I see posts even for like my friends at Google like, hey, celebrating two-year anniversary, boy, sure is hard working here but all these amazing people, I'm just having a blast. And man, I know you're not having a blast. Why are you telling these people that it's amazing and there it's not amazing in it? So it's just these false expectations. Hello and welcome to the Metacast podcast. I'm Ilya Bezdev. And I'm Arnaud Deca. And on this podcast, we talk about how we build our startup metacast.app.
It's a podcast app that's about to be released in a couple of months to the public. Go to metacast.app, enter your email and you will get a notification when the app is released. If you are looking forward to changing your Apple Podcasts, Spotify will something that's better. At least we hope so. And every now and then we have guests on our podcast that we learn from and hope that other entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs can also learn from.
And today we have Alex Ryszewski, who is a product management career coach. But he is also a former product manager at Google and a founder of I think a few companies. Alex, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. All right, so let's get started with the brief intro. Can you tell us what you do, what you up to these days? Sure, yes. These days I primarily teach product management. Folks that want to get into the business want to get into the top tech companies, I help get into
the company that I help to go through the interviews. And I also help folks that are lucky enough or sometimes miserable at these top tech companies. I help them out with career development and kind of moving forward and hopefully making things suck a little bit less. So that's what I do nowadays. Cool, yeah, getting into a product management job is quite an ordeal with all the interviews and all. So yeah, yeah, even though like there's no real educational component to it, like it's not
a doctor or a rocket scientist or engineer, but it's hard. It's hard to do it. So I try to help folks out with that. It's also combined that with like big tech interviews. That's quite an ordeal in itself. So combine that two of them and you have yourself the perfect storm. Yeah, I remember reading a book. I think it was cracking the PM in through you. I think it was the book where they said that most PMs are misfits because like you said, it's not like you can go and get a
bar certification to become a lawyer, right? You actually somehow get a lot of knowledge from all over the place. And then some companies need just what you have, but some companies may eat something else. So I'm curious from your perspective, why is product management hard? Yeah, it's a great question. Why is product management hard? Actually, product management, like it's simple, but it's not easy is what it is. There's not actually that much you need to know. You need to
fundamentally be good at business. That's my approach to this is that if you have an entrepreneur background, you will kind of naturally be better at product management. The thing that makes product management nowadays a little bit different for entrepreneurship is this tech element is that you tend to be doing it with software sometimes hardware, but basically in the digital realm. That's
the difference. Otherwise, you sort of selling lemonade in the corner or like selling something physical in the physical world, but then you're just doing it digitally and you're scaling it and there's unique problems that come along with it. The hardest thing is this mastering the soft skills. So all the communication stuff, the collaboration stuff, it's hard to really teach it's something you kind of have to acquire with practice. So a lot of product managers just do different stuff.
They're out there building businesses or doing sales or marketing and then they find themselves in sort of a leadership position where they are in charge of a product or a project. And effectively, that is what product management is. You figure out how to get the customers what they want while making money for your business. That's it in a nutshell. The difficulty comes with the fact that it's like a confusing role. People don't really know how to get into it. Like how do you get the
education for it? How do you get the experience for it? And it is a little bit of a cast 22 because most PM roles require experience, but you can't get a role without any experience. It's a common question and my answer is usually like go and build some stuff or help other people build some stuff. And then of course there's like unique challenges that come from working at the top tech companies.
I think at AWS, Ilya correct me if I'm wrong, but there was a specific role for technical product managers. Actually Amazon has three different product management roles. There's a regular product manager, which usually somebody who works in more kind of business, you see like check out at Amazon.com would be a regular product manager.
Then there is product manager technical. The job that requires you to understand the underlying tech stack like video streaming or a Kindle because there are inherent limitations coming from the tech stack. So they need to understand how it works. But then there's also product manager technical external services. That's a mouthful. So that's what most AWS PMs are because they serve technical audiences. So their
customers are technical people, their customers are developers. So therefore it actually requires you to not just understand the stack, but actually be one of them, be one of those who you serve. So yeah, there is this kind of ladder. And I'm saying ladder because people aspire to move into technical roles because they pay more and there's more prestige there. And you have a background in software development,
is it right? Not really. I mean, I learned to code as a kid a little bit and then I haven't coded it in many a decade. Until recently when I came back with chat GPs help and played around with Python and did some stuff for this comment armor that we were building with a buddy. So yeah, my background is not any more technical than just somebody who knows how to code a little bit and knows the fundamentals. No, no CS degree, nothing like that. Ilya is the only one here with a CS degree.
