This conversation is part of our Lead/Forward series, where we talk with technology leaders about the real stories behind the themes of innovation, talent, and experience. In this episode, we interview Tihomir Bajic, CEO of LTSE Software to find out more about the evolution of DevOps, and his vision for overcoming siloed developer, ops and security teams for fast, consistent and scalable operations across environments.
This conversation is part of our Lead/Forward series, where we talk with technology leaders about the real stories behind the themes of innovation, talent, and experience. In this episode, we interview Tihomir Bajic, CEO of LTSE Software to find out more about the evolution of DevOps, and his vision for overcoming siloed developer, ops and security teams for fast, consistent and scalable operations across environments. He explains the importance of developer lifestyle and flexibility, to ensure they can remain effective while working in a supportive culture while the barriers between teams are removed. During the discussion Tiho expresses what he considers to be newer and better ways of measuring developer productivity. He tells us what he thinks about the developer and operations relationship, shedding light on how best they can integrate and interact to be influential on productivity, progress, and profitability. Tiho also delves into how LTSE is innovating investment, experimentation, and scaling for companies, in an effort to help them find continuous success.
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“If you are a technology company, you're focusing your innovation on technology. One of the most important things that you can think about is speed of development, and how fast you can get new products or changes out in the market, into the hands of the customers. And, what matters there is the people who are creating that code, who are creating that content; their ability to do so quickly, their ability to do so reliably and to be able to troubleshoot, test, engage, and monitor how the customers are working with what's out there.”
“Software, writing code, it's a craft. You develop your own jargon, and you need to engage with people who are creating, who are craft people, who are creating this valuable thing. You need to really study and understand and appreciate what they do and what's needed for them to be successful in that craft.”
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01:30 Importance of the Developer Experience
04:00 Evolution of the Developer Lifestyle
11:30 Building Companies that Support Developer Lifestyle and Culture
17:30 The DevOps Relationship, Culture, and Working Environment
24:00 Budget Authority and Responsibility
25:15 Innovation at LTSE
30:15 Developer Flexibility and Success
34:00 Developer Value
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Tihomir Bajic on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tihomirbajic/
CIO Exchange on Twitter: https://twitter.com/vmwcioexchange
Yadin Porter de León on Twitter: https://twitter.com/porterdeleon
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Tihomir Bajic (00:01):
One of the most important things that you can think about is your speed of development and how fast you can get new products or changes out in the market into the hands of the customers. And what matters there is the people who are creating that code, who are creating that content. Their ability to do so quickly, and their ability to do so reliably, and to be able to troubleshoot, test, engage, and monitor how the customers are working with what's out there.
Yadin Porter de Leon (00:33):
Welcome to the CIO Exchange Podcast. We talk about what's working, what's not, and what's next. I'm Yadin Porter de Leon. This conversation is part of our lead forward series, where we talk with technology leaders about the real stories behind the themes of innovation, talent, and experience. In this episode, we interview Tiho Bajic, CEO of LTSE Software. To find out more about the evolution of DevOps and his vision for overcoming siloed developers, ops, and security teams for fast, consistent, scalable operations across environments.
Yadin Porter de Leon (01:03):
He explains the importance of developer lifestyle and flexibility to ensure they can remain effective while working in a supportive culture while the barriers between teams are removed. During the discussion, Tiho expresses what he considers to be newer and better ways of measuring developer productivity. He tells us what he thinks about the developer and operations relationship, shedding light on how best they can integrate and interact to be influential on productivity, progress, and profitability.
Yadin Porter de Leon (01:32):
Tiho also delves into how LTSE is innovating investment, experimentation, and scaling for companies in an effort to help them find continuous success us. So I think it's undeniable that developer experience is paramount for a whole bunch of different business reasons, for faster time to market, getting ideas out there, for being competitive for differentiation.
Yadin Porter de Leon (01:54):
And one thing that's evolved over the last few years is that remote, that hybrid developer experience, not having everyone be in an office, which was always interesting that developers were brought into a central space into instead of being in their own creative space. So I wanted to start the idea or the conversation around, what's that developer experience? How has it been with the evolution of hybrid remote work? And give me a sense of your perspective, Tiho, on the critical importance, starting out with that developer experience, why it's so important that that developers have the capabilities to just ideate, to execute.
