Amir Bormand: [00:00:00] On this episode of the podcast I have with me Indie Carre. He is the head of engineering at Convex. We’re gonna be talking about transitioning back to startups. Indie has the experience of working for other startups and fairly large company as well. He’s gonna walk us through some of what that process looks like for him, why he ended up back at a startup.
I think some interesting points that he’s gonna make. I think it’s great for everyone who, is it a big company is thinking about startups or as a startup who wants to get an idea what a big company is I think will kinda cover a lot of different areas for us. And I’m excited to have him on.
Andy, thanks for being on the podcast.
Indy Khare: Awesome. Thanks for having me, Amir.
Amir Bormand: Absolutely. Let’s start off at the top with two things before we kick it off. One being tell us what Convex does as a company and then you’re head of engineering. Just tell us what some of those responsibilities are and then we’ll kick it.
Indy Khare: Yeah, for sure. So at convex we like to say we’re building a application platform for [00:01:00] developers. So we provide a custom database and an in integrated execution environment. But what we like to say is, we want our customers to build products and not backends, right? So we’re providing a full backend environment for you.
So yeah, that’s what we’re doing. And as for me as head of engineering I think the. The funnest way to put it is just make sure the trains are moving, right? So there’s a hundred things happening, and I just make sure they’re all going in the right direction. Things are ha happening at the right time, and everyone’s, focused on the most important thing for the business.
Amir Bormand: Awesome. So this episode we’re gonna be talking about, in your case, transitioning back to startup. And we’ll have your LinkedIn in the, in, in the show notes. So if somebody wants to go in and. Each of the chrono, the chronology of your career, they could do that.
But I guess really what we wanted to talk about on the episode was, that experience of being at a startup in this case you were a bump, got acquired by Google. We can talk about Google and the scale and then [00:02:00] going back to startup. I think some people. Might see, Hey, I’ve been to Google, where do I go?
Some people are like, Hey, I just a startup mentality. There’s a lot of stuff here that I think you highlighted I’d love to cover. I guess to start off, maybe actually let’s talk about without going too far back, but talk about that bump Google acquisition and just give us a little context of what that is cuz obviously, you were at a startup before you got, you
Indy Khare: guys got acquire.
Yeah. Yeah. So Bump was an app back in the day. It was very popular. Some, maybe some of the younger listeners don’t know about it now. The idea was you’d bump two phones together and it would make a connection. And what that allowed people to do was exchange contact information, share photos and all of that.
And we iterated on the product a bunch and over time we realized photo sharing is the big thing people wanna do and really this like private photo sharing, right? Like obviously there were social networks around, but we noticed that, families and partners would share a lot of photos with each other through [00:03:00] bomb.
And we to continue that vision we basically ended up getting acquired by. So that’s the transition basically. And it was an aqua hire. We weren’t gonna necessarily continue working on the original product. There was definitely already ideas on floating around, like building Google photos within the company.
So yeah, we landed right in that mix of as things were getting figured. Awesome.
Amir Bormand: Yeah. And maybe just you mentioned Google Photos. I told you before, I loved your line on LinkedIn it says, took Google Photos from zero to 1 billion users. That’s not something many people can say.
That’s it’s a one, it’s a fun
Indy Khare: thing to say.
Amir Bormand: Yeah, it’s cool. It’s really cool. You obviously left after being there seven years, maybe let’s talk about that experience, right? So you went from a. That I gotta acquire to you’re within Google.
It’s a different world. There’s a, there’s so many things to change here, but I guess at a high level, maybe just, let’s start at, the top obviously you’re gonna have a lot more resources. You have, yeah. You have a different framework and, but also [00:04:00] you were working on a product that was maybe not as well known.
You mentioned zero to billion. To take us back, Tell us what it looked like. Day one you guys got acquired, you’re there and you’re a Google employee.
Indy Khare: Yeah, for sure. I was the, through the acquisition we ended up at as I said this like early days of as the company was starting to figure out what they wanted Google Photos to be.
So large chunk of what Google Photos. Was existed at the company already as part of Google Plus. It was a feature within Google Plus, which would which had this feature called Instant Upload, where it would already be uploading some images for you, make it easier and faster to share them.
And so there was this whole transition happening where Android organization wanted a better default photos experience and obviously with Google’s mission to organize the world’s information, photos being this like [00:05:00] huge area that wasn’t organized within people’s lives was was an important just extension of the mission for Google, right?
Yeah, as there was obviously lots. Things to figure out. But eventually we started working on it in 2014 and I ended up being the original tech lead of the Android app with a few folks from the acquisition and a few folks within the company within Google already. And yeah, it was fun to get a chance to build something from scratch, really.
