Beyond The Code

Maulik Sailor (00:02.467)
Hey, Khanda, how are you doing, man?

Kandarp Desai (00:05.678)
Hey Maulik, good to see you man. Things are going well, how about you?

Maulik Sailor (00:10.243)
Yeah, not bad, not bad. Just busy hosting all these podcasts and trying to scale our platform. But hey man, good to be connected with you after a long time. I know that we belong to the same hometown, right? And after a long many years, we got reconnected through a common friend. So I'm more excited to know about your background. What are you up to nowadays? And then tell me your story.

Kandarp Desai (00:31.438)
That's right.

Kandarp Desai (00:37.838)
Yeah, sure, absolutely. So let me start by introducing myself. My name is Khandav Desai. I work at a company called Xatly. I work at the SVP of engineering at Xatly. I've been at Xatly for quite a while, played a different role at Xatly. But I started my career as a hardware engineer back in Cisco. And right after that, I played a part in engineering roles at a couple of startups.

went into the real -time bidding ad platform. So I was like working as an engineer in ads. And then I, right after that, I switched to the B2B side, right? Which is the building the enterprise, you know, enterprise software. And since then I've been within XATLY. Right now, I'm based out of Bay Area and you know, we have a team in offices all across the world.

If you don't know exactly, we provide a platform and a solution to optimize and innovate your entire end -to -end revenue life cycle. So starting from the sales pipeline management, to the forecast, to the planning, to the compensation and entire optimization of it. So it's an end -to -end revenue management life cycle.

Maulik Sailor (02:00.899)
That's pretty interesting man. Tell me about your transition from hardware to software. Tell me more about that. How did you find programming hardware?

Kandarp Desai (02:08.846)
So, yeah.

Kandarp Desai (02:14.862)
Yeah, so, you know, I started at Cisco back in the days and, you know, I was working in, you know, 7000 series switch. The primary coding language was C. I had a great mentors there. So I was fortunate to have those mentors. But after some time staying there, what I realized is,

the way things works in hardware, you do the build, you process things, you do the debugging, it requires a different set of mindset, it requires different set of skill sets. And it defines, you know, quite different set of patients because, you know, working with hardware, it's not easy. And I felt that this is, you know, not a lot for me. Also, you know, I wanted to dabble into the startup world, but working at Cisco.

gives a different set of accomplishments. And I've always wanted to dabble into a startup world. So I started to talk to a few friends and stumble upon the opportunity for the company we're building the ad platform. And that's how I got introduced into a software world.

Maulik Sailor (03:26.307)
Pretty interesting, man, pretty interesting. I want to sidestep a little bit more, right? So, you know, when I've been involved in a startup for, I don't know, almost 15 years now, you know, involved in all sorts of startups, I've done one hardware startup as well, didn't really go very well. But, you know, I've been involved in that. And generally, you know, even if you read visee like Mantra, they...

Kandarp Desai (03:32.206)
Sure.

Maulik Sailor (03:55.331)
They call it like a tar... I think is it a tar pit idea, if I remember the terminology correctly. But generally they don't invest into a hardware startup, right? Difficult to scale, difficult to sustain, very difficult to protect the IP and so on. But at the same time, we've seen some really good startup come out in the hardware space like Ring, acquired by Amazon. The iRobot, the vacuum cleaners, right?

Kandarp Desai (04:01.166)
Mm -hmm.

Maulik Sailor (04:23.459)
Now, of course, you have plenty of knockoffs out there, but it's a good combination of a hardware and a software, the whole indoor navigation software behind that. It was an amazing idea and is one of the most successful hardware companies as well. So what's your take on that? What do you think? Is hardware startup a bad idea or is it a good idea?

Kandarp Desai (04:48.014)
Yeah, I don't think it's when we call a bad or good idea, I don't think it's a bad idea. It's just require a different DNA to build a hardware startup because it comes with a, within software, you can build a prototype within like a week now or less than a week if you want with an AI and you can pitch your idea to the investors, right? Versus on hardware, it starts with the actual designing of it, trying to achieve design and you have to find...

and you'll first convince someone to invest because it's a long -term game. It's not like you started to see the customer from day one. Of course, that has been changing in a recent landscape with the software modules, where they build software modules and try to do some POC on it and commoditizing some of the smaller hardware. We are seeing that a lot. But in general, it's...

It's a different mindset, different DNA, which requires you to build a hardware startup, which is why you see that there's less hardware startup compared to the software. To give an example, if you are building, let's say, Nvidia chips, and if you're using the CUDA, which is the software module on our GPUs, you can build like 10 different products on top of it. But there's only one Nvidia, with actually providing that CUDA.

So we can build tens and hundreds of startups on it. But it also shows how powerful the whole hardware infrastructure is and how sticky it is. Once you find your niche, once you find what you want to do, and you are on it, you will find a success eventually. The company, ARM, is a great example. I mean, NVIDIA tried to acquire them some time ago.

