w/david khourshid + from microsoft to founder

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auto-generated from the audio, so expect a few typos. the audio is the source of truth.

Hello, hello. Thanks for listening to Guidance Counselor 2.0. Listen, I want to give you a quick rundown of what this podcast is and what you're about to get into as you listen to these episodes. We had Guidance Counselors in middle school. We had Guidance Counselors in high school, but we didn't really have Guidance Counselors in college and now as professionals, we don't really have anybody to turn to to ask a quick question to learn something about the job search or to navigate your career. And so that is what I want this podcast to be for you. I want it to be a tool for you to navigate the job search and your career.

So that being said, I hope you enjoy this episode. And if you need to reach me, Taylor at vaco.com is how to get in touch with me, old fashioned email, social media at t s and t d e s s e y n. And finally, please rate and review this in the app store because I want this to be discoverable for others so they can navigate their careers. Hope you enjoy the episode. David, give the people what they want. Who are you? What do you do, Chris? Good morning, and we'll go from there. Hey, yeah, so my name is David Corsey, not piano. Piano's not my last name.

Piano was actually something that I studied in college until I decided that a career in coding was more lucrative. So, you know, sort of transition from that. I was always interested in coding, but yeah, I actually started, you know, at the University of Central Florida, just doing some PHP and WordPress and stuff like that. And then worked in various startups until I landed at Microsoft, worked there for about four years. So we're wearing a ton of hats as you have to do when you're working at Microsoft. Sure. Recently, I decided to start my own company. So, yeah, it's currently doing. And that's the way I'm.

Yeah, and we're gonna dive into that now because, so I put a tweet out every now and again, to get new guest on the show. And what I tweeted about is, hey, I wanna talk to the best hiring manager, the best lead, somebody you know who can speak to these skills. And David got tagged and I'm really excited because like I said, I've followed David from afar for a bit. So David, I wanna dive in. Let's first off talk about getting to Microsoft. So can you kind of go over as much as you can about what made you wanna go to Microsoft? What did the interview process look like?

Like what should people be aware of if they're wanting to get into an opportunity like Microsoft or Fang in general? Sure. So, um, joining Microsoft actually came in at an interesting time because I was at a previous startup at the while and they were like in that awkward phase where they were just about to get bought out by a bigger company. And so, you know, there was a whole lot of reorg. The La Proy was disappearing from fridge, you know, because accounting got in there and was like, Hey, no more snacks, no more fun. So yeah, so I got reached out to mostly because of my open source work.

I did a lot of projects in the React space, React Redux. And so yeah, they reached out to me and they said, hey, this is a remote opportunity. And I was like, wow, that's actually really great. So first of all, whenever I see remote opportunity, I'm like, okay, this is definitely going in my think about it box instead of having to move somewhere. So I always want to work at like one of the big tech companies, like Microsoft, Google, maybe not Facebook, but and probably not Amazon, but you know, just one of those big companies and Netflix, things like that. And yeah, so they talked to me, they said, you know, we're really interested by the open source work you've done.

We are working on this project that's fully remote. And so here's all of the things you have to study up to, you know, pass the interview. And honestly, it was like being in college again. It was lights and weekends and sometimes some all-nighters just doing lead code practice problems and relearning and even learning some new algorithms that, you know, and just like different coding techniques. And yeah, so it was a pretty brutal interview. It's like, you know, whatever you hear about like, uh, those infamous Google or Facebook or my website, uh, interviews, it was exactly that. Like here's a whiteboard, try to figure this out.

And you're just doing things partly from memory and partly from like just making your brain exercise muscles. Yeah. I'll just tear tear. Just. Exactly. So, um, yeah. And then, uh, as it turns out, you know, once that interview process is over, which I call or bit easing because the job has almost nothing to do with any of the interview questions. It was pretty interesting like just seeing the difference between working at a small startup and working at a huge corporation. Yeah, so I really enjoyed my time at Microsoft. What do you, what's your biggest advice for somebody who is wanting, should everybody work at Microsoft or Big Tech at some point in their career?

