So if you're working at a bigger company, what you're really trying to optimize for is how quickly can you move up in terms of abstraction layer? It's not about titles. It's about can you actually understand the next layer of abstraction within the business? So if you're like I see, what is the engineering manager it's priority right now for your team? What is the director of engineering is the priority right now for the team? And if you actually start caring about those things, you'll be able to make a lot more faster progress.
Hello and welcome to the Engineering Leadership Podcast brought to you by ELC, the Engineering Leadership Community. I'm Jerry Lee, founder of ELC, and I'm Patrick Gallagher, and we're your host. Our show shares the most critical perspectives habits and examples of great software engineering leaders to help evolve leadership in the tech industry.
This conversation is about the story of John Kim who went from being a professional gamer in South Korea's number one unreal tournament player to then become a serial entrepreneur building his own social gaming company, starting a social network for mothers, then pivoting, founding the number one chat API in the world at Sinbird. I know what you're thinking. What? How? This is why we were so excited to explore John's unconventional career path. The principle of engineering is that the first thing you need to do is to make sure that you're not going to be able to do it.
The principles that he's used to evaluate and navigate his career and company and share how we can apply all of his lessons to our own careers as engineering leaders. We cover principles from complexity science to help you navigate the unknowns, the risks and opportunities in your career frameworks to help make sure that the skills you're accumulating are balanced and benefit you long term. And how to pivot and align your career towards motivation and happiness. Enjoy our conversation with John Kim.
Welcome, John. It's great to have you here on the show. Jerry and I have been really looking forward to this conversation for a number of reasons, but I think first off, we just wanted to say thanks for joining us here on the podcast. Yeah, really excited to be here looking forward to our conversation today.
Before we get into the conversation, I wanted to start by I think noting why we're having this conversation in the first place because your background is really unique and distinct from many of the guests that we typically have on the show. Just to make a couple quick notes, the world of technology obviously moves fast and is accelerating and this is something that many people in our community and our listeners know firsthand.
There's also common career advice out there that you can expect to have multiple careers throughout your lifetime. And from some of our experiences, career development we found is often nonlinear. And when it changes, it usually changes in a dramatic fashion. And I think the last note is that in my personal experience, I find that the most interesting lessons and insights often happen at the extremes.
All of that to say to match the changing pace of the tech industry and to be appropriately prepared for the inevitable dramatic career change. We probably need to look at an extreme example of someone who's had success in really different careers, which brings us to our conversation with you, John. And we're here today because your story really provides an incredible example of what success looks like in really a few completely different careers.
And so we're here to really deconstruct your thought process through that whole story and understand how and why you made those choices with that said how the heck to someone go for being a professional gamer and the number one unreal tournament player in South Korea to the founder of the world's number one chat API company.
Give us the quick overview of the story arc for everything going on there. Yeah, I wish the life was as simple and beautiful as that, but obviously there's a lot of ups and downs in the middle. So, you know, when I was a kid, probably a lot of engineers would resonate is, you know, I was at a gamer. I literally had no social life.
All I did was play games all day long and tried hack games, create community around games and stuff like that. I learned how to program because I want to create community for games and also hack into games and create games. But still, I was I want to become like a scientist when I become serious adult, but as a child, I will always want to like the games and create games. So I ended up doing little bit of software engineering or learning how to code pretty much by myself.
Back in the days, we didn't have online classes or whatnot. We didn't even actually have a decent internet. So played a lot of games and start playing little bit of the dialogue modem and then learn how to connect your internet and start playing on networks like Collian and stuff like that. And then start playing a little bit more competitive, but tibly, what's the early era of professional gaming?
So the gaming leagues were just about to, you know, getting set up. I don't know if somebody audience might recall there was like players like Thresh and Fatality played a lot of like Quake, Doom era. I was like in the early early days of gaming. I saw all of those players on tech TV and in G4 TV back in the day. I totally know what you're talking about.
Yeah. And Thresh actually turns out to be a fantastic entrepreneur too. Create multiple companies that had done phenomenally well about the fact that I didn't really care about the business side of things. So I played a lot of games and I got recruited into Samsung Khan, which was the first gen of professional gaming team. And then probably again, the price money back then was like a couple of thousand bucks.
They give you all the free swag, the highest quality headphones, the classic graphic cards. If you win, but for a kid who's in their late teens, it's like living a dream basically. And then you know, once you kind of get to the level of what people sometimes call a peak performance, you look around yourself and everything is pretty much downhill from there. If you win, you're at the same place.
But if you lose, you just get embarrassed and you start to realize a lot of kids in their mid teens start to catch up with you. You recall your pandemic coordination started to get a little bit slower and become later wiser with strategy, but just a foundational level of skills started to degrade a little bit. So you're like, okay, so I want to stay here as long as possible and you know, really get embarrassed and stuff like that or just leave them at my peak.
So I kind of decided to do that because I could be spending time more on creating things. So I actually quit the game entirely that day when I won one of those tournaments and then just completely switched over to creating programs and basically learning how to code more deeper. I mean, curious to ask about how did that happen? You have been intentionally focusing on that for a long time that your passion. How you were able to walk away from that so quickly?