Obviously, as I said, there were some parts of the experience that already existed at Google, but we knew to really build the experience we wanted for this private. Photo library product. We had to build a lot of it from scratch, especially on the mobile side. So yeah, it was fun to go do that. And yeah, suddenly had a lot more resources.
As you mentioned. I remember early on just being super excited that there was even a QA organization, right? There’s lookout. People who went, did that and, who I could just talk to and figure things out with set up plans and [00:06:00] all of that instead of just me doing it on the side.
Yeah, there’s just a, it was awesome to have all of that around so that we could build and obviously, Google photos wouldn’t have been possible because it was just the huge compute powers and all the amazing. AI research image recognition research that was already at Google.
So all of these things came in and made this amazing product. Absolutely.
Amir Bormand: You mentioned the qa, having that access to the resource, that’s something at a startup, you’re, you, somebody’s wearing that as an additional hat.
Indy Khare: This is what Yeah, basically. Yeah, that was my hat, other hat before.
Yeah, exactly.
Amir Bormand: I guess when you looking at that and now you can kinda look back with, d different view of it, but you had a lot of resources. Large scale. Everyone always is, not everyone, but a lot of people want to get to say, oh, I’ve worked at that large scale.
But yet you left. Yeah. And I guess, yada ying a little bit of the years there, but getting to the point where, you’d been there long enough and I guess at some point, you’re you’ve, this product has [00:07:00] matured. It’s used by a billion people. It’s widespread.
That’s gotta feel good, but. I guess you weren’t necessarily gonna stay there forever. What was it that you were missing there? What were you looking for that you started to think, okay, maybe a change is necessary?
Indy Khare: Yeah, I think, one thing as I’ve reflected on all this I’ve realized is I’ve always really been a startup person.
I love wearing many hat. I love just figuring out something that no one else can because there’s just no one else there to do it. And yeah as Google Photos got bigger, more mature, I had people for all sorts of things taking care of great work. My teams had great leads and managers and yeah, I just felt that itch to.
I would start working on something that was growing quickly again, or starting from scratch and possibly even. And yeah, it was seven years is definitely a long time at a place too. And I definitely [00:08:00] felt like I also just needed a break. So actually between Google and Convex I took a little over a year off just to give myself a just mental break before I jumped into something new.
Amir Bormand: Always needed. I guess as you were, evaluating that need for break, it’s, something new. You’ve been there seven years and yeah. Obviously you wanna build. Did you ta, did you stop the look at what other opportunities there were within Google? Was it a decision that, I just I’ve been working for this big company, I need a wholesale change.
Was that an option or was it more or less you felt like you should just left straight?
Indy Khare: No, I definitely looked around a little bit. I just I at the moment I just didn’t quite find the magic. Of something like a Google Photos and that’s prob it’s really hard. It’s a rare thing for a confluence of things to come together.
Something like Google Photos. Yeah, I just was looking for something that felt high impact, felt that something I could just go run and execute on. And that was also [00:09:00] Blue sky, a lot more blue sky, right? A term we’ve talked about earlier. And I just didn’t quite find the right balance for myself there.
And as I said, I also just needed a break. So between all of that, I decided to just leave and give myself some time. Makes sense.
Amir Bormand: And I guess, a, as you took a break and you were looking to get back into it, you mentioned, obviously we talked about blue sky. You wanna have that opportunity to build and builders like to build.
When you were evaluating opportunities I am positive there was no shortage of companies that you could have joined. How were you going about evaluating? Because that’s always interesting to me, right? Yeah. What are you seeing within, obviously you ended up at Convex, but what are you seeing that goes, Hey I can be a part of that.
I can see myself, being a builder again, and I’m gonna build this product.
Indy Khare: Yeah, for sure. To be honest, given how much I’d grown at Google my first thought was to just look at another sort of high growth startup, right? So startup that had, that’s now in this space of really growing out, it was like, oh, I’ve done that, and that’s my, that might be something I can [00:10:00] help out some other company in. And so I definitely talked to a few of those folks. I had one exception in my mind for going to something really early stage, even though I I wanted to do that it’s hard to find something early stage that you that sort of like checks all your boxes, right?
Because it is riskier and all of that, right? And in my case, it was really important to me that the people. At this, cuz when I joined Convex it was just a team of four, right? What people at that stage were just high integrity. So a way for me to evaluate that. And obviously the product being something that was just personally interesting, exciting for me.
And so convex, save those boxes. Jamie Turner was the CEO of Convex I’d worked with him previously. At Bump actually. And he definitely has stuck out in my mind over the years, just like an incredible person to work with. High integrity, incredible engineer, all of that. So I just love to that sort of box to check for me.