Tihomir Bajic (02:29):
If you are a technology company, you're focusing on innovation, on technology. One of the most important things that you can think about is your speed of development and how fast you can get new products or changes out in the market, into the hands of the customers. And what matters there is the people who are creating that code, who are creating that content, their ability to do so quickly, their ability to do so reliably, and to be able to troubleshoot, test, engage, and monitor how the customers are working with what's out there.
Tihomir Bajic (03:06):
So this developer lifestyle really matters and developer experience really matters. And that's why at LTSE, we pride ourselves at really making sure that, in addition to LTSE school and all the other things that we do when we onboard new employees, especially developers at our company, have their laptops set up right away, have cookbooks, so to speak, ready to go. And on day one, they're able to push, even at least the sugar will change up the stack and see how that all percolates through. So by the end of day one, they should be able to be fully productive as much as possible from the technical point of view.
Yadin Porter de Leon (03:42):
Yeah. No. That makes sense too. And that developer experience is... And there's tooling, there's culture. There's a whole bunch of things that we want to tackle today. And so that first piece, it sounds like onboarding is of course critically important, what's that experience like. And as they're working, you said something that I thought was really important, which was lifestyle, I like the way that you put that.
Yadin Porter de Leon (03:58):
I think that it puts a lot of the different components of everything into, I think one really great word, which is lifestyle. I'm going to use that developer lifestyle from now on. And what is that? What are you seeing in that evolution of that developer lifestyle? Now, people are getting the opportunity to work where they want, how they want with tools that are far more fluid and flexible than they were before. What's been the shift in the developer lifestyle?
Tihomir Bajic (04:22):
I'll just go back. I've been in startups. I started as an engineer now for 20 years. And the law has changed over those 20 years when it comes to writing code, committing that code, getting that code built, executed, maybe printed on a CD. Shit. Installed-
Yadin Porter de Leon (04:38):
It's, yeah, a little bit different now, isn't it?
Tihomir Bajic (04:41):
Yeah. It's a lot different, that whole speed, that lifestyle becomes really, really interesting. And I had early on stumbled into the open source community. And I was fascinated by this lifestyle that developers who were core to some of the opensource libraries or platforms, frameworks that we were using, that they were all around the planet.
Tihomir Bajic (05:06):
And a bunch of them never saw each other, never met each other in-person. And this was prior to Zoom, so they never had video calls. Yet they were able to create something extremely valuable, something that was critical to our building commercial software, for which, my first company, we got to a point of 400, 500 engineers that all had to sit within 500 feet of each other. And that always fascinated me.
Yadin Porter de Leon (05:29):
Yeah. So that was a requirement? So this was a centralized requirement, they all had to be in the same space physically?
Tihomir Bajic (05:35):
The first company was basically, we had some sales engineers who would go and travel to the customers site, but we had a very in-office culture. It set working hours with all of that. And yet we relied on some of the open source that was not built that way at all. And that always fascinated me.
Tihomir Bajic (05:54):
And then once I got a chance to build my own companies, to be the first engineer and to set that culture, as well in my life stages became married and got kids, moved around. That flexibility, ability to do the work, ability to really be effective and to not measure the KLOC, kilo lines of code, or-
Yadin Porter de Leon (06:14):
I love that.
Tihomir Bajic (06:16):
... got fixed. Or how many... But think about it, it's like-
Yadin Porter de Leon (06:19):
That's an old IBM thing, isn't it? KLOCs.
Tihomir Bajic (06:21):
It is. It is. But I was in these environments where it was nine to five, for example, for developer it was more than that. But it was nine to five for developers and you couldn't log out prior to that. It's like, "Well, you're not on a call, you're not minding a station or a live phone line."
Tihomir Bajic (06:41):
Sure. If you are on call and PagerDuty, carry your brick around your waist, but for ping for paging, you. But you don't necessarily need to be there. But somehow whether it was the corporate culture. So I was fascinated that we were measuring developer productivity, whether it be in kilo lines of code or how many hours people were at the desk. Where, at the same time, we were using the software that was not good.
Yadin Porter de Leon (07:07):
And that's KLOCs, that's 10,000 or 1000 lines of code, KLOC is 1000 lines of code. Yeah. I think it's an IBM thing.
Tihomir Bajic (07:13):
Oh, it's an old school thing. I'm just talking about it as an example of something that in practice is proven to be completely wrong when you're measuring developer productivity, because we all write code differently.