Let's answer that question first. So I would say before the pandemic, yes, after the pandemic not really. And the reason is because I would say that especially nowadays in order to evolve and keep up with like the new technology and just the culture, you know, just everything is that companies get big enough where the teams that you're in essentially feel like small startups anyway. And that was definitely the case when I worked over at Microsoft. I worked on the live share team for part of my time there. And that definitely felt like a startup, but it's like a startup with Red Tape, right? You're not allowed to have the freedom that you have at a startup, but you also have this fast-paced nature of like, all right, we have all of these goals and deadlines and just some cowboy coding.

That goes along with the startup. But now I would say like there are so many companies right now who have very ambitious visions and you know like our areas of technology which are really really interesting so you're definitely bound to find something that's Interesting to you when you're at a big company chances are more often than not you are going to be forced into something that You really have zero interest in When I was at Microsoft, I was doing some projects near the end of my time there that I had very, very little interest in. And they were even areas that weren't even catering to my strengths at all.

So it's like I had to learn new things, which I don't mind doing, but when you have the opportunity to do something more interesting, then I would say take that. To understand so so talk to me then about getting out of Microsoft right what what made you make that decision to X Like start your own thing again for those of you are watching right now if you have questions for David Especially because I want to dig into this because there's a lot of people who asked me they're like I want a freelance I want to go out on my own or to do my own thing.

I have an idea Right, I mean listen you were at one of the biggest tech companies in the world And then you're like, you know what it's time. What made you make that jump man? Well, so before I dive into specifics, I will say like right now is probably the best time to do one of two things, either join a company, and this matter if it's small or big, but join a company that aligns to your interests because you will be able to find something. Like if you have a specialization on, I don't know, animations or design or just like just this niche area, you're going to find something that, you know, where you could just work fully in that.

So either join a company where you could do that or if you're more ambitious and willing to deal with the stress and everything, just start your own thing. I would say right now is a really good time. Not that it's any easier to get funding and start your own company, but it's definitely still a good time to do it because if you are able to do it, then you could go pretty far with that. So my process while I was at Microsoft, it was actually over the course of, I want to say almost a year, like at least six months. So I was working on this big open source project, or at the time it was small, called X-State which allows you to make visual workflows.

So if you match them like your typical flow chart, but express that in code and you get a whole lot of nice benefits from that, like be able to visualize it, inspect it, and just easily describe complex logic for any sort of application. And so that eventually grew a lot to over 15,000 stars on GitHub. And so it caught the attention of a couple of investors pretty early on. I wanna say more than a year ago, so last August, not last August, but last August. And I was saying- I was wrong with this point. Yeah. So at the time I was just working on this project, like pretty much my passion project, I was working on it nights and weekends and mornings too, just because I, you know, the community was growing and like there were big companies using it, including Microsoft itself, but nothing that I was related to at the time.

So they said, hey, you should really start thinking about making this like your own company. It's something that I sort of dreamed about, but not something that I really took too seriously, as a thought. So that's when I started doing all the research, going in endless meetings with a lot of investors. Again, outside of work hours just trying to make all of that scheduling work. And long story short, after talking to what must have been dozens and dozens of investors and other founders just trying to get advice, I finally took the big leap of just saying, Hey, I have to pursue this opportunity. I have to quit my job and just do this full time.

That's awesome. So one of the things that you keep referencing to, and I want to talk about for a second, is all these projects, open source projects. That's how you got found at Microsoft. Yeah. That's how you were able to do this thing. Can you talk about the importance of like open source contributions in the dev community to either be discoverable and or just to network with others. Like can you shed some light on that? Oh yeah, I would say it's definitely important. And that's because of the community aspect. Like it's sort of like an unseen or like a not immediately realized like advantage of working on open source.

But when you have an open source project and that open source project gains traction, then you start gaining a community. And so sometimes it starts off with the community being informal, like just people talking to you about it on Twitter or you get issues. And then you could sort of formalize that like any variety of techniques like starting a slacker, a disc board, which is what we decided to do. And at that point, you realize how big the community really is. So also, when you do open source projects, you get to talk about it at conferences. And that also is like a community on itself.