I kind of look at the world as the world of creators and world of consumers, right? You either are creating something or you're consuming something all the time. Of course, one person is not 100% creator all the time, right? You create on a day-to-day basis, you create something, you consume some. And then I look at where I spend my time. What I realized was I enjoyed creating game communities, I enjoyed creating programs and that passion grew over time.
I enjoyed playing games, decreased over time. And then I look at a couple of other professional gamers out there who are massively successful back then. And I met them in like tournaments and they fly with their coaches or dad as their managers and they are literally professional players. I was dubbed professional, but I simply enjoyed playing games. I was kind of good at it.
But the other people were like really, really serious. They got sponsorship. They had all this stuff to do to like rules that they had to follow. I didn't want any of that. So I kind of look at them. I was like, I didn't want to spend the rest of my life doing that. And also found myself getting more passionate about creating stuff rather than consuming stuff. So I'm like, okay, I'm going to be a creator from this moment on.
And then because I couldn't really find a model that I went through benchmark from the professional gaming side. So the clarity about what you're interested, how you imagine, how your career is going to look like years after and that helps you to make that transition really quickly. I guess in general, just add to that is general rule. I try to follow at least myself is I want to get to a peak level of something. And I'm probably not going to give up ever until I reach that point.
Once I reach that, I'm relatively quicker to make big jumps like kind of letting go of everything I had and figure out what's the next in my life. So even if you look at our company's history too, which we can go in deeper later on. But I pivoted my first company to which the pivot actually worked out so we were able to get acquired second company also we did a pivot. So it's kind of I end up pivoting all of my career and all of these sort of items throughout my entire journey.
So I think there's hopefully some method to this madness, but that's been kind of my journey so far. So what happened next what happened after you left professional gaming. Well, even before going to career, I started my school as a double electrical engineering. I'm a Korean citizen. So in Korea, you actually have to go through like mandatory military program.
But instead if you're like engineer, if you get some special government license, instead of going to the actual military, you can choose to work at a tech company as long as you get accepted by the company. So I ended up working for a tech company as a software engineer. And then kind of work that two different companies throughout that mandatory period, one of those company was a company called NC stop one of the largest gaming company. So really learned a ton there.
And after finishing a program, I returned to school. I pivoted to computer science and then finished my studies there and then as soon as I graduated. And I was doing professional gaming on the side while I was going through that journey. And then as soon as I finished my studies, I started my first company. So it was a web 2.0 company back then. I don't know what version we are on these days. That was like late 2007.
And immediately when 2008 hit with the financial crisis, obviously no investor wanted to invest in web to point the companies anymore. But because I had this background in gaming work for the gaming company for was a software engineer investor for like, you know what, you should be making games to make games will invest.
Because we've been like courting each other for a very long time. So again, I pivoted to a social gaming company. That's where we received our initial seed financing and then grew the company for about four and a half years and then we got acquired. And then after that, I stayed there briefly and then started this company with the buddies from my first started.
So we've been working together for a good 13 years now. Then we started yet another social network this time, kind of like a web 2.0 company, but for mobile. We built a company for about 20,000 years and we're trying to add a chapter for our own application. Then we went on the buyer's journey and we couldn't really find a solution that we wanted to use. So we ended up building that ourselves. Then we started selling that on the sideline and that starts to really take off.
So we applied to a computer with that idea and gotten and fast forward a couple of years. And we are serving 130 million users and we had a shutdown the initial application, the local community after we built. So we went from B2C to B2B in our current company. So there was a lot of pivots and junctions throughout the journey.
So many different transition points in your career. But you know, as you share it, there are some things that seem like they make a lot of sense in terms of the things that you value and the things that you're interested in.
So this whole process, how do you evaluate your career throughout all of this and these different choices are there core principles or frameworks that you've relied on to help guide you through these decisions where you feel like you have more reliability or confidence that you're making the right choice in your next move.
Usually I look through the lens of what people call complexity science in that field or kind of any field would it be industrial engineering, mechanical engineering, even like biology and whatnot. There's a classical problem landscape, right. The entire life or entire business.
You can imagine it in terms of like a landscape you're looking at hills and valleys, your big mountains, their short and small hills, I kind of imagine myself blindfolded just landed in a random spot on that map, almost like inside again, trying to like figure out what's in front of you, but everything's black around you. Only thing you can do is move horizontally.
And you can only assess yourself by how much higher you're going or how much slower you're falling. So you're trying to figure out, OK, in which direction can I actually go up and your goal, your fitness function is trying to get to the highest point possible, which would be the global optimum. Now throughout your life, you'll probably go through a lot of hills, ups and downs.
You're always trying to figure out am I going fast enough for the higher goal or am I getting stuck because you're blindfolded, you might go to a certain hill, let's say some company or some career choice that you made, you look everywhere, you try your hardest, but whichever direction you take, you feel like you're getting stuck for relatively long period of time.
That's when you know you need to add divergence. So convergence is your act of trying to go up divergence is being OK with going down, but trying to figure out. Take a little bit of risk to figure out the next better higher hill and the balance here is that you don't want to add too much divergence, which means you're not going to climb any hill at all, you'll be jumping ship all the time.