And then [00:11:00] in terms of the product, in my time off I tried to build things cuz that’s what some of us do. And I realized there was still this need in the market for. A backend that sort of abstracts a lot of things away from you and just gives you the right set of tools and abstractions that you need to to build new products.
And once Jamie pitched the vision to me I was like, I realized oh, I actually, I want to use that. And that’s important for me is to feel like there’s something I work on. That I wanna use, or at least I feel like I can understand the problem well enough that I can push it forward, right?
I can push the solution forward. And yeah, it hit those boxes for me. And so I decided to just jump in. There you go.
Amir Bormand: Yeah I guess I’ve, I was just thinking, seven years at Google. You didn’t have to wear that QA hat anymore. You’re going back to company. You’re going back to company of [00:12:00] single digits, double, or low teens.
And all of a sudden you don’t have the same resources, the same benefits, perks. You don’t have the team size. You don’t have, yeah, that QA department. When you were going back, and I know you’re a startup guy, but seven years is a long time to get used to something. Yeah. If you said hey Indy, I’m gonna turn off your hot water for the next couple years, you can live without it.
You’ll get used to lukewarm cold water showers. It’ll be okay. You probably would think I’m insane but I know you’re a startup guy. H how did you cope with, you’re gonna lose some of those additional resources that a smaller company couldn’t afford to provide yet?
Indy Khare: Yeah. It’s interesting.
And maybe this is being a startup person sort of a thing. What I didn’t think that hard about it maybe? Yeah, no. In that I was happy. I was happy. That’s probably the honest answer. I was happy to just be in a place where we have to figure out things from first principles again. Because, it’s a different type of product than the type of product I’ve worked on.
So thinking. QA or, a bunch of other things. Product [00:13:00] design, product management, everything feels pretty different in this type of product. And so that opportunity to learn all of that from first principles was just exciting enough for me that that I. Yeah, I guess I didn’t think that deeply about missing those resources.
Obviously there are definitely times where I was like I am looking forward to when we’re big enough, I’m like, oh, I been happy to, now that I understand this world, I’m happy to hand this off to someone, but we’ll get there. But as I said, I enjoy wearing different hats, enjoy figuring out new things.
When I joined Convex, I, I ended up. Hiring our first few contractors. Finding, figuring out, doing product design, doing product management stuff. I ran recruiting before we had our head of talent for a little bit. And so yeah it’s just you get to go try all of these different things within the company and I just enjoy being able to shift between different roles like that.
Yeah.
Amir Bormand: I like that. From your [00:14:00] point of view, I know that I don’t think there’s the right answer to this question, but from your point of view I guess as companies grow, you’re going to get more refined responsibilities. There’s gonna be departments, you’re gonna get QA department.
All these things happen. But I think I’ve spoken to enough engineers over the years to know that a lot of them enjoy building, a lot of them enjoy solving problems. And some of the time, some of the reasons behind them wanting to leave is they want to find a new problem to solve. As you’re looking at yourself and just, you know what you found interesting.
How does a company avoid that being the inevitability? It see, it seems hard because obviously as the product grows, there’s, maybe less new development, maybe less multiple hats, but yet, yeah, we all know this is something engineers like, not all engineers. I’m just talking generalities but how do you how could that be Avoid.
Indy Khare: I think you’re right to say that to, there’s certain, to a certain extent it can’t be, but I think you as a, as a manager you wanna try to give people as much [00:15:00] autonomy as possible, right? Give them the encouragement to be like, Hey, yeah, you should just go finger this out, or you should just go drive this problem, even if there’s someone.
Who like a QA department or whatever, right? But. Someone has to glue it all together, right? You can’t just throw things over the wall. Even in large organizations like Google, you still, someone has to go and get everyone in the same room and figure all those pieces out.
So you then, through that process to keep getting that exposure to these different things and. The opportunity you always have is to stitch all these things together, make a cohesive plan or or a goal that you’re trying to get to.
Amir Bormand: That’s fair. I think it’s interesting cuz I think as you’re a builder, you move up through that, engineering career ladder and and then you become a manager and all of a sudden, you were, you got into engineering cuz you like problem solving. And that little [00:16:00] burning desire could dwindle and you wanted to rekindle and managers necessarily that, that allure of, I guess management, there’s a lot of problem solving, but it’s not, yeah.
No longer. Technological, it’s a lot more people management problems you’re solving. This is very different and I think that’s a, that’s an interesting thing cuz you, you still had a ton of people management responsibilities. But that mul that multiple hat, cuz you said it a couple times is what you kept playing back to being able to have Yeah.
That diversity in thought within yourself.
Indy Khare: So what I sometimes told people when they were asking about growth and all of that, right? As a manager people, we have these conversations. One thing I told them that, okay, maybe as you’re a great engineer, but you also have some interesting product intuitions that are valuable and interesting is that one thing I told people was that as you grow, and this is what I.