Oh, I got. Okay. Great. Now we have one and even like an engineer with no CS degree. I love that. Yeah. But I think that highlights the point you raised earlier is like how do you learn something and there are lots of engineers without CS degrees. There are lots of product managers with
all sorts of different degrees because there is no degree in product management. At Amazon and other places too, I felt like that was one of the struggles that a lot of product managers went through is generally people who are coming into the product management roles at these big companies. They're good at understanding what the customer is asking for, right? And translating it. But also needing to understand the technical realities and trying to figure out a innovative solution that
figures out what can we give the customer that would be delightful to them. That's where a lot of people struggled with, I think. Yeah, I think that's fair. That's totally fair. I think especially folks that are coming in with no tech background, not only in CS, but I just mean tech like it's helpful. I always say to my students or folks that I work with that it's good to understand the fundamentals of programming, computer science, like it's good to understand how the internet works
on a fundamental level. Nothing extreme, but just so that you understand limitations. I think are not what you said about the limitations or I think you said the limitations of certain the tech stack. I think that's that is important to know because sometimes you come up with some wacky stuff that just basically can't be done and not in the fun way can't be done, but in the real way can't be done. Yeah. curious to talk about your coaching practice and your teaching practice
as a business. So can you tell us how you got started on it and how it evolved? Yeah, yeah. So you guys are familiar with solo entrepreneurship, the hottest thing going around these days, just and Welsh and everything talking about that. I like the concept because it kind of marries creating content of some kind and talking about interesting things with a potentially a business. I'm not quite there yet, but I think it's an interesting place to be. I like the
potential of technically limitless upside. That's the thing that kind of I think draws people to pursuing social media following. It's like this technically limitless upside. That's why you see Elon Musk out there yelling up cingodies at everyone with his 200 million followers. He just doesn't really care anymore. It started with me being at Google and realizing that I don't really like it at Google, but I do like the concept of building products. I like the concept of business,
and I like the concept of product management. So I did probably 150 interviews at Google for incoming candidates. I started to help people to do better in interviews because I've kind of seen the same type of problems. I think the book that you mentioned, cracking the PM interview, was one of the original books on the subject. I think I even read it when I was going to Google, and I don't think I would have gotten into Google without just understanding the concepts there,
because it's the framing of the interview. The interviews at Solve's skill, the PM interview. It overlaps with product management skills, but it's its own thing. So you could be a great product manager and just completely flunk the interview. And you could do very well in the interview and do terrible on the job. There's overlapping stuff there. I enjoyed the process of helping people
understand these things. I call there a certain structure to it, and it's not like memorizing. It's just internalizing certain ways about the way that the business works and the interview process works. You only have 40 minutes. So somehow you got to give them the signals that they're looking for, and they're looking for 40 different signals. You need to be structured. You need to manage the time. You need to talk about important things. You need to focus on things that they think are important
in order to grade you appropriately. So that's what I did. Just as an aside, the thing that you described of the interview being a skill of its own, I feel like that's even more true in the engineering interviews thing. And you both are probably familiar with it because in technical interviews, what you're asked to do, you never do that in your actual job algorithms.
It's very funny. I loved working with all the different engineers at Google. And like the funnest thing was when we were actually solving a problem together, and I was just telling like, hey, like, what do you think of the situation? And it took a little bit of like convincing to get them to sort of relax and actually work creatively on a product. It has nothing to do with any fancy algorithms, which is doing like the simplest things. But we're just trying to solve
interesting creative solutions. And for sure, I agree with that. I didn't even think about the fact that engineering does even more wacky stuff is like, go build me this complicated algorithm that you'll never going to actually use. Yeah. But even if you go like a level below that, like when you graduate from school, you get into university or graduate school. You do all this like SAT and GMAT or whatever, right? What those tests indicate is your ability to pass tests.
That's the greatest measure. Fundamentally, the problem is that we're trying to find whether a person is good fit for a company or an institution in 45 minutes or an hour. So you have to do this kind of like statistical ways of getting signals out of it. That's correct. Yeah. I thought a lot about how could this process actually be improved? Because you know, I did so many of these interviews and I saw my own like distribution. It was very much centered around. Do not hire. And there was
outliers into the hire and outliers into the strong do not hire. But generally it was like very nice bell curve. Not everybody stats were like that. I don't know if you guys ever looked into it, but you could see the interviewer's ratings history. So you can look at every interview, you can see,
okay, what are they actually rating? What does it look like so that the committee theoretically and practically I was involved in a few of these would look at these distributions and they'd say, okay, this person gave a strong hire, but then again, they give strong hire every third time. So the signal is lower. And so I think that spot on or not that you do the best you can. You run through these like six or seven cycles and you put these data points together and you look at it.
And if it's generally all pointing in that direction, then you go for it. But if it's like mixed signals, then you say, once you come back, come back and give us a sharper signal. And that's why people come in and do five, six, seven times attempts. And we see, we see their whole history. When you look at a candidate, you're like, oh, this is your set of attempts. Here we go. Let's do this thing. Yeah. Just like I'm back to the topic of your business. So you started helping people
like coaching them for interviews. Yeah. So this is the stuff that I just generally enjoy. I know this to be true is you learn better when you teach it. So this is a concept that we've all seen. So it was a self-reinforcing function that the more I taught and I enjoyed it, I got better and better and that I was able to teach better and so on. So the number of folks definitely got
placed into lots of different tech companies. And I think at the same time, maybe a little earlier, I started the YouTube channel literally just because if you have an entrepreneur background and you go into any job, doesn't matter what it is, if the best job in a Google ostensibly is one of the best jobs, there's a ceiling. It doesn't matter what you do. You're not going to make more than X does not matter what you do. And so once I sat with that for a while,
I did not like that at all. So as an interesting thing about me, I don't value the present value as much as I do the potential. That's just factually what ends up happening. And so I went to YouTube just because it has limitless upside. Even though it's absolutely not monetizable for the initial very long time, theoretically it has infinite upside. And also not we're heading into this, but we are in this place now where your audience in a large way determines your opportunities and
possibilities. So literally the size and relevance of your audience, who they are, what their problems are, how you can help them. And so when I got into YouTube, just for that to just see what kind of I do, that theoretically has unlimited upside. So for a number of years at Google, I was thinking that it would be great to get into something even if it's small, but has a theoretical limit of potential.
And so that's what I'm doing now. And it is indeed small. It's true. It is small, but the potential is there. And so I'm working. I'm helping folks get into the top tech companies, improve their interview performance, do well at the job. And we're talking about interesting products. At the same time, I'm trying to build essentially an audience of people that like to build stuff. And then maybe we'll be able to build interesting products in the future together. So that's the overview.
Are you able to share how you charge for this? Sure. Yeah, I work on a couple different ways. So we do one-on-one coaching, which I have limited capacity. I'm pretty much full at the moment, where we meet often and you have kind of ongoing support where we can interact via text, email, document reviews. We can specifically prepare for certain interviews that are coming up. So if you have a specific round with a specific company, we can get into it. And a lot of times
really anticipate the questions, the things that are important to them. For instance, I'm working with a couple of clients right now where we're doing these prep sessions. And then they come back and they tell me those are like 80% of the questions that were reviewed are the questions that were asked at the interview. So you can imagine if you go into an interview and you've already practiced this thing, there's no way your performance is going to be worse. It's going to
be guaranteed to be better because you know even small tweaks, right? Sometimes we say things that we don't intend to, just because we don't think we don't prepare. So that's the one-on-one coaching. And I'm also kicking off a group coaching program where I'm trying to do this in small forums. So it's capped. There's only 30 people that can participate in this first round. And I think it's going to start probably right around January 1st or second. We'll give people a date to recover.