Or if you have too much convergence, then you're going to get stuck on certain hill, and you know all of your peers are making so much more progress, you're not taking any risk, you're only trying to go up and you get stuck.
So you're always trying to figure out what is the right balance. If you look at evolution or biology, it's usually that 80, 20, sometimes 70, 30 ratio, you always want a little bit more convergence, because you want the structure, organization, you want the building of your career, but you sometimes want to add a little bit of divergence. So you're always being open to a new innovation and new opportunities.
So I try to figure out am I getting to stuck here or am I adding enough divergence throughout my career to give a latest example when we're building this B2C mobile location based on social networking application. We got to this user growth where we feel like we're getting stuck at quarter million users and feel like no matter what we try, the needles were not moving.
The amount of inputs would have be capital effort we're putting in our returns were getting almost exaggerated. We feel like we're stuck at certain point now we can choose to double down and see if there's a bigger mountain right around us. But we knew within the given time we won't be able to get to next milestone that was needed to do our next fundraise because we were running out of money at the time.
We didn't figure out enough of a pivot where we knew with certainty that there's a bigger mountain out there. That's why we experimented with hackathon we did pull the chat into SDK, start selling the sideline to see if there's a better hill out there. And then we realized our rate of climbing that hill was much faster, which gave us a confidence. Okay, let's go down from this hill.
Let's climb that hill because that hill we can gain the height a lot faster. So it's kind of the mindset of divergence and convergence and really balancing that out throughout your career. I can go forever, but just to add one more thing, if you think about search to learn about breadth first search, breadth versus kind of like looking us out there.
First search you really go deep that versus a convergence right breath versus like divergence and we already know like a star algorithms like it's the statistics is a balancing between the death and the breath first that gives you the most efficient way to find the greatest outcome. So throughout life, I try to like have a mental mindset about business to my career to the life choices I make. I might until I have the right balance between the convergence and the divergence.
So it's really good mindset and mental model as well, the thing about career now so running businesses. Do you have examples that can help illustrate applications of the mental model. Let me actually add one more model. So one is convergence and diverse model, which I explained the second frame or I use is abstraction layers.
So if you move up or down between abstraction layers, the more you move up, consider it promotion or you have a bigger visibility into business or you're actually going deeper in the reduction where you're going to the icy mode. So I try to use those two kind of frameworks to navigate. So if you're working at a bigger company, what you're really trying to optimize for is how quickly can you move up the internet turns it abstraction layer.
It's not about titles is about can you actually understand the next layer of abstraction within the business. So if you're like I see what is the engineering manager. It's priority right now for your team. What is it? Let's say a director of engineering is a priority right now for the team. And if you actually start caring about those things, you'll be able to make a lot more faster progress.
Now it's not for everyone because some people don't like this abstraction and bigness. Some people do like concrete actionable items. And that's okay. Then you kind of choose on the specialist path. Now there are a lot of mistakes people make is that people think they would enjoy the people management side of things or going up in the abstraction layer.
Surprisingly, that's not the case. Now the problem with the current corporate systems today. Well, just actually vibratated but some companies like Facebook and Dropbox does as well. But more traditional or have this incentive that they will pay more for the people manager versus specialist. So people are incentivized to keep a smart. So do you think this is the only way for them to go up. So they'll choose the path that's not good for them.
So it's ultimately discovering what you want to optimize for. Are you happy with moving up the abstraction layer or now. Then you have to think about, okay, if I'm not happy, what do I do about it? Do I add enough of the divergence within the same order to ship to a different or or is this something that I actually have to create even greater divergence to jump to a new company or new industry.
So it's a level of risk appetite that you have, which is actually fundamentally big into your personality profile. But personally deeply rooted. How much of a divergence are you willing to add to your career. That means greater risk could be greater upside, but could also mean that you're going to waste next three, four years trying to get to where you are within the same company. So it's kind of thinking about that.
And now if you're at a startup, it's slightly easier because I usually go by this model and people probably think about the same way too is you look at a company when you join a company trying to look through the three, four years of time line. And then you don't think about one to two years because that means you're not converging enough. Probably you're not probably learning a lot within same company. If you spend three, four years, you're someone rooted into company.
You probably know not just the explicit or start, but you also know the implicit or structure of the influence networks. You probably are building what people call social capital. You're going to spend next three, four years and then reevaluate. Have you escalated enough in your fitness function in terms of height. If you're stuck, again, can you move within same or but startups are usually small enough where they might not have a position for you.
So either you create your own new position by doing more work on you or find a new start to join. So I just recommend maybe spending three, four years committing to it and really try to climb the hill as much as possible. That really really well with something that one of our previous speaker mentioned, Vade Chimbers, he talks about the observation that there are people constantly switched from one company to that company tried maybe four years or two.
And they feel stuck then they move to a new company. But over time, they don't really get through that as exactly provided. It's not much convergence yet. Stay too short. Yeah. And there's a framework called human capital framework. Basically, you're always accumulating three different capitals right intellectual capital, social capital and emotional capital.