Yadin Porter de Leon (07:27):
Exactly.
Tihomir Bajic (07:27):
And so why were we so fascinated in the early 2000s in this company I was at, to have developers in the seat for a specific period of time? When at the same time we were relying on open source software that was not built that way. And a lot of those contributors were probably not even doing that as a full time thing. And so that got me started.
Yadin Porter de Leon (07:47):
Did it feel crazy then? When you saw this beautiful stuff that was being created, did it feel a little crazy even early on that that developers had to be in this one place physically when you were creating something digitally where you could literally be anywhere? Was that a common conversation?
Tihomir Bajic (08:03):
Yeah. No. It really fascinated me. And get this, at the height of this, actually, because I was customer facing a lot, actually I had a laptop and a desk station that I would plug my laptop in. I was supposed to be there, but it was yet okay to travel to go to the customer site and to their data center. So clearly, I had to be in multiple places. And so that fascinated me to the point where something felt wrong, and obviously I was not the only one.
Tihomir Bajic (08:30):
And so in the next startup that I got to build, and I was the first engineer, so I was able to influence the culture a lot. We talked about that flexibility even more, and then with every startup and with every project. And now 20 years later, I've run startups in nine different countries. At some points, I had people, as they say, following the sun in terms of where engineers sit and where they live.
Tihomir Bajic (08:54):
And six years ago, when we were starting at LTSE, we jokingly were saying at the time how we need to be trilingual, because we need to understand the language of Silicon Valley, we need to understand the language of Wall Street, and we need to understand the language of Capitol Hill. And our engineers need to be trilingual and well vast in understanding the customers for those three different areas.
Yadin Porter de Leon (09:20):
And that's a customer focused lens? So then the developers... I love that. And I want to make sure that we highlight that because I think it's so important that the developers creating the experience, the need to understand the customers that's creating the experience for it. I know that sounds common sensical, it sounds obvious, but it's something that is so incredibly, critically important.
Yadin Porter de Leon (09:41):
And maybe you can give me your perspective. Maybe isn't part of all of the cultures, isn't part of all the developer lifestyles, it's very much, "Hey, here's the problem, I need to write the code. Do the unit testing, put in security," et cetera. And customers may not be a focus, but that does seem like a cultural component. So something that you put in the culture of the companies that you are running.
Tihomir Bajic (10:02):
That's right. Yeah. And I find that, personally, again, I'm talking back to the developer lifestyle, I find that a lot more interesting to me personally. To be able to see how the code I write actually ends up being used and how it impacts the customer and what it does.
Tihomir Bajic (10:17):
And a lot of times it's not as simple as like, "Well, let's have a discovery cycle and now go back to my dark layer and write some code for six months and ship it to a CD and everything's going to be perfect." Of course, it won't work that way, it turns out. And so it's like a contact support.
Yadin Porter de Leon (10:37):
I like that, contact support. So it's part of the developer lifestyle, and then as you write the code it's a contact support where you have to go and you have to smash into reality, engage with customers, get in there and really understand what the real world life is like. And I think some great examples I've had is when people are creating software for the healthcare vertical, for example. And someone is trying to care for somebody who's either really ill or someone who has some medical condition.
Yadin Porter de Leon (11:01):
And there's some interaction, there's a human connection there. And software is a part of facilitating the process, but at the same time, understanding what that human connection and the communication is a critical. And you sounded like you are looking at Silicon Valley, you're looking at government, Capitol Hill, public sector. You're looking at Wall Street critically and saying, "Well, what is that? What are those experiences like? And how do developers really understand that? And then how do they build that into the developer lifestyle?"
Tihomir Bajic (11:26):
That's exactly right. Because you need to understand, in some cases that you have compliance, that there are other things that you need to really satisfy. It's not just about writing code. You have a lot more than you take into consideration.
Yadin Porter de Leon (11:40):
Yeah. So talk about LTSE and some of the companies that you built, and you kind of alluded to those. How did you build that culture? How did you build that developer lifestyle so that you could create these great customer experiences? And at the same time, the developers could express the creativity, could have the whole CICD, constant delivery, fluid experience and work the way that they want to work?
Tihomir Bajic (12:02):
First is, it has to be run by people. It's a contact support, so it has to be run by people who are in contact with the customer, who are in contact with the code base, people who are really living this lifestyle. And I find that too many leaders in engineering organizations aren't actually the developer, and they represent some sort of a proxy, and with levels of indirection, things may be lost.