But unfortunately, it didn't go through. But this is a great example where ARM tried to build something, something which is complementing NVIDIA. And it took some time to establish, it took some time to get some customers on it. What's the software where you can start signing up the customers and generate the revenue within a pretty short amount of time. So that's, I feel, it's a major difference.

Maulik Sailor (07:07.907)
Yeah, great that you mentioned one of our customer like Arm is actually one of our clients, is one of our long standing client. We have been working with them for many years. So we as a company are very familiar with not really the hardware design, but like the software that goes behind that in terms of designing the hardware. And, you know, we are quite proud. We are, we are a very small team.

Kandarp Desai (07:11.69)
Okay.

Maulik Sailor (07:33.891)
But at the same time, we are working with Arm, which is one of the largest chipmaker in the world now. The Arm architecture is pretty much everywhere. And I'm really proud of my team, who works very closely with them on some really cool products. I can't really tell you too much about it, but some really cool products that we work with them, which is also used by their customers, like companies like Arm.

Kandarp Desai (07:53.326)
Yeah.

Kandarp Desai (08:02.542)
That's right.

Maulik Sailor (08:02.699)
Samsung, Google, everybody's using the product that my team designed and built and still support. So that's a story, a really proud story. But we can't talk too much. OK, I can talk passively, but can't really tell you what the project is about. And in a way, it's kind of a growing company. You want to talk about your achievements. And this is something that we can talk, but not too much. Right. Anyways, moving on from that.

Kandarp Desai (08:09.198)
That's great.

Maulik Sailor (08:32.387)
In your role, what's your day -to -day role like currently? What are you involved in?

Kandarp Desai (08:38.894)
That's a good question. So I run the engineering and operations for the XATLY and what does it really mean, right? So the day -to -day role is basically to involve wide variety in other spectrums, starting from working with my team on designing the software all the way till execution and deployment. But when you are in the leadership role, it starts with the strategic thinking, starting with...

you know, thinking how you want to design your roadmap, how you want to help your customer, how you balance your stake against your technical depth, right? How you want to, you know, figure out the innovation, right? So the balancing the customer ask versus the innovation, as well as, you know, technical depth, that's going to be a big challenge when you're designing any roadmap. So it started to start to thinking of it, then, you know, you design a roadmap, you start executing on it.

And we generally do like a yearly roadmap design, but we are quite agile in terms of how we execute that roadmap. So every three months, we review the roadmap and we figure out what are the changes that we are seeing in the market? Do we need to adjust? Do we need to make some changes? What we decided three months, six months, 12 months ago. And we make those smaller adjustments. So you can think about pulling the levers.

according to the market needs, according to what we are hearing from customers and execute on it. So that's pretty much the way the year starts and the year end in terms of the execution of the product.

Maulik Sailor (10:22.179)
That's pretty solid, right? Look, I work as a product manager as well and designing roadmap or prioritizing your roadmap, it's quite challenging, especially in a startup world, your roadmap keeps on changing like every day. Everything is a priority. And yeah, this must be delivered tomorrow. It's our number one priority. And the next day is changed. Sorry, you know what? That's no longer the priority. Something else has come up. And you're continuously juggling.

What is this stuff you need to deliver? And I've done both like a corporate road, like product management and startup product management as well. And there's a lot of good frameworks out there which helps you with defining your roadmap or managing your roadmap, running experiment and stuff like that. But I believe, even my own experiences.

I think a lot of those frameworks kind of applies to product which is already there in the market, which is a little bit mature. And when you're right at the beginning, when you don't really know how your roadmap is going to go or what strategy is going to happen, you have a vision, but you still don't know how you're going to get there. You have an idea of what your customer or the problem statement is.

but you're still trying to prove whether that's really the problem, that really is the solution, right? You know, you go with an assumption, the customer does completely different thing than what you assumed the problem and the solution would be. They like the solution, but they use the solution in a different context than what you think. And, you know, you can't really be that's too much, especially if you are in a B2B product space where the in the beginning, you know, I'm talking pre -series A or seed state startup, right?

where you don't have a lot of users or customers to really experiment. Even if you experiment, the data set is so small to make any probabilistic sense out of it. The frameworks that you apply on a large scale. Let's say you're trying to optimize ABZ, like two journeys, trying to run an AB test. If you have millions of users, you can easily do that. What do you do when you are having like tens of users, right? Or not even tens, single digit.

Maulik Sailor (12:43.523)
users, right? So I found that navigating that part really challenging in the early stage environment.

Kandarp Desai (12:49.55)
Yeah. No, absolutely. I think we're talking about the product market fit when you're trying to find the product market fit. And it's initial days is always hard, right? And, you know, as, you know, our current president used to always say that if Henry Ford would have asked his customer what they want, they would have said, I want a pasta horses, right? Instead of like, so it would not have built a car, would have built a pasta horses. So, yeah.