As you grow in your career and as you take on more responsibilities as you pair up with more peers in other organizations, these lines like product design, engineering, actually are [00:17:00] fuzzier at like at the higher levels than we all like to think. Obviously we have our core duties to follow, but when you’re in the room and hashing things out together, you are all providing, your own perspective and input. It isn’t that just because I’m, the engineering lead or engineering manager, I’m gonna just stop at telling you what is or isn’t technically possible. I might actually be able to say, Hey, because I understand. The technical aspects here fairly well.
I can provide some insight into what is possible with the product that maybe, the PM or the designer or whatever isn’t necessarily thinking about. And on the other hand sometimes like designers and PMs push you to try something that you didn’t want to, necessar didn’t really necessarily think was.
Was possible, or at least like work spending time on when they like present here’s the business case, or here’s this like incredible interaction we’ll be able to have if we try it and you’re like, okay, let me actually spend some time and explore [00:18:00] that as well. So it’s always this you’re in these rooms where you are all providing input on different aspects of of the business, right?
And so as you grow those opportunities, Actually are still there. Interesting.
Amir Bormand: I think I actually yeah, you mentioned the lines become fuzzier within that room. I think that’s actually a really good observation. I guess from the flip side of that. Yeah, I think we’ve joked about, wearing multiple hats and you had a different view of. At being a Google of how things are formally run. When you’re actually now thinking, okay, convex is gonna grow and I’m going to divest myself of some of these hats at some point. How do you prioritize that? Because that always is, the other tricky part as a startup is knowing which hat to give up at what point?
Indy Khare: I think, one signal for me is when I feel like I understand the problem well. So when I can, when I hand it off, I will be able to know it’s if it’s being done well or not, right? And the [00:19:00] other time is sometimes it’s just opportunistic, right? Sometimes you just find someone who’s just so much better at it, and actually over time you really want that to happen, right?
Find someone who’s just so much better at that than you are where they come and tell you like, Hey, actually the way you’ve been doing this isn’t actually the best way to do it. This happened with our with our head of talent who we hired a few months ago. For a brief period of time, I was trying to, I was just treading, right?
I was just barely like reading all the resumes and making some calls. And he came in my first meeting with him, he was like, I got all of this. I’ll just take care of this whole set of things you’re doing, and I’m gonna make sure we do all these follow ups properly and set up a process here that you haven’t set up.
I’m like, great. Do it right. Like I did that for a bit because we needed it. And it gave me an opportunity to learn new things. But once you get that expert in the room, you just know how much better your business is gonna be because of it. And you just want to hand things off. It just feels.
Amir Bormand: [00:20:00] Awesome, man. I like that. I think that’s great advice. I think people sometimes struggle with with that it’s not easy to give up control or when to give up control, but as you mentioned, when somebody can do it better, that’s obviously no better time. Thanks for being on. Thanks for sharing.
I think you have a super interesting background and you’re a builder, so I was super excited to have you come on and talk about this. Yeah, thanks.
Indy Khare: Thanks for
Amir Bormand: having. Absolutely. Before I let you go, I like to ask all my guests this question. And that is, if you could ask a future guest on this show to cover a topic for you what topic
Indy Khare: would you be curious to learn about more?
There’s this sort of like classic problem in engineering management around like when teams should be functional or product oriented, right? So horizontal or vertical, different people use different words. And yeah, I just I have an opinion on when things need to switch back and forth.
But it’s definitely something I love hearing from other folks on when they think. Time comes. And because [00:21:00] there’s a variety of situations in different companies and I haven’t had all the experiences in the world. And so it’s always hearing different people’s take on that.
Amir Bormand: Absolutely. That’s a good one.
And if somebody does wanna reach out to you to talk to you about anything you’ve mentioned on the podcast what’s a good way of getting ahold of you?
Indy Khare: Yeah. As you mentioned, my LinkedIn will be in the podcast notes, but beyond that I am also on Twitter. So you can find me at I K H A R e I curray.
So first letter, my first name, last name, and yeah, it’s easy enough, hopefully.
Amir Bormand: Awesome, man. Thanks for again thanks again for being on super fun conversation. I can’t thank you enough. All right. That’s it for this episode. We’ll be back again. Different guests, different topic until then. Two things.
One, if you yourself or somebody that can talk about, how do teams get structured, functional versus product, horizontal, vertical. I think it’s a great conversation, especially if you’ve seen it in different environments at different scales. I think it’d be great to have you on the show.
And secondly, [00:22:00] if you found the podcast useful share it with somebody else, give it a rating. Wherever you listen to it, that’s how we’ve been growing organically. I can’t thank everyone enough for doing that. Until next time, thank you and goodbye.