So I would say there's a lot of advantages to you know working on open source projects because you get much more visibility I mean that shouldn't be the reason you're doing it The reason is because you're scratching a really itchy itch you know for yourself and it becomes a passion project and you just want to see how far you could go with it but yeah, I would say like the you know, there's there's developers who just code and then there's developers who code to sort of like 10x their code and make it so that it makes everyone much more productive. And not saying that one's better than the other, but like you want to go through the pain and struggle of doing open source.

There are a lot of benefits to doing that. I love that. And so let's talk about your current gig now, right? Give the people a quick high level of the name of your company currently and then what it does. We won't go into super detail. We're going to get David on unicorn finders here soon but to go over the the nitty gritty but David given overview of your company right now. Sure so my company is called Staley and we're building software for visual software modeling of any sort of complex logic and applications and we've been alive for about six or seven months. That's awesome that's awesome so so let's talk about this so you went from were you just individual contributor at Microsoft?

Yeah so I was an engineer based on this levels or something, I forget which level I was at. But yeah, just the lowly engineer. So that being said, where talk to me about the mindset of going from individual contributor to like founder CEO, like in hiring like what's been the mindset and maybe talk a little bit about the interview process and how you brought people on. Because you told me off air that your team of six fingers crossed, potentially the team of seven here soon. Talk to me about like how the mindset shifted. Well, it felt like sort of a natural shift. So it definitely wasn't a like, you know, right now I'm a developer and now I want to be like a CEO, engineering manager, you know, founder, like that, like the thing, it wasn't a huge jump.

It was more of a natural like, like I sort of fell into it because As the community grew, like, you know, there's definitely contributors who stand out. And that's why actually our first three hires were pretty natural to get because these have been people who have been working with the open source project and the community for a long time. So I was just like, hey, you know, I already know that you could code and everything. So we didn't have to do any of the technical interviews. So that's like that's a good thing. But again, that came from open source. Of course. Of course, yeah. And so that's why, yeah, the community is a huge thing because you're not going into it blind, right?

So you know that, all right, I know these people, I might know some of them personally, I know what they could do, and I know that they're going to be a good team member. So that's why the first three hires came pretty quickly, and it was mostly just say, hey, do you wanna join me on this journey and do this with me? And, you know, all three of them gave really passionate yeses. And then there was someone else our developer design advocate. And she's amazing. That's someone who I actually did talk to. And the interview process, it was sort of like a back and forth interview, so like a natural conversation.

And so these conversations early on in the company become less of a, okay, let's see your qualifications. Let's see what you've done in the past. And they more become like sort of a, you know, a relationship of here's what we're trying to achieve. What are you trying to achieve with your career? Like how can we make this really good for both of us? And I think especially now that that's what I feel, I mean, I'm very new to this, but that's what I feel that you really have to focus on. Like you no longer have people just working for you, you're trying to again, create that relationship of how can you benefit us, how can we benefit you?

And I feel like, and I'm gonna applaud David for that comment right there, because I feel like the interview stage, and David, and again, this probably goes, I think Fang gives the interview process a bad rap. And I mean, listen, everything you said, rightfully so, right? And so my question, so I wanna applaud David because I feel like interviewing needs to switch. It needs to switch from the mindset of, Hey, you need to convince me of why I need to hire you to, hey, we actually want you based off everything we see. Let's just have a conversation on how you can fit within our organization.

Mm-hmm, exactly. And as far as big companies go, I do wanna say that like the attitude towards like, you know, at least a few years ago when someone said, hey, I'm joining Microsoft or I'm joining Facebook, was met with a lot of applause where it's like, wow, you're so lucky it's a dream opportunity, et cetera. But now you see, at least if you scroll through Twitter, you see just as much, if not more applause by people saying, I'm leaving Microsoft or I'm leaving Facebook and people are like, wow, that's amazing. We can't wait to see what you do next. And so, yeah, that's why right now, it's more about the individual than the company.