Maulik Sailor (13:11.107)
Correct.

Maulik Sailor (13:15.907)
Yeah, so don't you think, as a product manager, we are always taught on listening to your customers, always listen to what your customer needs, try to solve for your customers problem. Don't you think then it's like a little bit of a flawed advice?

Kandarp Desai (13:30.07)
Well, you know again, I've worked closely with my peers on the product side and so you know What I have learned from them is it's always a right makes a balance right within and in the situation You cannot have one size fits all for every time you're doing the things right? what I mean by that is let's say if you are a building, you know, if you have an established product and if you're building the

product which is adjusting to that product, which is the adjusting market, I think that gives a different set of framework. Versus if you are trying to build something which doesn't have a product market fit, which you're trying to find a product market fit. So that requires different thinking where you have to go with your gut feeling more and somewhat research versus, let's say, if you're building a product in the...

you know, SPM space, sales performance management space, there are very, you know, standard set of rules that, you know, if I'll go against, right, I'll talk to my customer, what are they looking for? I know the revenue management life cycle. And so I know certain things. I know how to navigate and create sort of a closed product market, right? Versus if I'm building a startup, which, you know, which is completely new idea, hasn't been explored. And if I'm going after one niche,

then I have to follow a different set of rules. So if I'm creating a market versus market already exists, like your TAM already exists, I have to follow a different framework. And you have to keep reiterating on it. And you ask about overall leadership style earlier too. And what I always feel is you have to lead by examples. If you're, whenever you're building, regardless of which stage of company you are in, you have to develop these strategic thinking.

you develop the build high IQ, EQ team, right? The IQ is given, right? And one of my mentors always talked about, you will find people who are pretty smart, right? But that's not enough when you are building the team. You need to find people who can trust each other, right? The team help is something extremely important when you're building the team, when you're building a product, right? You need to have a healthy team because you can hire always right set of folks.

Kandarp Desai (15:51.47)
who have a great IQ, but can you find people who have a great EQ, right? Which is empathy, self -awareness, right? Working with a trust, with a commitment. And that is the main factor when, you know, what I call building any product. So like building any product, I would start with the people, right? You need the right set of people. Yeah.

Maulik Sailor (16:12.259)
So that's what I was going to ask you as well, that, you know, regardless of what you're building, you got to have a great team behind that, right? How do you go about finding or building a great team, you know?

Kandarp Desai (16:17.902)
Right. Right. Right.

Kandarp Desai (16:24.046)
Yeah, no, that's a great question. So of course, the technical ability of the team, what you are trying to hire, that's like a table state, right? So you go through a standard question, coding question. And the other thing is that will give you some idea how good of an engineer or someone who you're looking for is in that technical expertise, right?

But the next set of things which you always want to look for is EQ, as I mentioned. You need to ask yourself, is this person is going to lift the rest of my team member, or is this person is going to diminish the rest of the team member? I would rather have someone who knows 80 % of the technical skills, but someone with a great EQ who can lift.

the entire team. It doesn't have to be like, you know, the smartest person in the room, right? As far as the person knows what we're trying to do, he gets it, right? Here she gets it, what we're trying to do and, you know, commit to it. Who has a great empathy, states of awareness, who has, you know, who has an ability to reinvent themselves, challenge themselves, right? And make sure the people who are surrounded have an equal stake and trust amongst them.

If that is getting created, right? And that would be second factor, which I feel I have to consider in the hiring, right? If I don't consider it, then it's going to be, I won't be able to, I will be able to build maybe a small team, but then when it comes to scaling, I won't be able to scale my company because you can build a POC, you can build like, you know, initial 10, 15 customer, but do you want to build...

Maulik Sailor (18:10.499)
Yeah, so.

Kandarp Desai (18:17.678)
of company that can sustain for 10 years and that's this set of members we do.

Maulik Sailor (18:23.459)
Yeah, look, I agree with you that when you're trying to build a team, it's not an easy task. Technical skills, I think, is an easier part to identify and test for. But for the rest of the things like their soft skills, their behaviors, their ways of working and all, it's not an easy one to evaluate. And frankly, in my opinion, I just find this whole recruitment useless, to be honest, outdated.

Kandarp Desai (18:30.094)
Bye.

Maulik Sailor (18:51.811)
You know, it's very reactive process. You create a jobs post, you know, you get tons of CVs, hundreds, 200s, you know, your HR team spends, I don't know, months, weeks trying to filter everything. And there's always some interviews, you then ask them to do coding, technical test, whatever. You then go through interview, you know, multiple rounds of interviews, whatever. And then you finally make an offer. And then the candidate may say, yeah, sorry, but I'm, I take another job, you know.

or even when they accept the role, they may come on the floor and may not fit with your team. You think that they will, but they don't. Or they may have conflict with some of your team members and creates more friction in your existing team. For good or bad, I don't know, but they might create friction. And it's a continuous process, right? So I find that...

like whole journey really, really frustrating. And to be honest, I really want to change and disrupt that with our platform that we are working towards, hopefully. I don't know whether we'll get there or not. But just building more on that, in your organization or in your day -to -day setup, what does your process look like? Apart from the user, the civil filtering and all, what is the one thing that you do differently?

