Digital Nexus Dive

Carlos Ponce (00:12):

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Tech Leaders Unplugged. And today, well, we have a we're, we're, we're proud to announce that we have with us today on Tech Leaders Unplugged the Vice President of Engineering at HubSpot, right? So, none other than HubSpot Mr. Kartik Vishwanath. So thank you for being with us on the show today, Kartik, we, it's really a pleasure to have you here. We are, really, look, we're looking forward to this conversation, and of course, thank you, Wade, as ever for co-hosting to be here. Yeah, our tech Leaders Unplugged. Alright, gentlemen, so Kartik, let's start with you, shall we? So, tell us a little bit about you, what, you know, your background your journey. Tell us a little bit about you. Who's Kartik Vishwanath?

Kartik Vishwanath (01:07):

Sure. again, first of all thank you so much for having me on the podcast. It's, it's a pleasure, pleasure to be here speaking with you all. Again, I like, again, I'd start by saying that, you know whatever I say on this podcast are my views and not my company's views. And in with regard to my, you know, my professional sort of my, my journey. And I think about my journey, you know, like, I feel like it's been sort of a continuous arc of sort of learning growth from one, you know, from one challenge to another. And that's how I've sort of navigated my sort of career. If I think back I mean, I actually started, you know, this was a long, you know, a long time ago. I actually started in with a focus on clinical informatics. So initially started my career in a, working in a pediatrics hospital, in a cardiac research department where I was crunching you know, data, the, like, a lot of the clinical data and trying to develop sort of innovative, you know, patient care applications. I focused a lot of my initial career on like medical data modeling. I have a few publications there and like semantic knowledge representations, like medical ontologies, things like that. And while I was doing this, this work of like processing this, this large amount of data back in, you know, this was back in the day when we didn't have these nice sort of cloud providers out there that allowed us to crunch our data efficiently. This ignited a passion for distributed computing in me in that time. And this interest sort of eventually led me to this company called Cerner, which is now you know, acquired by Oracle. And Cerner is, this is this EHR company. It's a, you know, electronic health record company. And at Cerner, I joined one of their, at that time, you know, the company's going through an interesting transition. They were trying to essentially build out a, a SaaS version of their EHR system. And so I ended up on their, on their platform team at, at Cerner. And again, I was really interested in distributed systems and how they can help use these systems to kind of you know, process large, you know, data sets, especially in the medical domain. And so I ended up eventually building out various different distributed systems there, ended up leading their search infrastructure, led their semantic search teams. And, and during this time, I really honed sort of my skills in, in, you know, distributed systems at scale, but also like operating them in really critical sort of healthcare environments, right? And again, this interest in distributed systems I started looking for, you know, bigger challenges. Now, I was looking for, you know, challenges at, you know, of scale. And this, this led me to my career at Amazon. So where I started Amazon, I started on the, you know, on the catalog quality team, which was a, a new team that, you know, Amazon was forming to really understand catalog quality, the product catalog quality at, at Amazon. And, and, and as you can imagine, this was, you know, the largest product catalog out there. So it's a very exciting sort of opportunity. And I, I found this to be, you know I, again, I was really drawn to this position and, and joined this team. And what, what that particular experience taught me was like, you know, this, this, the ability to to kind of operate in this, this, this space of immense scale, right? So this was the largest product catalog you can imagine. Billions of products, billions of features. And we were trying to kind of improve the quality leveraging machine learning, and which was, you know, this was back in the day used some really innovative approaches to kind of really improve the quality of the overall, you know, Amazon catalog. So, as I think back to those days, you know, it really taught me valuable lessons in sort of scalability applications of machine learning where it can be successful in solving such you know, in really difficult problems and, and where it may not be a good fit, you know, and in, in some, in some problem areas where we try to apply solutions, it didn't really work out where, you know, simple heuristics work better, and then again keep, as you can see, you can see a pattern here. I've been really interested in problems of increasing complexity and, and scale and so on. And so I ended up in AWS again, an order of magnitude in terms of complexity of distributed systems and the diversity of customers we were serving. So I joined AWS Lambda, which was a, a new service. I mean, it's relatively new when I joined. And we were sort of, you know we were sort of hering this sort of serverless revolution in, in the, in those days. And it was a very exciting journey. And what I really learned from ideas there was there, you know, and AWS in general, and Lambda particularly the, the importance of, you know, operational excellence and how you sort of imbue that into the ethos of your engineering culture, right? That that is what really made AWS tick and be very successful. And while we were building out innovative services, we were really, really laser focused on, you know operational excellence there. So, again I was, while I was doing all this I realized that, you know throughout my career, I've been really focused on building sort of internal platforms, internal facing platforms, internal facing systems that I used, that I used to build products. And, and so I'd really not focused a lot on building out developer experiences, right? If you look at my career up to this point, it was really focused on, you know, sort of building out really hard sort of, you know, solving hard, really hard technical problems with distributed systems and architecting the systems and, and building teams that, you know, to help kind of build and operate these systems. But I had really built, you know, sort of thought about developer experiences. So I got this really unique opportunity at, at Square or Block where there was Block was actually building out a developer platform, a third party developer platform block for folks who are not familiar is, is was formerly known as Square. It is it is, you know, the, the famous FinTech company. And so there, I took on this opportunity of like really building out a developer platform. It's really taught me how to build how to really think about developer experiences, which I had really not spent a lot of time thinking about until then. And, you know, and I also, at, at Block, I also ended up owning sort of the developer. Im which was my first foray into leading security teams, which is another new thing. So again, I would say that my role at Block was instrumental in kind of teaching me about building and managing sort of these, these developer experiences, but also about you know you know, the, you know, security you know, operating sec or sort of leading security teams and so on. So now at HubSpot, as you can see, it's been a, it's been a long career, but I, you know, I'm sort of leveraging a lot of my diverse experiences that I've gained over the years to, to lead a significant sort of infrastructure organization here. And the infrastructure organization that I lead here covers everything from our data infrastructure to our, our developer experience, internal developer experience, when I say developer experience, internal developer platform our you know, SRE, our reliability observability traffic management. So I need a sort of a significant organization right now at HubSpot. And I don't know, I, I think I've, I've talked a lot about my journey. I don't know if that covers everything or if there's anything you'd like to talk about more.