And then we'll do group coaching. We'll cover the same material from the resume, application, interviews, and we'll try to help folks in a group setting. I also have a newsletter, the YouTube channel, and LinkedIn, where I write and I have a certain audience and I'm trying to see what develops from that. So there's nothing monetizable there at the moment, but there's a lot of directions. You could take that. That's it. I'm curious to be the one-on-one coaching.
So it sounds like it's not like people pay you by the hour. So they sell like a package. How does that work? So I used to do three month packages, which are around four, five thousand dollars, give or take. But the difficulty with that is sometimes people really are in different places of personal readiness. So they have different levels of background. They have different degree of preparedness for interviews. They have different level of experience and product management.
It's not really a one-size-fits-all. So I've kind of moved into a monthly program where effectively as long as you're finding value that you're welcome to stay so long as I have capacity. And then when I don't have capacity, that's it. Then the one-on-one coaching doesn't work. Of course, that's the difficulty. You'll see that with. I think anybody that's doing a consulting or coaching services, the one-on-one stuff does not scale. It might be fun. It might be valuable.
But it's not really a business. It's just you at the end of the day, even if you're doing it in package, you're still selling your time. It's not greatly appealing. Even though it could be fun and fulfilling for folks that enjoy the personal interaction. Yeah. So I'm curious. Other of some kind of caps, let's say if some of your texts you every two hours for a month, that's probably not what you would expect from a client. What God-real's do you have
there? Yeah. So you have to definitely pick and choose who you work with. And so if your audience is big enough in mind is luckily I don't have to work with anybody and everybody that wants to work with me so I can kind of pick and choose. And that makes sense because I want folks directly who I can deliver maximum value to. And I can help folks that are very early on in their journey. But probably one-to-one over a long period of time is not the best way to do that. So for those folks,
maybe group coaching would be better. Maybe a community. I'm also building a community where I think we want to provide the spectrum for the beginner PM, for folks that are trying to get into product from different career. And for folks that are inside these tech jobs and they're miserable and they need to figure out how to avoid burnout or they want to figure out how to get to the next promo level. And I've got a number of folks and ex-colleagues that are going to help out with
the community with teaching certain aspects of it. So we've got data science, we've got interaction, a hardware, AI, a lot of different things that we want to cover and want to have different tracks for it in the community. That's another thing I'm building out hasn't launched yet. This all came from your observations running interviews inside Google, right? So tell us why you went to Google in the first place. What was that experience like?
Yeah, sure. That's an interesting story because I applied cold. There's no referral, no nothing. I just sent in my resume. And like I said, I didn't never really worked for anybody in employee fashion before. But at that time, I needed a change and I wanted to see where else I could do interesting things and get paid for it in a relatively stable manner. So certain reasons I needed stable compensation at the time, which the entrepreneur life does not really allow.
Because you're always all over the place sometimes, you're successful sometimes, you've got nothing. So I needed some stability at the moment. And I applied for it. And surprisingly, they said, yeah, we're interested. And I think it was just a combination of related experience for the stuff that they had a pain point. And that's kind of what I always teach my students and clients is that when you're applying, you want to solve a problem with your resume. You don't just want to like
just apply everywhere. Like what is the problem that they have in the job description? Can you solve it? If yes, just write it in bold up top and send it to them. Hopefully, they'll notice it in the first couple of seconds. And I think that's what happened here. And there's just a lot of relevant experience around mobile. And it was a Google Play application. So when I went in for the interview, I read the book. And in fact, that book,
Crackin' the PM interview. And I remember I bought it for like 45 bucks in physical bookstore because there's like a... It's not a cheap book now. You know, the ROI on that book for me was just probably just out of this world. It's just incredible. So the book, by the way, still holds up. Some of the things are a little outdated, but like you could definitely go from 0 to 90% from that book, which is what I did. And definitely prepared a lot. I don't think not as much as I
should have now that I know what the process actually looks like from the inside. And I had a great time at the interview. We got through all the questions. We had a great time. And so I got into Google. Like I said, the first month, I thought it was just the greatest place ever. And then the cracks started appearing. I started to see under the hood. I got a chance to work at Google Play, Android, and because of the work that I was doing in trust and safety, I got a chance to see pretty much
every product at Google because there was like internal audits that were doing it. So I feel like I've got a pretty good view of Google all around. And then I went to work in App Ads and was running a pretty big business over there. There's some interesting stuff that happened. But like I said, the cracks started. And I realized that Google is not really for me. So I did my time. And I don't think I'll be coming back. What were those cracks? You know, you've worked at Google. How about horror
stories? Yes. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff. Like if you can keep going and going when you think about it. But I think nobody really works at anything interesting. Let's just open with that. There's not really anything interesting to do over there. And let me not single go out. There's like 99% not interesting things in big tech from my POV. What I saw. So like step one, you're working on stuff that is just you're not into it. Like it's very difficult to get into it truly. And the reason
that is is that it's extremely iterative. It is not innovative in the least. There's no place for innovation. I say that figuratively because there's no innovation at Google. But also literally because I went to the and worked out of the area 120. Are you familiar with that? Yeah, it was deprecated as many other Google things. Yes. But I went there when it was still not deprecated. And it was just
like this giant complex, which was empty. Is it like a innovation lab or something? You know, it's a part of Google where they're supposed to work on some innovative 10x, 100x moonshots or at least roof shots. And like there's nothing going on. So I just used it as an empty co-working space during COVID. And I just worked there by myself and it's just gigantic complex. And so I'm saying like literally there's just no innovation going on because you can't get ahead by doing
innovative things. You can't build your career up. You can't get a promo by doing innovative stuff. And so it's extremely part of the DNA. So, you know, the people that are out there on social media dreaming about getting into Google because it's such an innovative place. Get out of here, man. What are you talking about? What are you talking about? What innovation? What innovation? Are you talking about? So, you know, I sound bitter because I am. You know, I spent four years there.