Kandarp Desai (20:03.086)
Sure.

Maulik Sailor (20:19.139)
than maybe somebody else.

Kandarp Desai (20:21.902)
Yeah. So exactly, we have a mantra of care, what we call. So customer focused accountability, respect and excellence. That's like our four, what we call a motto of the company, what we call core values of the company, right? So once a candidate pass the basic things about the tech skills, the soft skills and all those things, the hiring manager and HR team,

look for that core values, right? They will try to figure out if this person is a culture fit or not, right? And that's when we rank and when we give a score to like each and every individual attribute, this core value comes at the center of everything, right? So we have done the interviews, we have candidates who are like super smart, but we're not fitting the core values.

Right. So my team and HR decided we are not going to make an offer to this person, regardless of how smart, you know, this person is. Right. Because it's not, it's not culture. It's not healthy for us. It's not healthy for them to, because it's not something, you know, we are doing a, we are not doing a justice to them as well. Whoever is going to join our company because you know, if they got to leave three months, it's a waste of time for them. It's a waste of time for us. So when you ask about distinction, what you do is.

So culture fit is one of the most important factor we consider in the hiring. And when we hire someone during the last round, the HR and hiring manager, that's their focus. They don't ask any technical questions. They just know more about that background, what they have been through in their life, what kind of challenges they have been through, right? And it's not job related about some of the personal things that they can share.

And that tells you a lot about a candidate, you know, how much hustle they have to do or what kind of challenges they faced recently, right? And how they overcome those or they fail, right? Someone who is actually ready to accept that, you know, I had a X, Y, and Z challenges and like I tried this X way, it didn't work, right? But it's a personal life. I took this approach and so it gives you that, you know, this person is a culture fit or not.

Maulik Sailor (22:41.475)
Okay, cool.

Like just trying to dwell more onto that. As companies become more product -led, more agile in their product delivery, do you think there's a role for this long -term permanent employment anymore? Because your requirements change, your priorities change. What you need today may not be relevant in six months or 12 months time, the skills you need today. Also, the talent.

Maybe UK and US markets are different, but in the UK, the average tenure of a permanent employee is less than 18 months within tech. So then you will be questioning, do I really need to think about long -term and hire somebody for long -term? So I just need to focus more on my immediate priorities. How can I get the immediate list of work completed as quickly, as efficiently as possible, and focus on that part? What's your opinion on that?

Kandarp Desai (23:43.758)
Great question. I think you're talking mainly about, okay, if a short -term success is a long -term. And I strongly believe that regardless of the tenure of the company or someone, how senior he or she or they are, I would always look for someone with the right attitude. Doesn't matter if that candidate is gonna stay with me for six months or 60 years or six years, right?

Because as I mentioned, team health is something extremely important for me. And if I don't have team health, I can just break my company within three months. Because one bad seed can just spoil the entire corpse, as you know. And it's not like that seed is just, it won't give you fruit. It just doesn't work with the other seed. It needs to grow in the isolation.

it cannot grow with the other seeds, right? And that's the analogy I always use, like if this one new seed, right, can excel and can help all of my other seeds, and all the seeds can also easily adopt a new seed. Absolutely, that's what I look for, right? Regardless of their tenure. And you brought an interesting point about someone in a long in the job. And I've been with, this is my longest tenure right now, exactly. But,

One of the things that I learned early in my career and thanks to my mentor at the various companies is you have to keep reinventing yourself according to the industry trend. Like to give an example, I started as a hardware engineer, went to an adge business, then went to a software, an enterprise software. I started with an SMB business, then I learned the data platform because a few years ago, the big data was big, right? It was a big thing.

Then I moved from there to management, right? And then now this whole AI and GenAI and LMS becomes so I'm learning that. So you have to keep reinventing yourself. And that is the another attribute I think you should look for in a candidate where is this candidate is ready to reinvent themselves, right? At a certain interval of time. And you can definitely see either it doesn't matter if it's a fresh graduate of college or someone who's a 20 years experience, right?

Kandarp Desai (26:08.174)
when you talk to them, you will be able to figure out if this person is reinventing themselves or not. And as far as they are reinventing, it doesn't matter if this person is for three years, four years, 15 years, 20 years at the same company, because they have been reinventing themselves for a while. I mean, I give an example. I met someone who was at the IBM for a long time, right? But that leader has been reinventing himself for so long.

right, that now he's running the entire, you know, that, you know, IBM innovation lab. But again, he, you know, he didn't started with, with an attitude that I'm going to be here for 15 years or 20 years, right? He just say, okay, I just want to do something new, right? And he's somehow able to find those opportunities. So going back to a question about being a long tenure, it's, it's always about, you know, right attitude and right EQ and team health for me.