So how the individual can contribute to the company but also playing to their strengths and letting them grow in their careers because I'm sure you've heard and you know very well probably more than me that it is right now a developers market like we could just hop to where yeah. Well, and I think too, and going to what David said, I think employers, and David, I wanna harp on this a little bit with you, like do you feel like, so do you feel, because of the shift of being fully remote? Because you can't do the pizza parties, because you can't do the open bars downstairs at three o'clock on a Friday, that were mote work actually puts more emphasis on the individual than ever before?

Yeah, I would say so. And yeah, it's not so much like the company is catering to the employee, but like I said, it's more of a relationship. And honestly, I've been working remotes for the last, I wanna say seven years now. You were doing it before it was cool. like before it was like globally accepted. Yeah. Well, I was lucky enough to have the opportunity like a while ago. Again, I worked at startups over here and then like one startup I was like, hey, can I just work from home every Wednesday? Like that was sort of an option. That's when I sort of got that taste for working remote but then the next startup I worked at was based in San Francisco and obviously I'm not gonna move there especially for that salary.

It was crazy when I, when they said, what is your salary range? I gave them like what I thought was a ridiculously high number. And they said, that's too low. We cannot go that low. For San Francisco. Well, I didn't understand what the San Francisco range was. So Orlando, it's like, you could take half of the San Francisco salary and be very happy. I have heard that about the Orlando market. I've heard that. So going back to putting emphasis. So you've been working remote now for seven years then. So you've seen it both ways. Have you seen a shift in a company, in company's mindsets to the individuals now that everyone's remote?

I feel like maybe not a big shift, but a shift that needs to happen regardless, just because I think companies right now are feeling the struggle with like, oh, wait, why is everyone leaving? I thought, you know, we're giving them such high salaries and everything. And right now, I think compensation is sort of taking a backseat to just all the other things a company can offer the individual. Please expand more on that, David, because literally this is all I tweet about all day. And here's the deal, guys, listen, I did not tee up David for that. David's saying everything on his own. Yeah, I'm just saying what's on my mind.

Yeah, yeah, so dive into that for me. Why should companies offer right now? because that's what I get, right? Well, we can't pay fang. And I'm like, listen, I'm not saying pay fang, just get your national average first. Let's talk about that. Cause there is a national average, right? So talk, so then talk to hiring managers right now. So I'm giving you the platform. So you're talking at hiring managers at the moment. What would you tell them that it's not just about salary? What else? Well, yeah, like I said, salary, you do need that, you know, base minimum, like you need to be competitive, right?

And so that's like the bare minimum, but again, you have to talk to the individual. And that's why you can't really have a cookie cutter job description where it's like, hey, here's all of the benefits and whatever, just because any developer, and I'm talking about this mainly from a developer angle, any developer is gonna look at that and be like, well, yeah, but there's like a hundred other companies that will give me that exact same benefit. And so now I'm really comparing on salary. And then this is a game where no one wins because it's like, you know, you're just fighting to the top and like, it's like, what's the points?

We've been indoors all day. Like, what are we gonna spend our money on? You know? We can't travel anywhere, even if we wanted to. I really recently had to even cancel our, we were gonna have a team retreats to Europe just because of Omicron and things like that. So it's like, you know? So that's why like interviews and initially reaching out to candidates need to be more about like what they want. So it's like, how do you wanna advance your career? What are the number one things that you want to work on? And how can that like potentially benefit our company? Because trust me, you could tell someone, hey, I will pay you 500,000 a year, but if it's something that's extremely uninteresting to them, they will still say no and pick up a job like maybe at half a fraction of that salary.

Yeah, so I spoke, so if y'all haven't caught this episode last Mondays, I had Jacob Harrington on it. So funny that I had Jacob on last Monday, and I've David on this Monday, they're both talking about kind of the same thing. So when Jacob just found a job recently and he found a job through Twitter, right, and we talked about putting out content with him and the importance of being discoverable just like David just said about contributing to the open source community. But one thing he said that was fascinating was he took salary out of the job search because he says I had a range and he goes every company I was interviewing for was in that range.