Tihomir Bajic (12:32):
And so I've been, a number of times, very fortunate that I'm writing code, or I'm working with people directly who are writing a bunch of the code. And so we get to set some rules or we really get an opportunity to understand what matters to the customer and how best we can deliver it and how best we can use some of the tooling that continues to be ever more so wonderful when it comes to improving how quickly you can write test, deliver code today.
Yadin Porter de Leon (13:01):
Yeah. And do you see, as one of the challenges, you just mentioned leaders, people who are, whether in lines of business or whether the executives at the top, not fully understanding what that developer experience is or could be, or the perspective of the developer?
Yadin Porter de Leon (13:16):
Do you think that's a major challenge in companies really creating great customer experiences, really getting ideas faster to market, not understanding how developers work and what that developer lifestyle should be in order for them to accomplish the key business goals that they're trying to accomplish? Do you find that as a big challenge?
Tihomir Bajic (13:33):
Oh, absolutely. Think about going to a local artisanal shop, where people marvel at a person who is blowing glass and creating something beautiful, or marvel at a chocolatier. We admire their craft. And we ask these questions, you go to a vintner in a vineyard and they explained to you about all of the colors. And I don't know the jargon of wine as well, but they explained, they have their own.
Yadin Porter de Leon (14:03):
And the aroma and all of that stuff. Yes. Yeah.
Tihomir Bajic (14:04):
Yeah. Yeah. Or earthiness and all that. So they have their own jargon, each one of these crafts, it develops. And software, writing code, it's a craft. And you develop your own jargon, so you need to engage with people who are craftspeople, who are creating this valuable thing. You need to really study and understand and appreciate what they do. And what's needed for them to be successful in that craft.
Yadin Porter de Leon (14:32):
Do you think it'd be good for these executives instead of going wine tasting, maybe they could go code testing. They could be hearing some of these, who could really understand? Explain to them how to do pair coding. Instead of pairing wine with food, you could talk about pairing code or something.
Tihomir Bajic (14:47):
Yeah. Maybe. So pairing wine with food, you're pairing a developer. That'd be a funny one. For tonight's pairing, we have Q animation plus the codes. Yeah.
Yadin Porter de Leon (14:56):
That'd be great.
Tihomir Bajic (14:57):
No. That'd be actually right. But for third course today, we have a DevOps person who's going to explain.
Yadin Porter de Leon (15:02):
Oh, that's fabulous.
Tihomir Bajic (15:03):
Yeah. I love that. I think I'm going to use this one. So yeah. Absolutely. I'll give you an example from early on in my career, where I'm wearing one of those blackberries and it's the middle of the night, I get woken up and it's daylight savings time and we have a customer that's complaining. And it's costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, that there's a glitch in the software.
Tihomir Bajic (15:26):
So we rushed to hotfix this, to deploy the thing, all of that. I think it passes validation testing, I don't sleep for a while, like, "Okay. We have a war room assembled for this." Everything goes well, supposedly, or I think so. And then in the next daylight savings time, I get the same issue, "Come back again." Because what happened in there is nobody understood how this needed to be deployed and how this needed to be put out there.
Tihomir Bajic (15:53):
And so people who were making such a big deal out of this issue, which was a really big business issue for the customer, didn't really understand what it takes to deploy that hotfix, to really address the issue for the customer. And so I think if they were pairing with their DevOps person, if they were repairing at that point, maybe they would understand like, "Wait a second, just because this got to this point, it didn't get to the final point."
Tihomir Bajic (16:17):
And I think just that level of appreciation, if you are a company that really, again, depends on technological innovation and shipping value to the customer via some version of code, these are your crafts people that you want to cherish the most. And you want to understand them, you want to give them the tools they need, and you want them to tell you what really matters to improve their lifestyle. And not so it's frivolous, not more beers on tap, type of situation.
Yadin Porter de Leon (16:48):
Yeah. Extra pizza.
Tihomir Bajic (16:48):
Extra pizza. Yeah. Extra toppings. But no, it's how they do what they need to do faster, better, more reliably. And then you start questioning some of these things of, I remember in one of the companies we asked for double monitors. And then we had to show a study that showed that dual monitors were helping with productivity and so forth and so forth. It is an interesting example of like, "Great. So somebody trusted that." And so like, "Does it really work?" And when we were was shown that it really works, like, "Great. Just go do this for everybody."