The intellectual capital is your skill set getting better coding, getting better architections stuff like that. Social capital is your like leadership skills, not necessarily who you know, but who else knows you in what way. And then it's like a page rank of you and then emotional capital is understanding human emotions, understand your own self emotions, how to motivate yourself, how to motivate others.
And what ends up happening is one to two years, you might get some vested shares from your company. So you're only optimizing for your financial capital, but you're actually human capital probably is not really developed one can only develop so much of intellectual capital here.
And then there for a year because six months is spent on ramp up and then six months is like what you're actually really trying to contribute social capital almost none exist and if you're been there only for a year or two. People probably barely know you or any achievement you made emotional capital you're not gathering any any at all. That's why I think spending enough time at a company to really accumulate recruit these human capital before moving on to the next company.
And actually bring something along with you. Because otherwise when companies you post you to next company, they will offer you a little more maybe more little more cash, but you're only getting financial capital, but you're not actually developing as human capital that's going to catch up pretty quickly.
10 years to career people will be interviewing you and they'll be able to figure out, okay, this person just jump ship collected is it's like an angel investor at this point, he has portfolio of stocks, but not necessarily the human capital to back up a career. So that's where the light kind of catches up to you.
So how do you apply your firm to accumulating or raise your emotional capital, for example, how do you get to next level of abstraction layer or how do you do diversions in terms of emotional capital. Yeah, that was a tough one because there's a psychological personality trait or assessment called big factor model, which is like why we use the modern psychology academia.
One of the fact one of the dimensions called agreeableness, agreeableness talks about empathy or compassionate things like that. So being able to understand people, some people are very high at that just inherently I rank zero. So I struggle a lot with emotional capital side of things I could rarely have empathy with people just emotionally.
So people who are high in these traits, let's say if you see someone else is crying, they can easily cry with you without even knowing the reasons because their mirror neurons can mimic those behaviors. Mine doesn't work that way. I was kind of a geeky socially awkward engineer in the days.
So there's other parts of empathy called cognitive empathy, basically is being able to simulate putting yourself in that person's shoes and simulate what the person is going through with the same amount of data that they're seeing not from where you stand. So really kind of first person should perspective you're simulating their behavior.
Then you actually feel like you have replicated their experience and you build an empathy so a lot more cost intensive process. So part of my journey was training myself how to go through the process as quickly as possible.
Because once you experienced it, then it becomes part of yours and you can actually feel empathy. I train myself to have that level of cognitive empathy where like, okay, if I were in the shoes, let's first assume that person's right first assume that I'm wrong. Let's see how I can prove that this person's right by gathering the data from that person perspective.
So once you have enough of that, you can start to actually have influence on these people because you actually empathize the other thing is imagine visually, you're sitting next to a person, you're not sitting across a person, you're sitting next to a person looking at the same direction like, hey, I'm here with you.
I want to help you. I want you to become successful. I'm your partner. How can I help you? So kind of allowing that vision because the other person will feel it. If you feel like you're going to get taken advantage of. And short term, maybe there could be wind and losses, but long term people figure out people are generally smart. Our brains are smart enough to figure these things out. So really having that person's interest and heart and assuming again, you're wrong.
I think those tend to result in good emotional capital over time. So it takes a lot. I think a lot of training for people like me who didn't really have the gift in the early days. Yeah, I can emphasize on that as well. The training is that for making a habit to apply or go through the process almost subconsciously to get more empathy when you have a conversation will have a disagreement.
Or it's the fundamental ability to emphasize. That's the beauty of this personality assessment is that it kind of tells you about your early childhood days are really formative for your personality development, right? Like whatever your first three years of life after this kind of hard to change because any complexity system and human beings a complex system, right?
So whatever you're kind of set out with that really determines the overall trajectory of your personal development throughout your life. That's really setting the first couple of years plus whatever genes you have. So is about putting a rigor and process to train yourself. The beauty is that we're like a neural network, right? Initially is setting up the framework since getting the right data.
But once you have the data and the model trained becomes a lot more efficient as you progress throughout your career to have the empathy a lot quicker and have a richer empathy because you have the rich data. You have built a good model through a discipline and process. Then you'll be able to have much more authentic interaction with people. It's not like you're calculating every single time. How do I build empathy is like you have like let's say a decade plus of experience.
Then you'll be able to at least have some empathy with the category of people they tend to work with. Now if I go to some random industry like what they call it arson music, I will be starting from scratch. Now people with high emotional empathy will can get in there, feel immediate relationship. I have to go in there and work my ass out to get back to where we are today, where I am today.
That's for me, that's why I work in technology because I do deal with engineering a lot where I feel more familiar with. And then I have built that kind of data set for train my brain to work in this kind of capacity. But the important thing now you have a processing place you had awareness and playbook to intentionally start in the gap as you never get.
And there's actually cost to being high in agree with us to I think agree with us is negatively correlated social economical success mildly. So it means that if you're too high in agree with us, you empathize with so many people you end up becoming not be able to do make tough choices or tough decisions because you know what this person is going through.
