different from the stethoscope. But the best case, things could be very different for you.
And, you know, you could be a lot more successful because of getting seeking help from a bunch of other people who want to see you succeed. So I think that's really important. I appreciate it. I totally agree. Well, alright, everyone. That wraps it up for today's episode. If you enjoy the podcast, make sure to drop a 5 star review down below. And thank you very much, Arthy, for taking the time to join the podcast It was a pleasure. Awesome. Thank you so much for having me, Shamus.
This was a blast. I appreciate it.