I mean, he goes like, I wouldn't accept a job opportunity if it wasn't in that kind of range. And so I asked him this question. I said, do you think it freed you up mentally to actually evaluate a company better? Because you weren't just looking at salary and he said yes. Because at the end of the day, you can dive into the intangibles of what a company can offer than just base plus bonus plus whatever else, which I think's huge. I think companies right now, during an interview process and David, it kind of sounds like you're doing it too, is you should be selling your opportunity more than anything else.

Mm-hmm, yeah, and that's exactly what we're doing too. So, yeah, well, when I expanded the team to six and like you said, I'll clean out seven, the conversations we had were about like, okay, here's the salary, it's going to be good, it needs to be good, know, just to be within that range. So, you know, we talk about like what are your career goals and things like that. Yeah. And then developers too, just to confirm that y'all actually do want to work on a product you're passionate about too. Right? It's just like you said, like you want to go get paid $500,000 and work on like a, like a forms app for like HR.

All right, I wouldn't take that. No. And so again, I think it's the job seeker to dig into the company and the intrinsic stuff, which I think is incredibly important. So David, as we wrap up here, four minutes left, I always like to leave a little bit of time for the guests to leave some wise words of wisdom, some nuggets, some David nuggets, to the job seeker, any encouraging words to the job seeker, any encouraging words to hiring managers, just general advice, now's your time. So yeah, for job seekers, I would just reiterate that if there's something that you're passionate about, something that you're going to be happy working on, you will be able, well, don't quote me on this, but you mostly will be able to find a job that really suits your needs.

So don't just look at the salary, look at just everything else about the company. Do they fit your culture and values? And are they going to give you the freedom to really allow you to do what you want to do. And so to the hiring managers, I would say like, again, don't focus on the cookie cutter benefits and salary, but really have conversations with potential candidates. Like, especially when you do cold reachouts and emails and stuff like that, actually do a little bit of research on the person and be like, oh, they seem to be really passionate on this. And I know that this works well because even me when I was thinking of starting my own company, I've also talked to other companies just because they reached them, And they were like, hey, we saw like, you know, your interest in this.

Here's how we use that at our company. I'm like, okay, that's worth a conversation. Yeah. So yeah, that's why like you can't sell developers on salary alone. It needs to be much, much more than that. I love it. I love it. So Alicia comes in, Alicia is a director of engineering here in Navid. He goes, I think we all, not companies, not major leaders, but we as a community should to continuously focus on how to drive connectedness forward. When we focus on the negatives of why we can't have events travel underline reasons why so many want to be remoted, reinforce the sense of hopelessness and endlessness.

I think it starts with a change in perspective. How can we build continuously increased connectedness while promoting a more adaptive work world? So I would agree, and I think that's going back to open source contributions to networking on social media I talk about, I totally agree. I think there needs to be a push in community, which we obviously broached with here, right? The open source community, I think it's huge. You know, David talked about it, Jacob last Monday, talked about posting one tweet on Twitter that he was looking for a job, and he developed a community around that one tweet, and he found a job because of that.

So, Alicia, I totally agree with you on that. So, David. Thanks, my man. That was it. 30 minutes flies by. Stay on real quick after we end this because I want to say bye. But again, thank you all for tuning to Guy's Council 2.0 this morning. David, if people want to find you, what's your Twitter handle again? David K. Keanu. I love it. David K. Keanu. Go follow David. He's a great follow. Tomorrow, have a wonderful conversation taking place. It is a VP of engineering here at Nashville. Justin Huber, I've admired Justin from afar for a very long time. He is a great mind when it comes to hiring and scaling team.

So we're gonna dive in that tomorrow. So again, thank you all for tuning in. Appreciate it, go connect with David. David, thanks for giving me that question. Thank you. Hey, you did it. You listened to an entire episode, and I am very grateful, because you know why? There's a lot of podcasts out there. There's a lot of episodes, and I myself rarely finished an entire episode. So I appreciate you so, so much for listening. Quick reminder, please rate and review this podcast in the App Store. I want this to be discoverable to others. And the only way that happens is if you take the time right now and rate and review it, please, like right now, unless you're driving, then don't do it.

So thank you again. If you need to reach out to me, tayloratvaco.com or at Tdaston on all social media handles. And I hope you have a fantastic day.