How can you make this decision for this person like this so as a CEO or any kind of executive leader, you sometimes have to make those tradeoffs right for the better of the company or for the customer. So it's a hard problem again like conversion divergence. You want to have enough of balance of agree with this or disagree with all this so you can sometimes switch the context and make those tough choices.
And making a couple really hard pivots. How do you balance making the hard choice and also sort of maintaining that cognitive empathy if it's a really difficult decision that impacts somebody else. Do you have a way that you navigate that conversation in your head when that happens.
Yeah, it's all up to expectation management right expectation management for customers and users for the employees, the investors, stakeholders and even potentially your like family members and friends who might think you're doing X and also you're doing why they're like, wait, are you struggling. So there's a multiple stakeholders you have to manage.
So what I try to do is I try to put together a timeline, who to communicate first and when and what are signals they need to build comfort around that and also understanding the other person's personality to right let's say I'll just use my breaks because it's better marketed. Well, let's probably reliable as a model. Let's say someone's like high p perception and high n and usually like let's say call it ntp like whether I or e versus someone's like STJ.
And a lot of data, a lot of heads up, they never like to be surprised. They don't want quick changes, they'll panic, they'll go up set and TJ. So I kind of like understand both side of world a little bit.
And on the other hand, they're completely okay with change that was that really quickly. So also has a pros and cons obviously, but when it comes to change, that's that your investors is still to STJ, you have to really manage your expectation early on like six months early on. Hey, these are stuff, but we're not giving just yet. I'll let you know when we see more signals, but we're still on our path of doing original thing.
We found this exciting opportunity, look at this cool data user responding is like, oh, let's do that. So you have to kind of understand your key stakeholders, thankfully, you're not dealing with 20 investors at this point, you're dealing with maybe two, maybe up to three. So you can kind of personalize your approach, but as a whole, of course, you want to set a framework, you want to optimize for as a minimum amount of shock.
So you probably have to give a lot of heads up early on, but internally, probably your internal alignment happens first to because you actually have to execute before getting any form of signal. So you start with the internal, hey, we have this hypothesis, we have this data, we have this feedback from users, you want to test itself, you work towards that, a little by little.
So you try to time your announce, hey, we think we have enough information, let's make the pivot, nobody on the inside of surprise, nobody in the investor, surprise, and your friends and family can be managed a little later on, but the key stakeholders for actually going to contribute to building your company.
So I think the expectation timeline, I try to put it into about six months in general, because in psychology or physiology to body takes about three to six months to adapt to a new change, right, the habits and the new ways or whatever that is. So I try to put in a mental model of like six months period, how do I back or engineer, what are the things I need to prove out, communicate over time. So that kind of have worked out relatively well for our pivots.
So I think I've been a little bit more specifically into some of those pivots, you've laid out divergence and convergence abstraction layers, you talked about cognitive empathy and a few other different principles of evaluating, I was wondering if we could transition to do a couple of case studies of key and flexion points in your career to illustrate how some of those different principles impacted your decision making.
I talked a little bit about the example of making the transition from professional gaming to your involvement as a developer and your first company, can you speak a little bit more about how some of these principles have shown up in the early stages of your career transition and changes.
Yeah, to be honest, like gaming to that was more of a outside milestone, because I was going through school, I went to finish the study. So there wasn't like particularly conversions diverse model that I applied this really model, I try to apply it around beginning of 2000s, because I think I got aware of this complexity science and all these frameworks around your 2003 and for this where I started like educate myself and got you know, starts consuming a lot of books and evolution life, you know, all those things.
So I try to apply that back then was more around again, the framework of am I creating something am I consuming something there's a famous quote by some jazz artist saying you're either appearing or disappearing right you only have two choices. So am I consuming something am I creating something I want to create more so that was kind of my framework, but in general, I've tried to pick my battles carefully.
If you think about my model, historically, I've been a highly convergent person right professional game if I pick a game, I'm not going to quit until hit number one in that game, I was a number one player in whatever Duke Nukem 3D back in days in Korea too.
So it's like I would never ever give up now what I realized is that there were professional players like fatality who quickly moved on to the next game like in real back in days in real 2003, he moved on to other new games and saw a lot of success there. Now I started to see that pattern with some other other games too. Players who were really good at Quake, when Counter Strike came out, they immediately moved on and really completely dominated the game.
So I'm like looking at those opportunities like when the new platform, new market emerges, the first one to actually go in, but they have this unfair advantage because they're already good at other first person shooter games and the skills that you learn from other games actually do transfer pretty well in FES versus MMO. You can't really bring your character to the next game, so you can carry your skills around. So I found that to be an opportunity to go for the next game.
That's why I also dove into Unreal Tournament instead of continuing to play Quake and stuff like that, which really gave me that unfair advantage. Now kind of switching over to a company, the initial pivot wasn't necessarily because of the conversion and diverse model because it was kind of the financial shock was the ultimate triggers like investor saying we're not going to invest in your company.