Maulik Sailor (27:06.595)
Yeah, so I tend to agree, right? It's always about finding the right hire, not about, you know, the contract, whether it's a short term or long term, because, you know, again, I've seen a lot of times you want to hire somebody, but that person does not want to come on a permanent basis or doesn't want to do contract. Then you let go of that person just because he wants a different paperwork, in my opinion, right?

So, and I've seen at times the HR team create so many barriers. You want to hire somebody and they're, yeah, but, you know, it's not attend one of the top schools, you know, or did not go to this particular, you know, academy or whatever, you know, it doesn't matter. I think this person is right for my team. I want as an HR to help me out, hire this person however we can not create barriers in doing so. Right.

Anyways, moving on a bit, how many people do you currently manage, line manager in the year?

Kandarp Desai (28:06.158)
So yeah, so I have close to 250 people in my team. Yeah.

Maulik Sailor (28:12.995)
wow. That's pretty good. So how do you manage them? I'm sure you cannot have one -on -one with every 250. So how do you do that? What's your leadership style there?

Kandarp Desai (28:20.462)
Sure. Yeah.

So there are various aspects of leadership I follow and again as I said, I keep experimenting those things, keep changing, reinventing their leadership style. But the number one thing I start with, you know, led by example, you know, I need to make sure that I want to be the change, you know, if I want to do some changes in my team, I want to, I have to be that change, right? So be the change you want to see in the world as that's number one thing for me.

If I'm not doing it, then I cannot ask them to do the same thing. The second piece is the safe and trusted culture, tolerance to failure. And trust is something that goes back to the team health. And as a matter of fact, we literally talked yesterday amongst some of the leaders about how do you cultivate the trust. Trust is a base for everything in your team. My leaders are feeling capable enough.

to bring up anything across themselves. So it starts with that. Once you have accomplished that, then it goes to accountability and commitment, because it comes automatically. The third is what I would call what I encourage is diverse experience. I strongly feel that some sort of it doesn't have to be like a really strong diversity.

being talked about right now. It just, you need a diverse opinions and that comes from a diverse culture, right? So that's a key. I should be able to, you know, straight my vision clearly, you know, ability to strategize and communicate with my team to my set of leaders so that when the message reaches to each and every person in my org, it's a single message, right? It's not diluted between them.

Kandarp Desai (30:18.062)
Set up measurable goals for them because you know, if I'm not setting a measurable goal in a definite timeline My team will be lost because they don't know what to do. Right if I'm not setting up a right goals Not giving them a clear direction I won't be able to manage So and repeat this like you'll keep repeating this because sometimes you know, I'm not perfect either. Right? So if I don't repeat the things is easy to get things leaked

right? And again, foster the team health. So the concept of team health is something number one, right? And it starts from there, you know, from my team all the way to the, you know, individual contributor level. So that's been all my overall my leadership style in terms of how I work with my teams. And, you know, I help them to grow. As a result, I grow as well.

Maulik Sailor (31:18.435)
Wonderful man. I have a question, right? Like, I've been mainly a product manager, right? And then I've been a technical, you know, I can program and stuff, but I have been mainly part of product management and kind of doing dual role product and tech leader. And I have been part of a lot of communities within product management, at least in the UK. I used to run my own community as well.

which I'm not doing anymore. Are you familiar with communities in your space, you know, tech leaders and all?

Kandarp Desai (31:56.302)
Yeah, yeah, we got like in Vigna Valley, it's like so many communities. It's like, it's really hard to keep track of which one you want to attend is, you know, pre -COVID. I think we are already there now is, you know, pre -COVID era, there was like always 10 events different happening in the Bay Area. Like there's always something, right? Either in the SF, either in the Palo Alto, Redwood City, like, you know, all the Mountain View, all the area, there's something that's going on.

And it's really hard to keep track of all this community, but yes, I'm a part of this community. I'm a part of one of the local leadership community, especially on the engineering side, who focuses on the efficiency and productivity and overall, how do you create a much larger innovation with the team you have. So I'm part of the community, which is what you call an angel investing syndicate.

where it has multiple groups, startup founders, like some of the great people in that community, shares the idea about latest trends, their learnings. Because I think that's, when you talk about the community, without that community and connection, you can't grow. And that's one of the things I would say to anyone who's listening to this podcast is like, without network, you won't be able to go. So you have to go out network.