And I appreciate the compensation and the people, the great people. But beyond that, it was just just a nightmare. Let's dig into this. I just wrote a post. I think this morning about Google Home, Google Assistant. This thing came out seven years ago. It's pretty good at the time. And I got Google Homes all over the place. But let me ask you this. How enjoyable is it to interact with Assistant ever since GPT came out? I don't have an assistant that I have Alexa and Adot Liheria.
It's like Alexa said the timer for 30 minutes. It's a limit of my interaction with Alexa. It is, but even then, like, Alexa said an alarm for three o'clock, right? And it's like 3 pm or 3 am. Oh my god. Come on. Yeah, it would be like a timer called 3 pm is set for 20 minutes. Sometimes it's like, it doesn't understand the world. Yeah. You guys, yeah. You guys get it. Like my kids, we want to put a music on it. But I want this screen to be off. It's a Google home with a screen.
Hey, you know, Google play this music. But listen to me, Google turn the display off. Can't do it. Can't do it. Either play some weird music that's called display off, or just gets confused or just turns the display off. Nightmare. Now, I open up my judge GPT on my phone with audio, which sounds completely like a human, and completely understands me like a human. And this is technology that Google pioneered.
Mind you, the transformer, right? So now tell me, please tell me, does Google really care about user needs and creativity and innovation? I don't think so. Prove me wrong. Go ahead. I think what tends to happen is the machinery of the big corporation gets in the way of the innovation. I'm sure there are people inside Google who'd want to bring the capabilities of GPT like from Bard or Palm into Google Home. But there's as we saw, like this is my experience in AWS.
It's the machinery of building something for AWS with the bar and all these other things that's required. That's finally bogs you down. That's true. That's true. And it's certainly like the basic case of the innovator dilemma, which we all read. It's like required reading at top tech, the innovators dilemma, but like fundamentally inside that book, they tell you what to do to avoid and to get over the individual and like we don't do it really anywhere. Look, I have a lot more
insight into Google than other companies, which is why I kind of single them out. But I'm sure it's the same in a lot of places at certain time. Like the systems are just they're not set up. Nobody incentivizes innovation. And then when it gets big enough, it's just pure corporate, pure politics, 100% of the time. No way to break out. So, I don't know, when you say there's people, yeah, they're probably people, but like for all intents and purposes, it does not matter because
you can't break out. The reason why I'm sound like bitter and a little upset about it is because I see posts even for like my friends at Google like, hey, celebrating two-year anniversary. Boy, sure, it's hard working here. But all these amazing people, smart people that I'm just having a blast. And man, I know you're not having a blast. Why are you telling these people that it's amazing
there? It's not amazing in there. So it's just these false expectations. It just kills me because I remember myself first month, like a kid in a candy store and then realizing, wait a minute, wait a minute. I remember I even pitched. This is the crazy thing. I pitched like a new Google Play, a brand like a rethinking of the ecosystem, you know, because Google Play. I mean, good lord. What is that even? We are both on the Apple ecosystem. We don't know what's there. Yeah, exactly. So exactly.
But anyway, so I actually pitched reimagining of Google Play. I mean, they laughed at me and correctly so like, this guy really pitching us like a new Google Play. Look at the OKRs, man. We're trying to like move this number from 15 to 16. We're not out there reimagining things. So yeah, you know, I just don't want people to come in there and just be completely crushed because I want to know look, go in there. There's stuff to learn. Sure. There's stuff to see. There's
money to be made. Opportunities to be unlocked. Maybe you can find a co-founder like you guys. These things, yes, but don't go in there thinking you're going to go help users do something better and like deliver impact. You guys know that YouTube channel, Krzamm, where the guy's like made a terrific video about microservices. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, he's actually an engineer in Amazon. Is he not now though? Oh my god. When he made that, he wasn't an engineer in Amazon. We'll
share it in the show notes. So microservices, right? If you haven't watched that, that's one of the best clips ever, right? And everybody that has worked in tech identifies that 100%. And he made another one multiple that are funny. One of them is like, I delivered impact, but at what cost? Those are very funny. It's the product managers like I delivered impact. But then he's just wandering around the town and just lost his hell. But like at what personal cost? And it's again,
exactly right. Like the stuff that you're doing is not meaningful. It's not really impactful. It's not innovative. He just out there moving a number from 15 to 16, getting paid, getting opportunities. That's it. That's much feel. So my experience at Google was, I mean, I spent three years there and I would say there were some happy days. I mean, there were many happy days. There were lots of great people. Like I really loved the people. But like I said previously,
many of them were actually not very happy. But they were still good people, right? Sticking there for the brands, sticking there for the money, for the prestige, you know, it's kind of hard to leave that on the table. Also like Arnav was saying, the complexity of products, like I worked in GCP and also working maps. And it was very apparent in maps. It's a market leader with this huge number of users. It's a huge stack. That's been around for probably almost 20 years at this
point. And the maps API has been around for like 15 years or so. It got neglected at some point. And once you neglect a large system, it starts to crumble, right? It starts to fall apart. I mean, it works. Reliability by the tool works, right? But then a competitor like my box crops up and then they start from scratch and do things the right way. And then the gap is just enormous. You can't bridge it to your stack. You have to redo a lot of things to bridge that gap.