We can't because this industry, if you're not generating revenue, we can't. But gaming was a proven market in at least in the Korean startup ecosystem. So investors kind of say, hey, if you come here, we'll invest. And this is an industry that I knew extremely well because I was already highly convergent. I was at the peak of the mountains in that field. I knew everyone in the industry, I could hire good people.
So again, that gave me the opportunity, but over time, what I didn't enjoy was I knew the product that I'm creating is not helping solve problems. It's making people like fun, but not not easier. So I want to solve problems instead of making like more fun. So I kind of pivoted wanted to kind of get out of gaming. That's why when the opportunity came, we decided to sell.
Now, with December, it was a very, very conscious pivot using the framework because we were measuring metrics, right, engagement metrics. We were looking at metrics. We were looking at the dollar we spent amount of hours you spent on improving the product experiments are doing the metrics for if you had a linear progression in terms of input and output.
At least if your output is linear to your input or slightly higher, you can have a exponential curve. But if you feel like whatever your input is, if your output is starting to like plateau a little bit in every direction, you know you kind of are stuck in the local optimum, you have to either completely pivot your product or actually get out of the product completely.
And because internally our motivation were no longer really passionate about this particular project, we decided to complete actually get out of that product, but thankfully by the time we already had enough data that there was a better heal that we climb much faster. So we applied a framework pre rigorously again, kind of going back to example of do you want to be a people manager, do you want to be executive actually surprisingly.
You probably can talk to all the other founders about it, what's surprising is a lot of early stage founders as they scale sometimes they don't enjoy what they do. Because they no longer feel like they're doing real work. So on the side job, they start creating their own pet projects coding for fun and night stuff like that. They're going to opposite direction to abstraction, right, they want some concreteness.
So they want to hold on to something the reason is the further away you are from the concreteness and you move up the abstraction layer your feedback cycle become a lot more indirect and a lot longer. I think about this that versus selling to small customer, small customer, so quick sale cycle, you sell you get commissions really quick.
So that takes two years to nurture relationship, never know when it's going to happen also similar with fundraising, although fundraising nowadays are fairly quick. There's so much information asymmetry so much indirectness feedback, Loube is very indirect and it can be very time consuming. Not a lot of people are okay with that actually most people will struggle or feel really stressed by that.
That's when people actually decide to go lower in the abstraction layer and that's okay. You learn something about yourself. So people should continue to figure out is it okay if I lengthen my feedback, is it okay if I work with indirectness and ambiguity. That's okay. You can continue to move up. But if that level what you're doing start to feel uncomfortable, then maybe that's the right level that you want to operate for the rest of your career and that's okay.
I think the awareness of understanding where you're operating within the abstraction layer seems like such a powerful idea because I'm now reflecting on different moments in my career where I would seek out some of those more direct opportunities to get that direct feedback loop and almost that validation that what I'm doing is fulfilling or valuable where you don't have the same immediate return on is this working out.
Also quickly, I just want to relate to the competitiveness that you had mentioned because my family, the saying is we are fierce competitors, but oftentimes is that things that don't matter when other people aren't competing. And so we have kind of a funny thing with the family. One of the Bill Gates book had an episode about where Bill Gates used to be hyper competitive when you invite other guests to his house, they would play some silly game.
At one point, he just gets so lost in the competition, he'll start saying, all the rules are not fair, or that person cheated and completely ruins the mood for the entire guests because he wants to win. And I think people who are in their edges and they're entrepreneurs, everyone not are somewhat fierce, they competitive. Now they over time they have the perspective to understand where unwise competing every single thing in life.
So they pick their battles, but it's something that is a learned skill almost. How do you pick the right battles? That's where you have to do a little bit soul searching. I think there's a good framework, an interesting motivation called AMP or ramp, like relatedness, autonomy, master in purpose.
I think ultimately comes out to looking at your past dots, like Steve just talked about connected dots, like at your past patterns and understand the fundamental, the rules are protocols that you actually gravitate towards. Let's say, we'll give you one example right there are engineers who are technology first and they're also engineers for customer or problems slash market first.
So engineers for technology first find a new novel technologist, they want to apply this everywhere because it's so cool. Engineers who are more customer market first want to see a problem in the market or want to help out this customer and they backward engineer and try to build a solution for that. And there is almost complete opposite trait and I think in general people tend to become more customer first over time.
But in the early days of engineering, those two traits tend to be really vibrocated almost people have a bifurcation those traits. So I think it really depends on understanding what you gravitate towards and pick the careers that really motivates you are allowing well to your happiness. Because ultimately you can't really lie about your own happiness, you can choose to mimic someone's else's career for a short period of time.
But if you do that for three or five, ten years, your soul is going to die one day and you'll be one of those cogs in the machine just moving through inertia, working for paycheck after paycheck. And now you have to convince the rest of the world why that's okay, why that's true. There's no such thing as dream you should never pursue risk. You have to justify your choices.
Don't be that person continue to fine tune the alignment and be self aware, get feedback and then see if you can find your own whatever your own trait that aligns with what you do. And of course, can't always be aligned right no one can, but at least directionally. If there's a line that at least you have something to hope for and long for.