And follow up like you meet someone and I don't do a good job at that either. Right. I mean, but I'm, I'm still always trying to improve where if, if I met someone, let's say I met you today and like, I within three months to follow up with them, right. Do not hesitate to ask them for help. They are like what I've seen more like is like in this tech community, majority of the folks leaders and they will contribute or they're eager to help. The eager to share the knowledge that eager to see if.

how they can grow or they can help you in any ways. And I've been quite fortunate to have good coworkers in my career, fortunate to have good mentors, friends in my career, but that doesn't happen overnight. As you mentioned, then yeah. Right.

Maulik Sailor (34:06.435)
Yeah, I agree. It takes ages to build the network. You know, one thing again, there is a cultural difference here. You know, I spent 20 years in London now in the UK and, you know, Brits or people, generally British culture is very tightly, you know, people are not open in asking for help. You know, they suffer in silence, you know, but whenever I come to Bay Area or visit the US,

It's always the other way around. I become so chatty. I talk to random people, ask random stuff, and always have some crazy conversations. Whereas here, it's like, you need to be careful what you ask for. You might just offend somebody by saying something or it does not come out in the right tone and so on. I certainly miss that particular part of networking.

Kandarp Desai (34:53.326)
Okay.

Kandarp Desai (34:59.63)
All right.

Maulik Sailor (35:05.987)
in the US. Anyways, any other tips you can give?

Kandarp Desai (35:09.39)
Yeah, no, no, as a matter of fact, like, you know, I worked in India for two and a half years, stayed there in the bank lord. And I've seen even like, even one step forward in India, like, you know, people, the engineers, the founders are not hesitant to send you a WhatsApp message. It doesn't matter if you're running like, you know, $200 million company, right? Or a billion dollar company. And the founders there are also like, you know, especially in India, they are so eager, like they'll, they'll reply.

to your text messages. You reply like if you met them, let's say at the conference and if you, they are not hesitant to give their numbers and like, and you will get replies for them, which is quite fascinating, honestly, to me that, okay, you know, they care that someone they met randomly and they're asking question, there'll be help because what I feel, well, like is no one asked. I mean, everyone is shy enough.

to ask this question. Should I ask, let's say Maulik is running a billion dollar company, how would he feel if I send him text message, right? But do not, just take a leap, leap of faith, right? Send Maulik a message. I'm pretty sure at some point, like he's gonna see and say, well, you know what, let me just see, like who is this guy, who is this girl that I met, right? And that's how you initiate the connection.

Maulik Sailor (36:27.331)
Cool, cool, right? Just talking about the current trends that we are seeing, AI is going crazy in the industry. Everybody's talking about AI in every particular segment that you can think about. What are you doing? Are there any AI tools you're leveraging within your engineering practices?

Kandarp Desai (36:52.046)
Yeah, I think, you know, what I call hype is real, right? And, you know, I've experienced that firsthand, not just using building some of the offering that it's coming out for customers. But you're right, it's impacting lives. You know, what I feel is much more positive way. And I always take, when it comes to technology, I'm a glass half full guy, right?

I always take this as a positive side of the tech. Of course, it's got a negative side of the tech, but I don't really focus on it. I'm conscious. I learn what those negative sides are, but I'm not too much focused on it. Now, we're going back to AI. What I find in AI and all the gen AI trends that we're looking at is it has becoming more of a natural extension to the human race. This is what I call is, how do you augment yourself?

It's sort of your second brain. Think about like, you know, that you're given a single brain, but what if you can have like a few more, right? Where you can do things much faster. Because a brain and knowledge is something which is distinguish the human race from all other races, right? And this is another brain that somehow we have created. And how do we...

augment ourselves with that, it's up to us. On a day -to -day life, I use tools which help me to increase my productivity in a lot more manner, just like, of course, chat, ZPT, for the most famous, absolutely. Like, tech, if you're not using that, now, by now, you're outdated. And I think most important is, like, some of the tools are so powerful that you just need to learn how to use it, right? And that's it.

And that becomes, you know, does your job really fast, right? You know, day to day usage on the co -pilot on the Microsoft side, absolutely like, you know, hands down, some of the, you know, some of the AI, Google has came out in terms of helping you to manage your emails and being more productive. That's really great. The companies are rolling out, you know, the vendors that we use, right? And they're rolling out their AI offerings and those offerings are really real. So.

Kandarp Desai (39:13.262)
I feel that it's definitely changing the game. One of the other innovations that I find it, which I think is overlooked because of OpenAI, is the whole AR VR world, and its application of it. And AI, because of OpenAI and NVIDIA, this AR and VR is getting overshadowed by this whole AI stuff. But I've used some of the products, I've tried it.

you know, read the news, how it's changing the, you know, the whole landscape of the education field, the medical field, the way, you know, you interact someone with remotely, it's fascinating. It's just, it's just amazing, right? So I think in the long term, you know, if you're tried the new, the Apple headsets and the experience you see, the promises it has,

it's gonna change the thing significantly. It's gonna take some time, of course, to adopt, right? I'll give you an example. I was on a rafting day with my son, and there was another parent, like, was wearing this, you know, META glasses, right? And she was taking pictures, she was taking videos on through it. She was like doing those things. By the time we are done with the trip,

She already sent all the videos, pictures and everything using those glasses. I was like, what is this? this is a meta glass. So I think these are the day -to -day use things using VR. It's going to take some time to be a mainstream, but when it will be and you combine that with this AI, it's definitely going to change the world, how we live day -to -day life, how the kids are learning in the school, how can they augment themselves. It's just fascinating. I think for...

kids who are listening to this podcast, your future is absolutely bright. Be positive, right? Adopt the technology in the right manner and you're going to be golden.