Yadin Porter de Leon (17:18):
I think you touched on a few really critical pieces. One was pairing with people who can really support developers so that they're not having to worry about and how stuff is deployed. There's insights into how different ways in which they can work are more effective and can create some more powerful experiences, better experiences. But I want to go back to that idea of... Especially when you got up that great example of the hotfix. And how you need to have an understanding of how the code is deployed to really address the customer piece too.
Yadin Porter de Leon (17:48):
Do you feel like that, let's say the DevOps person or that site reliability engineer and the developer, the pairing of maybe the dev and the ops, do you feel like those two need to be in the same physical location in order to gel as a team from a culture? And especially from the experience you've had in starting these companies.
Yadin Porter de Leon (18:06):
Or do you feel like those connections, that culture can be created no matter where they are? And time zone, of course, matters too, but do you feel like that flexibility is not only not a deterrent for productivity, but it can be helpful and it can help people in that developer lifestyle and create even better results by having that flexible lifestyle?
Tihomir Bajic (18:26):
Yeah. I think context matters a lot. Context of what you're trying to build, customer context, context of your work environment. Whether you're collocated and sitting next to a PM and a QA and a DevOps or whoever else you need, or whether you're remote or partially remote. I think all those contexts, all of that matters. And out of that context, clever people that we all are can bear some really interesting solutions.
Tihomir Bajic (18:54):
And if you assume that you're always going to be able to turn around and talk to your dean, for whatever reason, you may know everything, or you may not be having a paper show, so to speak. But if you expect that your dean may be in a different office or work from home, or that tomorrow maybe someone else is going to join, then you're going to think about that differently. And I think that-
Yadin Porter de Leon (19:21):
Yeah. So context is important too. Which is good.
Tihomir Bajic (19:24):
... context matters. And so there's nothing comparing to culture is one in-person and one fully remote. So a while ago we had a really interesting example that was being publicly championed by 37signals slash Basecamp crew.
Yadin Porter de Leon (19:40):
What is 37signals? What do they do? What's that company?
Tihomir Bajic (19:43):
That is the company behind Basecamp.
Yadin Porter de Leon (19:44):
Basecamp.
Tihomir Bajic (19:44):
They are a collaboration software, task management, all those things they do for small teams and companies. And they had the intentionality behind working a certain way they did. There are hours in a week or being remote and how they were going about it. And that is a great example of fairly a while ago, that was over 15 years ago, I think, by now, when they really championed that, of something that existed and thrived, but context matters.
Tihomir Bajic (20:17):
And there are a number of really great successful companies that insist on being in-person for various reasons. And believe in that collocation as a table stakes feature in certain fixed office hours and things like that. And so I think when you start with such a strong founding cultural element, that sets the context that really matters.
Tihomir Bajic (20:41):
And then out of the context, you're going to have different solutions for how you peer review code, for example. It's very different if you're expected to do this in-person in a room, showing on a board on slide decks, your own code, where I had that experience, or you're actually doing this completely asynchronously using GitHub or GitLabs or whatever else.
Yadin Porter de Leon (21:05):
Yeah. No. That makes sense. And do you feel like it's not a binary choice, whether it's remote or whether it's in-person, like you said, it's context? And do you feel like it's really about... Two pieces actually. Do you feel like it's really about choice? And when I say choice, meaning individuals who need to work the right way in order to address the context.
Yadin Porter de Leon (21:23):
And another piece of that too is, are companies being hindered from a talent perspective because they're too rigid and require people to be in-person? Or do you feel like there's a mix of developers who want to work in different ways? And it's not just about, "Hey, we need everyone in the office." Or, "Hey, everyone should be remote." But it's just giving, as long as developers have choice, then companies can be competitive from a talent perspective.
Tihomir Bajic (21:47):
Yeah. Several really great topics in there. First is, prior to the pandemic and whatnot, there seems to be a quite bit of rigidity that you're either fully in the remote camp or fully in the in-person collocation camp. And I think what we've seen happen over the last couple of years is that you can be fluid and can switch and can survive and you can thrive.
Tihomir Bajic (22:16):
And there are a number of projects that, for example, I started in the last two years where I never met the people I started the projects with in-person. And I'd wonder... There's somebody recently in one of those projects said how we need to have an onsite or finally get together. And we were wondering, "But why at this point after two years of running a project?