Just to relate to that a little bit, the framework that I've used for my career is applying Jim Collins's hedgehog concept to assessing and evaluating different opportunities. And the simple framework is what can you be the best in the world at what drives your economic engine and what are you passionate about and you find the intersection of that and that's your hedgehog concept.
And so for me, that's been like a lifelong sort of testing and refining of are these things that I'm passionate about. Do I love them will test it or identify the opportunities of can you be really good at this. I've sort of amended the question to be being younger in your career where you still have twenty thirty years left.
Probably aren't the best in the world at a whole lot of things, but you can sort of reasonably make a bet that given the investment in time, could I be the best in the world at this. And it reminded me a lot of how you assessed the different jumps to the different video games and that assessing the opportunity of could I be the best based on the given skill sets and competencies that I've developed under this game and transition.
I just thought that was really great. We're getting close to the end of our time. I wanted to ask you two more questions. I'd love to talk about smile mom transitioning to send bird. Your current company start off as a social network for mothers. Now it's the number one chat API in the world. Why did you make that pivot? What were the principles you use that really set the foundation for that change.
And how can those principles be applied to somebody as they assess their own career pivot and change. So when I manage any startup, I look into what I kind of call the two-pin framework. People product market money. And you want to make sure that those four dimensions are always being managed well. That's kind of how you run a company. Now when you pivot, you have to pick one of those pillars. Now you can't pick money because money is a scholar value. It doesn't have direction.
But the rest of things do have direction. You hire certain set of people that have certain set of qualities and trades and skills. Right. But if you market, you're going after certain market, you're going to certain customer that also have a direction of certain nuance to that product. You might have a certain IP or technology that you build. Now you have to pick your pillar when you make the pivots.
I've kind of thought about that. And then what is the least lowest risk pivot is pivoting through the market. You already know the customers, you already know their problems they're going through. You're just trying to figure out a different solution to that same problem or same market opportunity.
This is probably what I think would be the lowest risk. The product pivot is something like, hey, we are pivoting our product, but we already have some foundation of IP or technology that we can reuse. We people like, okay, forget market, forget product. Our people can do X. So let's just do that. So if you think about my first pivot from during paprika lab from going from Web 2.0 to social gaming was complete based on people wasn't the market.
We're going from different market wasn't a product. We threw everything out. The investor looked at us like, hey, you guys know games build games. So you should just make games. We're pivoting based on people. This is the highest risk.
So for money, you're just hitting reset on everything else. So thankfully it worked out. So the company make money stuff like that. Now second pivot was more in the product pivot. It wasn't market pivot because maybe I's not serving the most community or local social network. We pivot from B to C to B to B. But the core IP we built was based on the technology we built for our own applications. We already had the IP. We had a foundation technology that we were working on.
Also new we had built this check technology multiple times in previous gaming company to so this is an IP that we understood really well that we could pivot using so we kind of use that framework again. We're tracking the metrics whether it be daily active users, multi active users and all the other user engagement metrics to start to see that really plateau whatever we did.
So what are the factors we can use the pivot now we realized that all of our co funders and employees back then except for one person was male living out of Korea. This mom's community was us moms. So it's hindsight is quite clear that we're probably not the best team to build out for the US moms.
Maybe the market we're not super passionate or maybe it's a market that we don't understand the best we can't be number one in this hindsight. Whereas the technology we built chat multiple times already in the gaming company. We built this chat again having evaluated all these solutions available out there. So we know where they feel so we build was actually a superior solution then it was available in the market that day. So we pivot using that pillar.
So I don't know how to translate to career choices, but I think kind of looking back if you're an engineer, will you want to pivot using the same market. You want to go after see market as you are building.
Dev tooling or less you're going after the developers or certain community or BTC whatever that is. You want to go into a different company that is kind of targeting similar market that you understand really well you want to solve a problem for or do you want to concentrate on a technology or certain IPvs you're a back and engineer and you don't care what industry you're in.
But you really want to work on scale your back end then you just figure out whatever the company that has the biggest back end challenges you apply for that. And then you might want to actually pivot on your person like hey you know what I don't want to quote anymore actually like spending time with people. So maybe I want to switch my career to the same solution engineering or someone else like developer advocate so that I'm still kind of connected to coding that I can leverage off of.
I can spend more of my time talking to customers and spending time with them. So I probably use that as a tool to introspect myself a little bit. We have several engineering leaders in our community contemplating starting their own software company. What would you say to a future founder considering a transition away from their current career and making that pivot to becoming a founder what would be your advice and first action for them.
Well, versus think about if you want to do this for a 10 year period I mean of course that's the advice that a lot of other founders and investors would give but I sincerely recommend it because when I look back on all the choices I made gaming company to pivot of course we did it to survive and thrive but ultimately my heart wasn't in for 10 years because I was already done with gaming.
So when the opportunity rose I sold it and people say Siri entrepreneur just means that they haven't really found the one that they want to do forever if you look at Bill Gates or Steve jobs they're like one line or two line one is company they are just philanthropy right.
There's like nothing else so pick something that you can devote your life hopefully a 10 years of life into usually align that with market product and yourself the people if you find that you'll very likely you will almost never give up and that's going to give you a lot of opportunities once in a while you get that chance to win.