Maulik Sailor (41:13.603)
What are the some of the tools you would recommend to programmers, software developers that they leverage in their day -to -day jobs?

Kandarp Desai (41:22.894)
great. So in my team, a lot of my team members use GitHub Copilot, which is the code prompting tool. It's been really, really nice. You know, it's been really great success writing suggestions while you're writing the code. It has a great ability to give you suggestions on the, what I call the writing unit test, right?

It has an ability to actually create the explanation of your code, right? So when someone is onboarding new, they can learn onboard really fast. So GitHub Copilot, definitely one of them. Someone who's a not native English speaker, you know, communicating with your team, of course, Google has a free version, but I would say Grammarly also is a really good tool, which will help you.

to narrate your idea if you're not a natural native English speaker. Or even like if you're communicating in different languages, it has an ability to do those things. Of course, Microsoft Co -Pilot, if you're a Microsoft fan, that's definitely something you should explore using it. If you are dabbling into the JNI world, this tool called Po, P -O -E, right?

I like the tool because what it does, it gives you ability to run your LLM models across all the providers. It means you can try Anthropic, you can try OpenAI, you can try Mistral, right? You can try all those things in a single tool. And you don't have to go to a website and do those things. It has a keys associated with. So you can see how each and every model is performing. So if you are someone who's learning, definitely, you know, I would...

I would recommend that. And those are the, I would say, main tools that I use in day -to -day use. Of course, there are some other vendors that we work with who has a great tool on Infosec side, but I would call, I'll keep it to productivity and efficiency improvement for now.

Maulik Sailor (43:37.123)
All right, I think it's about time that we start wrapping up this conversation. I think otherwise it will keep on going for hours. So we may start wrapping this one up. But before we end, there are a few questions that we ask each of our guests that appear on our podcast. And I would love to ask you those questions to you as well. So if you're ready, what would you...

Kandarp Desai (43:43.854)
Yes.

Kandarp Desai (43:49.582)
Yeah.

Maulik Sailor (44:06.755)
advise new graduates and junior programmers coming out for them to build their career over the next 10 years.

Kandarp Desai (44:16.43)
Good question. I wish I had a magic wand and I can just tell you what those are, right? But there are a few things that has worked for centuries. And I'll just give you those, right? One of them is master the fundamentals, right? Doesn't matter which is you are in a tech space, you are in a finance space, you're in sports. Like if you master your fundamentals, you can keep up with...

any changes that's coming to your future and you will excel. The second piece I would say, define success, right? What success is for you? Because success is a different, you know, for every single individual. Like, do not look at someone else and make their success as your success, right? See what success is like, what satisfy you as a successful person, right? If you don't know, find mentor and find help.

But that's going to be the key. The third, which I said in my podcast earlier, be positive. Take always class half full approach because it's going to help you in long term. It might not help you in short term in some ways, but it will help you in short term. Continuous learning, just learn continuously. It doesn't matter which stage in life you are, because always learning. I learn a lot from my kids. So it's just...

you can learn from each and every day interaction to life in anyone. Network, network, network, that's your like make more connection in this remote hybrid virtual world, where you're meeting less and less people and doing this remotely, it's really hard to create those connections, but please do that. And change is the only constant I would say for you. If you adopt that, change is only constant.

you can keep reinventing yourself. And last and least, which is the most important, community. Do not forget to give back to the community. It doesn't mean that you have to donate money or like you have to work in Kenya or somewhere for a month, right? It can be as simple as being kind on your day to day life, you know, helping a kid to do, you know, learn coding, like just anything. But please do not forget to give back to community.

Maulik Sailor (46:40.611)
Okay, great. Who is the top individual, living or dead, that motivated you the most in your life?

Kandarp Desai (46:53.262)
great question. Most motivated person. I have two of them, actually. One as growing up, I was a big cricket fan, as you can imagine. So what they call a god of cricket, his name is Sachin Tendulkar. He was my role model. And this goes back to mastering fundamentals, right? He talks about being fundamental.

how you can master fundamentals and become great and reinvent yourself. The guy has a career more than 20 years. You cannot be in that business if you don't reinvent yourself as a sportsman. The second I call, which is the Bill Gates. He's one of the most, I would call a motivational person for me, to how he started something with his dream to put a computer.

in each and every home, right? And he pivoted them from, you know, curing malaria, curing folio in the entire world, because what I feel is he has given a vision. So his vision is what I'm inspiring me. Like he has a vision to impact billions of lives, not thousands of millions, right? And that is quite motivating.