Carlos Ponce (09:22):

Oh, wow. I mean, it's, I mean, this, it's quite our journey. And, and whenever I think of, I was going to, usually what I do is tell us a little bit about you, and then tell us a little bit about the company. But I think that I'm going to skip that part, because at least in the, in the, in the, the business world, every everyone who's breathing and alive knows what HubSpot is. But I would like to move on to the topic, right? So we're discussing the, you know, the, the topic, which is, we named it Digital Nexus dive diving deep into the platform infrastructure innovations. But I, but I also as realized that you also wanted to cover some other aspects that have to do with, you know, the cultural aspect. So can you tell us a little bit about that and why you chose this particular topic?

Kartik Vishwanath (10:07):

Sure. So I would, I would say that, you know one of the, one of the, one of the things that I really like about HubSpot, working at HubSpot is that, you know, HubSpot really obsesses about our culture, right? The way we think about our culture is we, and, and one of our founders has a, has a great way of, of putting it, putting it, he says that we should treat culture as a product for our employees, right? So there is a product that we sell to our customers, which is, you know, the HubSpot product, but culture is the internal product that we develop for, for our employees, right? And so, in some ways, we can apply principles of product management to, to improve this culture to evolve this culture to achieve the right outcomes. And when I say culture, what I broadly mean is like how we work as individuals, as a, you know, as, as a company. Now, when I, when I think about infrastructure teams, I do think there, there's some nuance to that, right? Like, so I do think that infrastructure teams, especially in, in any large, you know, companies are constantly faced with, with trade-offs all the times. And sometimes, you know, as leaders, I feel it's our responsibility to, to equip equip our teams with, you know, the right guidance in terms of like, how do you approach these trade-offs? And essentially, in my view, you know, the way you approach these trade-offs defines the culture of your particular infrastructure organization, right? And I can take some specific, you know, sort of examples or, you know, trade-offs that I think about when I think about infrastructure teams and, and organizations. So one, one particular trade off that comes to mind is, you know, standardization versus, you know, flexibility, right? So when we, when we talk about internal infrastructure, is the internal infrastructure organization we enablers o of, of innovation, or are we trying to protect a paved path that we have, we have set for the organization, right? There's always going to be some push and pull, because as the, the rest of the product, you know organization innovates they, they, they would, they, they will want to you know, in, in the, in the, in the process of innovation they would want, they will kind of want to experiment and try different, you know, ways of solving a problem. But at the, but at the same time, if you, once you have ensured a certain once you have established a standard as an infrastructure organization, that is to ensure consistencies and efficiency, right? So in some ways, by limiting flexibility, you get consistency and efficiency, and your product organizations can ship faster, but you don't want to stifle innovation either. So there is this, this trade off that, that always happens in, you know, when, when your customers, when I talk about other engineering teams are talking to infrastructure teams again, there's other tradeoffs like feature richness or simplicity, right? Do you, when you design an infrastructure, when you design a platform, do you want it to be a Swiss army knife, or do you want it to perform one thing really well, right? And allow some level of customization. Now if you, if you, if you, if you make it, you know, complex, it's going to be more versatile, but then it might but then it might not be great for adoption, right? Because people may not know how to use it, or, you know, the simplicity usually aids in adoption. So you've got to think about that. Innovation and stability is another interesting one, right? Sometimes you'll notice in infrastructure organizations, there, there is, you know, there are some databases or systems that have been running for years, and you'll often hear people question them and say, Hey, why, why aren't we switching to this new database? Like, or this new system? And there's a reason, because sometimes pushing for innovation can, you know, compromise, stability, or, you know resilience of your, of your system. You've built a certain operational, operational maturity by operating a system over years and you've gained experience. And so all of these are trade-offs. And so, I, I can go down this list, I can talk about cost and performance. You could talk about you know, scalability versus resource optimization. Like you know, how, how much do you want your system to automatically handle growth versus like so, so I feel like these are the aspects that are I, that I feel by somewhat, not formalizing, but educating the, your infrastructure organizations that, hey, it's normal to have these these trade-offs, right? And it is normal to face these trade-offs in, in this organization, and then kind of revisit them right? Periodically as an organizational leadership team and have a point of view on, on these things usually helps your team. And I feel like that, that's a key point that I wanted to lay out you know, kind of present as, as like we should, we should as leaders be intentionally thinking about these things and have a point of view and perhaps reiterate those, those points of view. And, and revisit, revisit this, right as the, as the organization evolves and as you kind of build and, and grow your platform.