Yadin Porter de Leon (22:37):
I love that. I love that question, because I don't hear people asking that question enough. People just casually say, "Well, we need an onset. We need to get together. We need to have an all hands. And we have a team building experience." And the really important question behind that is, "Why? What is the purpose? I have no problem, I love people. I love seeing them." But meeting with purpose I think is really critical, have a real card. So I love the fact that you asked the question.
Tihomir Bajic (23:03):
And so I think we moved away from cultures being fairly like, "These are our principles. These are our values. Put those up on a website and come here if you like this and don't come here if you don't like it." To being a bit more, I think we're seeing there seems to be some fluidity now, because things get questioned and they may not be appropriate anymore.
Tihomir Bajic (23:23):
And I think being competitive in this space, I think the companies that are more fluid, more accepting, are going to be more competitive. They're allowing maybe some smaller teams to self organize. And if they really want to have some time in-person and they have the budget for it, then why not? They can go for it. But it's not prerequisite, and it's not a set mandated thing that we must meet.
Yadin Porter de Leon (23:44):
I like the concept of self organizing too. Is that prevalent within with the developer community and companies? And do you see the efficacy in giving teams the option, at least, the choice to self organize? I don't know if you can give an example of maybe one of the companies that you've worked with or dealt with where you've seen that be really effective.
Tihomir Bajic (24:02):
Yeah. I think one way that they can think about self-organization is how far down the chain can you push budget authority or DRI authority, direct responsible individual authority? How far can you delegate that? And then the person that has that authority, that has the budget, that has the responsibility for the business, let them make the choice. Obviously within certain context.
Yadin Porter de Leon (24:26):
Yeah. Is there any companies that you've dealt with where you've seen where that's been effective? And what's some of the great outcomes of that could be or have been?
Tihomir Bajic (24:35):
Yeah. Well, at LTSE we try to champion that delegation of the budget line and the DRI responsibility. Because as I was talking at the beginning about being trilingual and having different customers, different customers and different problems require different solutions. And a solution for one set of a customer may not be appropriate for a different set of a customer, that isn't regulated elsewhere in the company and so forth.
Tihomir Bajic (25:01):
And so we tend to delegate, at LTSE, very strongly that budget line authority and the concept of DRI, direct responsible individual who gets to make that call as to whether or not that is appropriate or they need to meet in-person or those things when it comes to working remotely and working flexibly. Where you are letting the people who are the closest to the problem, who are closest to the customer, to make the call for what's appropriate.
Yadin Porter de Leon (25:28):
Nice. And I think that would be a really good point to talk about the kind of innovation that LTSE is doing. Give us a little sense too, I know you mentioned LTSE a few times, of what the company does and how some of the ways in which you've championed some of these developer experience, or whether it's remote, or hybrid, or self organizing. How they've helped enable some of the great innovation that LTSE is doing.
Tihomir Bajic (25:49):
LTSE stands for the Long-Term Stock Exchange. And this is a project that our founder, Eric Ries, talked about in his book, The Lean Startup, back in 2010, 2011, when it was published. The idea is to evolve capitalism as it is practiced today, so that it really becomes a manifestation of stakeholder capitalism of something that an ecosystem that helps companies run better in the long run for the benefit of all their stakeholders.
Tihomir Bajic (26:20):
And really supports the sort of innovation and the long-term projects that today's environment is not set up to successfully support. And so we are an ecosystem of solutions that help companies at every single stage of their life cycle, of their existence, from the founding garage table to fundraising, to growing, preparing to go public, and then finally operating in the public markets. We have solutions in all those stages, where we're helping companies make better choices for running their company and helping them get the right investors, helping them get the right employees and take care of those stakeholders they have.
Yadin Porter de Leon (27:00):
Excellent. And how do you feel like with the choices you've made with the developer lifestyle and some of the things that you've been championing? How do you feel like that's supported and advanced some of the great work you're doing and innovation you're doing with LTSE?
Tihomir Bajic (27:13):
So I'll give you a couple of, maybe three examples, of the different types of products that we've built to date. And then we'll talk about the developer lifestyle behind those. So one of the first products that we built was LTSE Equity. It used to be called Captable.io, and it helped early stage startups manage their cap table.