And that's what I was working on with my team. And ultimately, you understand this is very important thing. Like Google Maps, I mean, I love Google Maps. I always wanted to work in Google Maps. It was like dream come true. I mean, until like few months in, right? But then you realize like it looks sexy on the outside, but like inside is this kind of complex beast, right? And then a lot of people try to make it better to make changes, but it requires
a concerted effort across multiple teams, multiple orgs sometimes. And then comes like the incentives. They okay hours, the promotion process, you don't get promoted at Google for like doing a re-architecture thing that lasts for three years, right? Or maybe you do, but like it takes probably like three to five years to get there. Whereas somebody who ships like a 15 to 16 that gets you 500 million
incremental revenue. Boom. That's money. Ruth can bank that. Yeah. So people go where the money is. And a lot of these big, complex products or projects, nobody really wants to work on them. And people who stick at them, at least in my experience, they are not very happy because they don't have that kind of institutional support for doing those. Or they do, but sometimes it's like lip service and like the strategy changes and they started doing something else. I personally found that aspect of
Google very challenging. I think it tried to behave as a startup running this direction, running that direction. But the culture they had does not scale to be company like they are right now. So they just cannot be kind of gun hoe, kind of cowboy style in orgs that I can price of hundreds of people with like billions of users with all this technical complexity. The thing that you mentioned about pitching Google Play, at Google I didn't even try to pitch anything. I just got
so bogged down by like the environment. I mean, I'll be honest, I stayed for the prestige and for the money for a long time. But also because I didn't know where to go to because I'm like, I went to Google because I thought it would be like different. It's like a pinnacle, right? And then I come there, it's like no different, maybe worse in some regards. Where do you go from there? Thinking about Metacast, that's when kind of it became clear. Okay, so actually I need to jump the corporate
ship all together and go into entrepreneurship. But coming back to the pitching part, at Amazon, actually we were able to successfully pitch a new product, it's AWS chatbot, that we basically came to our VP, she liked it, we came to the SAP, we eventually went to the CEO of AWS and it was still a CEO of AWS at the time. And then yeah, we got the green light, we got the funding, let's basically like our Nibb and I will work at the outset of that product. And now tens of people working on that
has been launched publicly. It's kind of a success story and I don't know how many people got products like this off the ground. But I think in Amazon, it's more, at least at the 80, 80, yes, like five, six, eight years ago, it was still possible to actually go pitching idea and go build it. At Google, I was a GCP, GCP grows like crazy. But I think most of the stuff they do, they copy it, yes. So even though you get to work on new stuff, you actually don't get to like innovate as much like
you said. Actually, I was going to ask Ilia, you to like kind of compare the two things because my experience at AWS and largely Amazon, I worked at different parts of Amazon also was that I don't know right now. It's been a few years now. But teams used to be very independent and they were enabled to be independent, go make your own decisions at which kind of fostered innovation, right? At some point with AWS becoming huge, of course, now you have to meet all the guardrails,
right? Like you can't just go really something on your own, you need to think about does this fit with AWS? What other things does AWS have? Should this be a product? And these are all like valid questions. GDPR. GDPR is. Those are all valid questions, right? Like you can't just go willingly build a thing and say, okay, this is done, right? It needs to fit with the whole ecosystem. And that's what bogs down innovation quite a lot. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's fair. I think you guys are just like
various stupe, I think, observations. You really digging into it. And then I think providing totally reasonable explanations for why it is what it is. My team is just to make sure people understand that this is what it is. That's it. Said your expectations, right? When you apply to these companies, yes. Yeah. I actually remember I was coaching somebody who was at a very small company as a product manager. And then he tried to get into Google or Meta or Amazon, one of those
big tech. But then we started talking about the expectations. And it turns out the person didn't even understand what the job would be because he almost like extrapolated. Okay. So this is like what I'm doing, but much bigger. But I think the job at a 50 person company and the job at Google at a 50 person org is very, very different and actually, whereas the different skills set, like you said, like social skills, I would also like recategorize it as politics as in not necessarily negative
sense, but being able to make alliances. Have people support you all that? Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. And also like the difference in cultures between different companies, even though the companies are just big now tend to be like these behemoths. But Google's culture has always been very slow organizational like agreement. And then eventually you kind of get everybody moving the same direction where something like an Amazon might be more value and entrepreneurial. We got a new
idea. Let's try to drive it and execute. That's not how it works at Google. So I think there's these nuances. But like for the majority of big companies nowadays, you should just expect that that's what you're going to be doing. Like if you really want to be building stuff and like interacting with users and trying to solve novel problems, then probably the entrepreneurial life
might be more suited or even like a small startup or something like that. If you're going to go on these companies, you're going to be incrementally moving pixels and percentage points through everything that you do. Although I think there are people who are excited by it because even if it's a few percentage points, it's maybe 100 million people that it's a percentage point difference for. The compensation camp, right? You're a mercenary for cash? Oh, no, no, no. I mean, that's definitely
big part of that draw. What I'm also saying is, for example, Ilya and me, we're building this podcast app, right? Like we want to take it from zero to 100 difference in podcast experience. However, the number of people that we're going to be able to reach who are going to see this experience is going to be very small compared to, let's say, we joined somewhere in, I don't know, in Spotify
or maybe in Amazon and audible and worked in their podcast app. Maybe we only get to build a small part or improve something small, but the number of users that we get to impact is a million users probably at least. So I like that. I like that framing. It's the scaling approach. It's like, well, but I can scale. But here's the thing about that though. At what point of reduction of your original vision, does it become negligible and then scale? Okay, so you delivered scale. You
wanted to do 100%. You did 3% at big scale. Okay, so what did you actually do? Not really. But that's what I'm saying. So if you like scale to me, it's compensation oriented to me a little bit closer because if you want creativity and novelty and closer to the users, you're going to be less on the compensation because less on the scale and this whole thing. But it's for sure tough questions. So if you're doing a commodity type business, of course, you want to be closer to
scale. Like if there's not a lot of creativity, innovation, proximity users in your business to begin with, then yes, you want some sort of platform ecosystem somewhere you can get on top off to leverage that the more you're doing something that is novel and is not done, the less you need that scale. And to me, these questions, once you've been around for decades, you're lucky enough to survive that long. I don't know, maybe you know, this not so boring newsletter where this guy,
I forgot, I think. Kapitama Kormick. Yeah, yeah. He's like, I think he talks about the optimist, you're just doing like an optimistic thing where you get a weekly dose of optimism. And he's like, look, we're doing all these things and like everything's going tremendously better. And I used to be an optimist. But then what happened was like, if I really look back in the last like 30, 40 years, like a lot of cool stuff has happened. But also, like, there's a lot more war happening now.