Carlos Ponce (15:53):

Alright. Yeah. Well, certainly a, a number of questions are starting to pop, pop into my head, but I'm going to pass on the mic to Wade because I know he, he has his own, and these are very interesting and deeper ended questions. Wade, back to you, please.

Wade Erickson (16:07):

Yeah. So you know, I remember when I first started playing with HubSpot, it was before it was a CRM, it was back almost like a social platform like Buffer or some of these others. And I remember when they announced that they were going to build out a CRM solution, it was free back then for quite some time. I was like, wow, that is a big apple to bite because, you know, you had the big monsters out there already that were, were very dominant in the SaaS market for CRM, right? So you know, kudos to the company. They've really, really, over the years built out a, a really solid CRM in, in, in a very competitive market. One thing I did notice, though, is that whenever you're looking at all the other satellite applications around the ecosystem, HubSpot's like the first integrated CRM, you know and I think Salesforce, because of their history, they really approached it as their platform. \If you want to integrate with their solution, you build it on a Salesforce as a pass. And that's how it integrates. Even though they do have APIs, and I don't want to, you know, make it sound like they don't, HubSpot's very different, and you didn't go after, Hey, you got to build a HubSpot app to integrate with us. It's been integration through APIs and that obviously is a very different integration challenge. And a lot of people think about it as, as, as the developers and the APIs, but the infrastructure's really the one that's taking the brunt of the hit. Can you tell me some about the challenges of managing the infrastructure team in such a highly integrated ecosystem?

Kartik Vishwanath (17:41):