And when you're going in there think about that landscape again like how can I move up this mountain figure out what the landscape looked like quickly and when you're blindfolded how do I traverse this landscape quickly figure out the best hill to climb as quickly as possible through whatever minimum viable product because what ends up happening is people will buy all the gears if you're going to a local hill as a area and you're buying all the gears for Mount Everest you don't need any of that you just need some shoes good whatever jacket you start climbing and see if something is there.
A lot of people end up spending so much time trying to figure out the analysis and buying all the nice gears spending a lot of money on that just figure out if you can climb pick up hill climb faster and see what that feels like be open to making quick pivots early on because it's a lot harder to pivot way later in the coming journey.
Thank you this was awesome I'm assessing my life through the lens of all these different frameworks and it's revealed a lot of opportunities where I feel like I could have made better informed decisions and a bit more clear in the metaphor of being blindfolded on a hill and figure out what you're doing.
I'm going to be able to do that on a hill and figuring out how to climb that as fast as possible I think it's such a powerful framework so this was absolutely incredible John thank you so much for your time. Yeah, thank you for having me and hope this is helpful to the audience. Here's a quick recap of our takeaways from our conversation with John Kim.
Are you creating or consuming this was the powerful question that inspired John to walk away from professional gaming and shift his focus towards becoming a creator. Remember navigating your career is like climbing a hill in this case you have no way of knowing for certain if the career you're climbing is the right one or the highest you could possibly climb.
All you can know is that if you're going up or down fast or slow and sometimes you need to take a risk and climb a completely different hill to help guide you on that climb identify if you have an appropriate balance of convergence and divergence.
Invergence being your committed to staying on your current path and won't quit climbing the hill of your career until you get to the top divergence being you're okay with the risk of going down the hill and introducing change to see if you can find a better higher hill in your career this looks like changing within your organization changing companies or even changing industries too much divergence and you're probably jumping ship too frequently too much convergence on the other hand and you're probably not introducing enough risk and you might find yourself stuck.
Evolutionary biology indicates that 20% divergence may be about the right balance of risk and change that opens up new opportunities and innovation in your career. So if you're stuck and don't know what to do ask yourself do I need more convergence or more divergence in my career another key tool to career navigation abstraction layers moving up the abstraction layer typically means greater visibility into the business.
You need to become comfortable with ambiguity and indirect or long feedback cycles moving down the abstraction layer means going deeper into specific functions typically you'll find more concrete actionable items and quicker feedback loops here to move up the abstraction layer faster make it a habit to understand the priorities of the level above you if you're an engineering manager what is a director care about if you're a director what is the VP care about if you're a VP or CTO what is the CEO or board of directors care about the value of career.
The value of career opportunities goes beyond money use the human capital framework to balance the value that you're accumulating over time intellectual capital is your skill set social capital are things like leadership skills and the ability to navigate implicit or structural influence networks emotional capital is understanding your own or others emotions and how to motivate yourself and others.
But these take time to build one to two years at a company means you'll likely miss opportunities to accumulate human capital especially social capital so consider committing three to four years to career decisions to maximize the longer term benefits of social intellectual and emotional capital to accumulate emotional capital you can get better at understanding others emotions by training for cognitive empathy ask yourself how can I prove the other person is right and begin gathering data from their perspective.
This exercise helps you empathize from the other person's point of view so that you can get better at influencing so you want to make a career pivot how should you assess your pivot try the 2 p.m. framework and prioritize one of the different variables of people product market or money if you're prioritizing for people you can ask yourself do you want to work with specific people regardless of the technology or market or maybe you want to pivot and work more directly on the front line with people teams or customers versus the market.
If you want to prioritize product do you want to concentrate on a specific technology or IP and if you're prioritizing market do you want to join a new company in the same market that you understand well and enjoy solving problems for or pivot to a completely new market or industry that you're more interested in.
John's recommendation don't pick money the limitation of prioritizing money is that it's a scholar value and it doesn't have direction. John's final advice align yourself with the career that motivates you and makes you happy and ask yourself can I commit to this for 10 years if you can answer that question and are prepared to make quick pivots using the concepts of convergence divergence abstraction layers human capital and prioritizing with the 2 p.m. framework it's very likely you'll never give up you'll find opportunity.
And get that chance to win. If you enjoyed the episode please share it with a fellow engineering leader. Also we'd love to hear from you send us a message with your thoughts feedback and any ideas you might have for the show or leave us a review on whichever podcast platform you're tuning in from. If you love the show we also have a ton of other ways to stay involved with the engineering leadership community. We also launched the ELC peer group program.
Peer groups provide a safe space to uncover solutions to your challenges from a thoughtfully curated group of your peers. It's not too late to join. ELC peer groups are ongoing and you can jump in at any time. But the sooner you join the program the sooner you'll be able to connect with other leaders who can help you solve your real challenges. To stay up to date and learn more about all of our upcoming events our peer groups and other programs that are going on head to sfelc.com.
Or follow the link in the description. See you next time on the engineering leadership podcast.