A lot of technology that we are so happy about actually is destroying our mental health completely and separating us and putting us into eco chambers. There's not a lot of really humanity useful innovation going on over the last 20, 30, 40 years. Or if there is, it is not as broad as something like a Google Microsoft or Netflix or something would have you believe. Like we're getting a little bit better at certain things, but I don't know, we're solving, are we getting happier?
Because people getting happier, they're getting closer together. What's are we working less? Where's our dream of working 15 hours a week? What happened? And then when you're like in the middle of it, your Google you work in 60 hour weeks to try to move some number from 15 to 16. And you spend enough years there, you start to ponder the questions, like, wait a minute. Something's not quite right in this whole thing. So that's right. You don't want to think too deeply about these things
sometimes. But I just want to put that out there. Folks. Yeah. The thing that I wanted to maybe close this with, you know, I did this post, it is how you found me. I just wrote how I stuck around Google for three years. And there was always this unhappiness, but at the same time, I'm like, this is the prestige, this is the money and all that, like, how they'll walk away from it. And actually,
a few people wrote in comments, yeah, but you like write ex-Google, new profile. I responded to a couple of those and then I'm like, screw it, I'm not going to entertain the trolls anymore. Because some of those were not very nice, actually. It made me kind of reflect on this. I think the experience of having worked in a company like this, I mean, obviously you learn a lot anyway. You still learn how these works. You learn the patterns, you learn anti-patterns.
The experience was good. I wouldn't diminish it in terms of learning. But also that perceived prestige that comes from other people, I think that's valuable. Because I think you gain authority by having worked there. Even if you were like, miserable, maybe didn't like achieve much, right? So I'm curious if you noticed the same way, like for you like being a coach, right? Having worked at Google, I assume it helps you a lot.
First of all, about the trolls. You did your time, man, at least you can get a badge at Google. And that's the very least that you could get for three miserable years. And again, I will take X Google, like I'll bash Google. I deserve it because I did my time over there. So when you go do your time, then you can, you can make your decision. But until then, you know,
a little bit of caveat. But my point is that I think it's important to build an audience if you plan to do any kind of business and you plan to help people with anything, you should be building an audience all the time. Like the number of products that I launched in my life and I don't have my email addresses of those people. How simple would it have been? So I'll give you an example. Before tech, I did a construction business in the Bay Area. And I worked with 2,000 homeowners
in the Bay Area who all loved me because we worked on their house. We did a great job. And a lot of those folks were startup founders, VCs, and then they built their careers over the next 20 years. And I can't find those email addresses anymore. But that's 2,000 email addresses of like guaranteed millionaires in the Bay Area. I was young. I didn't know what I was doing. Then later, we launched, I built a team that delivered like this cross platform game that had hundreds of thousands of
downloads and users and paying users. Again, like I kept a few email addresses. But what am I done? Like forever, you have to think and you have to just keep audience. I'm going to back you remind the same thing for coaching, the same thing for like YouTube. And so I think it's important to build these on it. And then you of course, you use whatever you can to get visibility on advantage. Once it becomes a certain weight to it, a certain magnitude, it becomes self fulfilling.
And you no longer need the additional support because the following speaks for itself. Once you have certain amount of followers on X, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, whatever, just the number. So it's just the size already draws more size. But at the beginning, you need to use whatever you can. So that's why we have universities. That's why we have certain achievements, certain companies, anything that you can to get that validation because that's how
humans work. What you do with it, it's up to you. But yeah, definitely don't engage the trolls. Yeah, sometimes it can be hard, but I heard this great advice from someone who has a huge hole in on Instagram. He said, just block the trolls and never block them. Yeah, I see people definitely getting into it. Sometimes even well-meaning trolls, they're not really even trolls.
They're engaging you to get themselves a little bit more engagement. And if the questions that are being asked don't actually help your user base and don't move you your business forward, you don't need to engage. Could be even a legitimate question, but doesn't help anybody? Does it help you in a darn engage? Go. So speaking about comments, so you started a company, right? Comment armor where you guys were helping creators remove spam and scam bad comments. Tell us more about that.
Sure. Well, so after Google, a buddy of mine and I who always wanted to build something together, and I still hope to do so, we just started to brainstorm ideas and we probably came up with like 40 different things, brainstormed all of them. A few of them went a little bit further, but one of them was this comment armor idea because we're just seeing a lot of and you probably still seeing it on YouTube all these spam comments. It's like, oh, this is a great video, but you know who really
helped me get out of financial debt is Mr. Amon Garcia Cortez. And then you Google Amon Garcia Cortez and it's like, oh, it's incredible. So it's like it's very sophisticated. If you spend a couple of years on the internet, you know, it's nonsense, but nonetheless, just the pure breadth and like level of honestly, text sophistication because you have to write these things, you have to build these sites, you have to build bots that then comment on these.