Tihomir Bajic (27:32):
We talked about four founders by founders, we were repeat founders ourselves that needed a better solution to manage their own cap tables, reward, their employees, stock incentives, option plans, fundraise planning, and scenario modeling, exit modeling, all of those things that start going on top of the cap table.
Tihomir Bajic (27:50):
And so there you're firmly in the Silicon Valley world, founders and investors and their lawyers are basically the three main stakeholders, and then you add employees as the companies grow. So that's like one set, and you can imagine that customer base and that sort of problem space has its interesting developer choices.
Tihomir Bajic (28:10):
Then we also, in parallel, built a national securities exchange. We started from first principles, we built our own matching engine, for example, that every day runs in our stock exchange. And eventually we listed the companies and all of those things. So we had to go through the SCC approval process for that. This is an existing ecosystem that you're joining, that is highly regulated. And whenever you turn on the news, people quote about how S&P 500 or such is doing.
Yadin Porter de Leon (28:41):
Yeah. Exactly.
Tihomir Bajic (28:43):
And so this permeates this need to be fast, the need to be correct. It's a very different set of challenges that you have and a very actual limited set of customers because you only have certain firms that allowed to place a trade in your exchange. And then if you think about the third customer that we have, these are the IROs or the CFOs of companies that are preparing to go public. IROs meaning, investor relations officers of companies. The folks who are doing the quarterly calls, earnings calls, or who are preparing a company to go public or running a public company.
Tihomir Bajic (29:18):
They have their own needs. They need to process, usually, reams of data for their comp groups, for how the market is doing, what is happening, what are the investors doing? Stock surveillance, all of those things. And so in there you're talking really now some interesting data problems when you're trying to analyze. And so those three different customers and we built software that helps all those three different customers requirements are completely different.
Tihomir Bajic (29:44):
The need for speed versus need for correctness, the need for probability, so to speak, the need for just being directionally in certain cases where you don't need to be completely correct. It just dictates everything from programming languages you select, from how you're running your software development life cycle to how frequently do you integrate, do you test, do you push, do you release? All of that is very, very different. Yet, successfully, we've had people who worked on all three of those that I just mentioned. And they're able to move from a project to a project and be successful. And so at the underlying principles we had to set them up in a certain way.
Yadin Porter de Leon (30:21):
What was the core key pieces to making sure those developers could move from project to project and be successful? What was key, whether it's the culture organization or capabilities? I don't know if you can speak to what those key pieces were.
Tihomir Bajic (30:35):
One of the core principles for us has been to really allow developers to select the stage appropriate, customer appropriate, context appropriate tooling and technologies. And that results in practice with having, in one place we're using GCP, in another place we're using AWS.
Tihomir Bajic (30:56):
And so some people would look at that and they would say like, "Oh my gosh, you're having a drift or you're having more complexity than you need to." In our case, we optimize for the right tool for the job, the right tool for that particular customer or for that particular solution.
Yadin Porter de Leon (31:11):
Nice. And that becomes part of that developer lifestyle, and based on skillset, and preference, and you organize around that product. Does that make it difficult for someone to move from project to project when you're selecting different tooling and different platforms for different products that you're putting into market?
Tihomir Bajic (31:30):
Definitely there is a learning curve, but I think that makes it a lot more interesting for developers who move.
Yadin Porter de Leon (31:36):
Oh, I like that. I like that. That's not a challenge, actually, that just turns a whole idea on its head. It's not a challenge, it's actually creating more value for the developers who are working on different platforms with different tooling. And not just stuck in the same platform, same tools, same life cycle, same process. I think that sounds like a much richer developer lifestyle.
Tihomir Bajic (31:57):
I hope so.
Yadin Porter de Leon (31:59):
And so do you find any other key pieces from a cultural perspective that help those developers move from project to project and be successful? It sounds like some of those pieces are choice, that's a big part of the culture, it's choice. Are there other cultural organizational or leadership pieces too that are really critical in making sure that you have that fluid success experience?
Tihomir Bajic (32:19):
Yeah. One of the core organizing principles for us is that we run the entire company on six week incremental cycles or twice a quarter. And we go through a planning exercise and fundamentals called pivot versus persevere cycles.
Yadin Porter de Leon (32:36):
Pivot versus persevere?
Tihomir Bajic (32:37):
Yeah. This is just Lean Startup methodology lingo.
Yadin Porter de Leon (32:41):
Yeah.