Maulik Sailor (48:13.891)
Yeah.

Now, I totally agree. I think personally, I also am a big fan of Bill Gates. Not a lot of people are a fan of Bill Gates and Windows in general, but ignoring a few bits, I think as an individual, he's amazing. He's really good. And also about Sachin, I'm not a cricket fan. I'm an unusual Indian who does not follow cricket. But I watched a documentary about Sachin.

Kandarp Desai (48:39.726)
Yeah.

Maulik Sailor (48:46.819)
And I figured out, there's one thing he mentioned in the documentary, he mostly was never bowled out, but whenever he got bowled out, he would practice the same bowl and the shot like a thousand times, ten thousand times, a million times until he's sure that he will not get bowled out again on the same delivery. And for that, you need the focus.

playing the same sort for the next five days, 10 days continuously. It's difficult, man. It's really, really difficult.

Kandarp Desai (49:24.174)
Yeah, it is. It is. And again, this goes back to, again, I keep saying maybe you're hearing this 15 times in this podcast, but mastering fundamentals, right? It doesn't matter if you learned this 20 years ago. You have to practice. You have to practice when mastering fundamentals.

Maulik Sailor (49:37.635)
Yeah, cool, cool. All right. Who is the one person, again, living or dead, that you would like to meet?

Kandarp Desai (49:49.07)
meat. that's a, that's a great question. And I'll go back to Bill Gates, you know, I had an opportunity to shake hands with him like 20 years ago, just happens to be there. but if I want to grab a dinner, I would definitely have him. he, he's one of the guys which, you know, and that's because he has accomplished a lot in his professional life. Right. And he left that.

at the peak of his career to do good in the community, to cure polio. That was his vision. So I wish I have that ability and the vision to impact millions of lives.

Maulik Sailor (50:32.931)
Right. Who do you think visited might to our podcast?

Kandarp Desai (50:38.062)
Good question Who should you think? You know there are a lot of leaders That you can invite to your podcast, but what I would suggest is someone You know who has changed their the life Significantly right like maybe someone and of course there are a lot of names there, but someone who has started

let's say as in one career and has continuously failed before they found their passion at maybe age of 50 or 60. There are great stories like that where someone started a company at like in their 40s or 50s and finally they found what they want to do. Because I think people should hear that it's okay to be like that. It's okay not to know what you want to do like till late in your life. It's okay.

Don't be too hard on yourself. So if you can find someone like that, I would say please invite them. Take the learning because that is always fascinating to me.

Maulik Sailor (51:45.667)
I think just thinking out on that, if I'm not wrong, then I think the founder of Webflow, you know, Webflow CMS, I think he's probably one of that who initially got rejected from a lot of places. And then eventually somebody funded him quite late actually for him to come up and build this Webflow, which is, I think I use Webflow, you know, we use it for our main public websites and it's amazing. It's really amazing tool.

Kandarp Desai (51:54.03)
Yes, yes.

Kandarp Desai (51:59.63)
All right.

Kandarp Desai (52:05.518)
Yeah.

Kandarp Desai (52:13.684)
wow. Yeah, it's a great tool, right? And this is where, you know, yeah, I think someone who has done this, it's fascinating to hear their stories, like, you know, how he not fail, he keep going after it, resiliency with their ideas and conviction that this is what they want to do. So yeah, absolutely. That would be a great guest if you can, you know, snap it. Yeah. Yeah.

Maulik Sailor (52:36.963)
Hopefully, hopefully soon. I think I'll try to find a connection, a mutual connection who may introduce me to him. Right. Let's see. Right. Anyways, I think it's about time we wrap this one up. So, you know, thanks a lot, Khandab for taking time and participating in our podcast. Right. And great to see you, you know, after a long time.

Kandarp Desai (52:42.566)
Yeah.

Kandarp Desai (52:53.23)
Thank you Maulik.

Kandarp Desai (53:00.014)
Yeah, thanks Maulik and good luck with Kord Monk. I wish you the best and thank you for having me here.

Maulik Sailor (53:05.059)
Cool. Cool. Thank you, Kundup. And to our listeners, if you want to listen to more of these kinds of podcasts, then please subscribe to our YouTube and Spotify channels, or just sign up to our newsletters. And if you're a talent looking for a job, working for some of these top companies, just sign up, go to codemunk .ai and sign up as a talent. Once you get your profile created, it will get auto -matched to some of the top companies in the world.

And similarly, if you're a tech manager who hates wasting time sorting the best candidate, then do sign up as an employer and let the magic of our AI help you build the best teams out there. That's it for today, guys. Thank you for listening. Thank you.

Kandarp Desai (53:45.006)
Thank you.

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