And like, it's pretty intricate. Honestly, those guys that build it, they should just go and work for Google and just make it honest living. They'll be a lot richer. But anyway, so we noticed it's a pervasive problem. And I even made a list of YouTubers that made videos asking YouTube to fix it. And so I contacted those very YouTubers and I said, hey, we fixed it. Long story short, like we went and we played around with a couple of manual filters and an automatic filter,
a little bit of AI. And overall, we got rid of 99% of the stuff. Does YouTube have an API that lets you manage comments? So YouTube has a clunky API that lets you pull the comments. And if you have certain privileges and account access, you can do different things. You can report the comment, you can delete the comment
importantly, and you can undelete the comment. Unfortunately, to do that, you need the API key that also gives you full access to the YouTube channel because YouTube's not in the business of enabling API use of the Zico system. And even scraping is technically against terms of service. Even though there's plenty of scrapers out there, you can go on scrap everything. And by the way,
like the wealth of information that's in comments and YouTube comments is preposterous. The amount of things you can learn by analyzing it, like there's a lot of interesting business ideas that could come of it. And I think certainly a lot of folks are doing it already. From investment perspective, you could do some pretty wacky things. So we effectively pulled all the comments and there's certain API restrictions. Obviously, you can apply for an increase. And
it's a little clunky, but we managed to do it. And with the help of another third actual engineer, because both of us are PMs that we're just coding to the best of our ability and then an engineer. But we built this thing and it worked. But the problem is we needed to get YouTubers to give us account access. And so that's certainly one of the problems the other problem was that I think people just didn't care about it enough. So I got into effectively contacting all those YouTubers,
email, leaving them comments, Twitter, everywhere. I basically became a cold marketer, where I would create these chains of emails where it would automatically email every couple of days. And the emails would get shorter and shorter so that I could get some sort of increase. And I got a decent hit rate and learned to be a better cold marketer. So now if I need to sell anything, I could do a better job. There's a lot of great tools out there for cold stuff. The level of
automation is really terrific nowadays that you can do. And it's all legitimate. You can send out hundreds of emails a day. And again, if you're delivering actual value, you're not going to end up in spam. So you're going to be fine. People do this in a crazy way. Like they spin up many, many, many email addresses, new email addresses per day so that they could send out hundreds of email addresses. So interesting world. But anyway, long story short, we got a bunch of interested
parties. But it was so hard to get them to hand over the API and to give us access. And I'm not even talking about like paying for it. That effectively we realized that even if we could get a certain number like to get enough of it to actually scale a business of any size would be just prohibitive. Because the thing is how painful is that problem for them. If I was that creator, I would certainly pay you know, $100, $200, $300 a month, not to deal with that. But even at those
levels, it's hard to get any substantial run rates. There's just no product market fit ultimately. If you pitched a bunch of people and they're not all jumping, take my money, even for free, they're kind of hesitant. That's not a great business. Yeah. So I wonder if those who can pay like the big accounts, I mean, they probably have a flood of comments. And I wonder if they even read them because that scale, like even linked in once you get like over 100 comments, you just like
can't spend all your time like reading the respondent comments. But if you're a solo pranier and you get hundreds of comments, each one of those is a warm lead. So it's a different story, interesting enough. But yeah, you're totally right that you get thousands of comments. You're not going to reply to them. But first of all, it's embarrassing. It's damaging to your brand. I go to your video and the first 40 comments are about Simon Garcia, something or like this new Bitcoin,
you know, and the thing is people are falling for it. It is working. They would not continue to do
this if it did not work. And also there's plenty of stories out there. And look, when I was at Google, I remember a filing like many bug reports each time Tesla would do an announcement or Musk would do an announcement because there would be concurrent live YouTube videos running where it's the same footage just delayed by a few minutes with underneath the ticker for which things you should buy, like hey, buy this Bitcoin because it's basically like Musk, you know, saying buy this Bitcoin.
And there's tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of you are sorry. I mean, the damage was like unsure. It was a million. And I, this is very true in sports also. Whenever there's some live sports going on, you'll find some sort of rebroadcast a bit on YouTube. But trying to sell them their own thing. Trust and safety is very interesting place and people are just out there ripping each other off.
So since API key, I mean, that does sound like not a good fit because I'll be hesitant to give you my API key that can do anything with that channel. And YouTube is not incentivized to produce like a plug-in ecosystem or something like that. Totally. We did find a workaround interestingly, just real quick. The workaround was like if you add a moderator in a clunky YouTube UX, you can find and like add a moderator like you add me. You have to type in my Alex Vichesky app.