Tihomir Bajic (32:42):
And so formally, you get to then talk about like, "Well, are we doubling down? Are we proceeding on a project?" But when you start running the entire company on these twice a quarter checkpoints, let's called them check-ins, you get everyone accustomed to the point that, "Maybe beyond the next check-in point, we won't proceed with this project as this." And so when you start planning, you really think about, "How do I, in half a quarter or quarter leave this project in a good space, in a good place?"
Tihomir Bajic (33:16):
From maybe documentation perspective, or code coverage perspective, or just planning your work so you don't have so much work in progress, it takes you three more weeks to finish things. But that they are tied up as much as possible. And that organizing principle has really helped us move those resources from projects to a project based on need.
Tihomir Bajic (33:38):
And really helps us have a lot more rigor as developers when it comes to, "Why are you working on that project? Why is that still an issue? Is this the data pipeline thing you've been going on? Is it really worth it? Should we just pay for this and solve it another way?" Versus, well, it becomes a pet project and just no one wants to kill a project.
Yadin Porter de Leon (33:59):
Yeah. I think that's a good point, which I want to think, maybe as a final piece to the conversation. I'd liked what you were touching on and how you started to draw the line between this developer experience, the project fluidity, the context, the culture, organizational principles.
Yadin Porter de Leon (34:17):
And then how you can articulate that to others who may not have that understanding of the developer experience. They're not developers themselves, they're business people. They're great at what they do, but they don't understand what that developer experience is like. And how do you explain that to another technology leader to be able to really articulate the value? How do you tell the story of why this is really important?
Tihomir Bajic (34:39):
The way I like to talk about this question or this topic with other, let's call it leaders, not just technology leaders, different companies, is that, in today's world, there's pretty much nothing that software doesn't touch or some sort of automation cannot improve. And we've seen this LTSE as well, where you can imagine just how many non-technology people we have to run a regular exchange.
Tihomir Bajic (35:03):
And when you imbue product people, technologists into a cross-functional team that is tasked with solving a problem. And there are people there who have a positive professional deformation to look at how to automate something, how to remove drudgery out of the day-to-day work. You then start finding really interesting solutions. Where all of a sudden, somebody who's spending hours moving data from a data source into an Excel and running formula gets paired up with a developer. I'm getting back to pairings. Gets paired up with a developer.
Tihomir Bajic (35:42):
And they're like, "Well, there's a better way to do this. Let me just write some scripts for you that will do this and save you some time." And people often think like, "Oh, there's this department or this problem, it doesn't lend itself to automation or it doesn't lend itself to software." And in practice, I've actually never seen that be the case.
Tihomir Bajic (36:03):
If you truly, fundamentally allow people to self organize and to have the mix of folks in the room, whether it be a virtual or real, to work on a problem. And so that self organizing principle and having that cross-functional outlook, I think is fundamentally important. Then why you want to have engineers involved in things at the company and why you want to understand how it is that they go about their craft.
Yadin Porter de Leon (36:33):
I love that. I love how you've described it throughout the conversation as a craft, like a chocolatier or a glass blower, and people really need to have that appreciation for it. So I think I'll definitely advocate throughout organizations and dealings I have moving forward with people needing to go code testing instead of wine tasting. So you can understand the craft of the engineer and can get the artisanal cage free, free range, artisanal code experience with a coder out in the wild. I think that would be fabulous.
Yadin Porter de Leon (37:02):
So Tiho, this has been just a great conversation. I think there's a lot of really great takeaways from this. Why don't you share with the listeners as well, where people could learn more about what you're doing, what LTSE is doing. How can they find you online? What you're going to be up to? Are there any resources people can look to find those things out?
Tihomir Bajic (37:17):
Yeah. If you go to ltse.com, that is our main corporate website, there are plenty of resources and links to what we do. I'm very active on my LinkedIn as well. So you can link that as Tiho Baj at LinkedIn, and I post a lot about some of the problems I run into and solutions. Everything from working with startups, to working with engineering teams.
Yadin Porter de Leon (37:44):
That's fabulous Tiho. Well, I appreciate the conversation. And thank you for joining the CIO Exchange Podcast.
Tihomir Bajic (37:49):
Thank you, Yadin, for having me.
Yadin Porter de Leon (37:51):
Thank you for listening to this latest episode. Please consider subscribing to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more insights from technology leaders as well as global research on key topics, visit vmware.com/cio.