Then in I have these privileges, then you can do it. You could do a slight workaround. But that's clunky people won't do it. Yeah. Did you try maybe like a browser extension or something like that? That doesn't need API keys. You sign in. You have the plug-in installed and it does everything for you. Yeah, it's funny after we already built this thing. We found that there's another guy who did the same thing like a year ago. And he did build out the whole thing. And
it's not an extension, but you basically go through the OAuth screen. So it's already done. You still have the same hesitation, but it's a little bit easier because it's one click. And I was trying to buy it. Like I offered to buy it from him. He only had a couple of paying clients. He had the same sort of problems with product market fit. He didn't want to focus on that. I offered an amount and those two little for him because it was worthless basically. On his
face, it doesn't really have any revenue. But it was a good guy. And I think it's good that we didn't buy it because then we just have this asset line around and you have to maintain it. So why doesn't Google fight spam? I mean, I assume they do, but why don't they do it better? They get rid of 99.99 percent. If you just imagine the internet and like you remember what the internet was like. And then if you go on YouTube right now and you read the comments,
I mean, the internet, good Lord. It was just a cesspool. By the way, I know it's still a cesspool, but if you go on YouTube comments right now and you look at them, besides these scammers every now and then look, it's not going to be wholesome, but it's not what it was five, 10 years ago. You just should never go on the comments. And now the comments are like a fun part of YouTube. So that's the iterative improvement that I'm talking about. Over 10 years, YouTube managed to
make the comments kind of sort of okay. Because think about it, till you're like, who's going to get promoted over that? What are you solving? You saving people from like getting ripped off for $10 million maybe. And how does that help Google? I mean, the users probably not to be in the consideration, right? I'm just trying to channel my inner Google, right? Those are just people
we sell a bit of, right? But then for creators, you actually want them to sit at the computer and sift through comments because it increases code engagement with the platforms. Oh, you know what some creators told me? Any engagement is good engagement. Yeah, that's exactly what I mean, yeah. They said, I'll take the spam comments all good with me. It increases the comment count. Negative PR is good PR. It's actually a bit of attention. The sole conversations are a bit of
attention, till you know, that's totally fine. That's what we do on this podcast once in a while. So yeah, a guy I follow, he has like 100,000 followers or so. So he, the post, I'm linked in about a couple of porn sites and where he basically said, yeah, like, I don't necessarily approve what they do, but like, how smart are they to find the need and like, to feel it? I was the first one to comment on the post. I'm like, okay, I just posted like a popcorn,
you know, emoji right? You guys like, this is very brave. I just wanted to subscribe to comments. And then he got a lot of comments saying that there's nothing great about this, right? It's like saying, you know, drug dealers found a great exploiting human nature, right? So it's kind of very similar. Good guy. I've heard the things that negative PR is good PR. Yeah. That's the other thing, is it like when we're talking about optimism versus pessimism versus realism. A lot of these
products that we love so much, the TikToks and everything. I mean, they're 95% exploitive of the human condition, like the human experience, basically, they just hijack our, and we all know this, and then we're still just sitting there scrolling. And it's funny, like, you just, you'll scroll anything. That was a really good book explaining the dopamine effect. And like, there's a couple, well, I hooked was one that is like trying to get us to build these things. Yes. But, you know,
I worked in mobile gaming for a long time. And during the golden age of mobile gaming, it was just a proliferation of these. Oh, by the way, like we can really hijack, like the slot mechanic is really tremendous because people love to not know what reward they're going to get. And so we can just exploit. And that's what this scroll down to refresh. We don't know what we're going to get. We just keep doing it. It's a big, big problem. And it doesn't have any clear
solution. YouTube is investing heavily into shorts. Are you guys enjoying the YouTube shorts experience? Are you watching those shorts? It's garbage is what it is. It's like a doom scrolling experience, like the ultimate doom scrolling experience. That's what YouTube shorts, TikTok, and Instagram Reels are. Yeah. YouTube is heavily investing into shorts by their own admission, no insider stuff, just like they're saying, look, we're all about shorts. And I don't know if I
you guys, but I get garbage shorts. All the shorts are garbage. And a lot of them are AI made. So you have the AI voice. And then also just the content. It's just so yeah, I'm not very optimistic. I guess maybe my YouTube watch patterns are different, but I mostly get music videos. And I actually really enjoy them. I would get like whatever Jimmy Page talking to Jack White about guitars. And I would just like keep scrolling like James Hatchel playing some kind of things that he never
played before. And it just goes on and on and on. And that's why I like two hours later. I'm like, well, at least it's fun, but where's my time? Yeah. Gotta get back to life now. Yeah. So that's what I'm saying. So everyone has their own extremely distinct watch, but that's the whole rise of TikTok is that it's not that they find exactly what makes you happier, makes your life better in any way, or optimizes for your long term
satisfaction or happy. And it's none of that. It's just the thing that is most optimized to get you to stay there. That's it. In exactly as many seconds and milliseconds, the shapes and patterns, like at certain point, the air is going to be so good. And I think there's like sci-fi stories about this, where it just will show you thing that you cannot physically put down. It's a combination of sights and sounds every pixel perfect at the right time. And then we're all glued to the machine.
So as you can see, not very optimistic. Yeah. So on this not very optimistic note, we are at the time. And so where can people find you Alex? LinkedIn probably is the best place nowadays, or YouTube. All roads will lead back to some way to contact me. And feel free to contact me. I generally will respond to like LinkedIn messages, YouTube, all YouTube comments less, but LinkedIn's probably the best X. I don't know. Should I say Twitter X? Either Twitter X, but LinkedIn
is the best because usually I'll just respond very quickly. But you have an X logo in your background. Where is it? Oh my God. The one that I heard recently is accent Twitter together is the shitter. The shitter. Yeah, that's what I definitely. X, I, T, T, R for sure. To close this off on maybe something more optimistic, are there any books or podcasts or any other content that you would recommend something that really
like helps you see the world in a different way or something? It depends. I read a lot. I have a ton of different books. Obviously I'm the product guy these days. So for product management, I think there's a lot of interesting folks. I would recommend a practice over theory as much as possible. So I would recommend building some stuff, figuring out which you can build for yourself that will help you in some part of your day, some little part of your day. It could be a manual
thing, figure out how to scale it later and make it automatic. But definitely happy to chat about product management and help folks out that may be interested in the career or are looking to get into these top tech companies that I don't want to work at. But they certainly have their reasons. So it's very funny people tell me like, why do you do this? Why do you help people get in there? I'm like, look, I'm all about working there as long as you have the right expectations.
And I think there's nothing wrong with working at these companies. Like if your goals are aligned with it, sometimes you do have like you said, stable, good income is the need of the R for your next, I don't know how many years. And that's totally fine. Or you want to work at that small piece of change that you can do that can touch 500 million people. Sure, go ahead, right? The thing is I think people get into these and then it's the golden handcuffs. It's almost impossible to get out of a
place like Google. It can be dangerous, but as long as you know, like you said, which we're getting into, you're good to go. But in terms of like reading, you know, probably recently like a reread Black Swan, which is always good. The same Nicolas Taleb. Yeah, that's right. And thinking fast and slow, I think is a great one because we don't know our biases and it's just fun to explore and understand how kind of human cognition actually works. So I think that one is required reading, I think for
business and product and just anthropology. But yeah, I mean, you know, follow me and LinkedIn and I'm sure we can explore other ways to learn about this stuff. Yeah, well, thank you, Alex. It was a blast. Yeah, thank you. My pleasure. For sure, guys. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.