Right. I think that's a, that's a great question. I mean, I will start by clarifying a few things Wade like now HubSpot is, you know we have now, I I don't know if you've looked at our latest branding. We are, we, we now, we now are proud to call ourselves a customer platform, right? So we've moved away from even the CRM boarding. And so our, our goal is now to be a true customer platform, right? So we, we want to be the customer platform for scaling businesses across, right? So as you mentioned, with all your software integrations, with all the resources you need to connect your marketing, sales, content, customer service, we want to be that connected platform, right? So I think that's a, so the, so one thing that has really worked is we've been very clear with what we wanted, we want us to be, right? From talking about infrastructure, I think one thing that we have internally always ma managed sort of we internally keep telling ourselves in internal channels, and, you know, all our communication is that we want to be, we want our customers to feel that HubSpot offers a crafted experience versus a cobbled together sort of an experience for our customers, right? So when you use a HubSpot product or a feature, it should feel like everything is sort of seamless and, and sort of crafted together. And in some ways, that comes back to the infrastructure strategy, right? I, I touched upon it a little bit when I talked about standardization versus flexibility, right? We've had a very strong culture of building of thinking about, you know at the infrastructure level, thinking about sort of platforms, right? How do we how do we sort of use platforms as our force multiplier, as we build out new features and build consistency across these new features, right? So we have really, you know, adopted a very so if you look at it at HubSpot, if I look at the infrastructure strategy, we have a few really great paved paths of building products and, you know features and shipping them really fast, right? And we've put a lot of focus on making sure that our developer effectiveness or developer efficiency in, in ado in using these pa this pave path is extremely high, right? So we really doubled down on that strategy, and that's really helped us because as we have matured this platform for us to kind of adapt to the, you know, changing business landscape or for example when, you know, took off if you, if you look at our our you know, our chief product officer gave a keynote at our inbound conference this year about the product innovations that we've shipped. At the end of the keynote, you'll see there's, it's, it's just there's, this is endless scroll of the product features we've managed to ship in, in the last year. And it boggles my mind as to how quickly these innovations we've managed to ship. And that speaks very highly of sort of, sort of this, this standardization philosophy we, we adopted across the platform. There's few ways of doing building things on our stack, but those ways are very well supported and integrated throughout our stack. Like, you get, you know, observability for free, you get a lot of things for free by adopting the, the, the standard platform way of doing things within, within HubSpot. So I think that strategy has really played well, and I'm glad that you notice it as a customer as well when you, when you work with when you, when you are kind of using our product.

Wade Erickson (21:20):

Great. And then another thing too is I was thinking about your background with machine learning and some of the, the things that you had earlier in your career. Tell me a little bit how those kind of you pulled forward in your current responsibilities. And I think a lot of folks that are young in their careers and maybe watching the show, they really only understand the present of where they're at, and they can't really see how a a career builds and the amount of changes and the pivots and things that you, you know, you have to give yourself some grace around the learning process and, and how you absolutely can build upon previous experiences to, to, to carve out your own unique journey in this tech space. Tell me a little bit about how you've used your past to support your, your current.

Kartik Vishwanath (22:16):

Yeah, that's a great you know that's a good question. I think the way I've used my past, I mean, machine learning is one area, but like in general the way I've tried to think about things is like I, in, in any new role I've taken or any new challenge as I've navigated my career, and I may have, you know, decisions, career decisions, one sort of one sort of thing that I've kept on top of my mind is that I always wanna be any new role that I pick up, I don't, I don't wanna be like just if, if I take a new role, I don't wanna be a hundred percent sure that I can, that I know everything about this role and I can knock this out of the park, right? Like, I always wanna be in this slightly uncomfortable zone, right? Where I, there are parts of this role that I have to learn, right? Or there's a new domain or a new problem space that I, that I must, that I have to learn about in order to be in order to grow, right? And so I try to tend to keep myself slightly uncomfortable always. And that's, that has helped me learn, right? So when I'm taking on a new challenge, I may not know the entire problem space, but I do feel like that enables me to learn enables me to kind of reach out to people, talk to people who, who are experts in that, in that area and, and kind of establish you know, and, and learn from them. So I've, in my mind, you know I've anchored on learning and growth as, and the, the, the, the career progression has happened somewhat orally to that, that's the way I view it. If there is an interesting problem, I really sometimes get obsessed by it, and I want to really like go join this, this, this team or this project. I would really want to work on this. And that's what's driven me to take on, I guess, more challenging pro problems or projects and, and gravitate towards things that have that have enabled, that have somehow shaped my career. That's how I can put it.

Wade Erickson (24:32):

Yeah. I think you make some great points that, you know, if you aren't stretching, if you aren't uncomfortable, that means you aren't stretching yourself and you have to stretch to grow. And part of that is just having a, you know whether they call it a growth mindset or a learning, you know, kind of aspect to your career growth, always be able to push yourself comfortably and know that that is just part of, of, of growing is to be uncomfortable. And and as long as you have the tools to learn and ask and get support, before you know it, you become an expert. And that becomes in your rear view mirror as you're building and building and building, and to the point where, you know, 20, 30 years into your career there's just so much covered areas that you've been able to cover as long as you don't just stop and get complacent. So I think that's the key. Be comfortable in the be comfortable in the uncomfortable space. Right? So, all right, go ahead, Carlos. I know we're coming near end.

Carlos Ponce (25:33):

Yeah, thank you, Wade. Well, yeah, well, the thing is that, you know, unfortunately, we're, we're coming up on time, right? Time flies when you're having fun, as they say. But my, the last question that I would have for you cardiac is you know, it's a little bit more from the layman's perspective, from the user end perspective, right? It's, and it's simple, right? The facing 2024, it's right ahead of us. So from your perspective, from the engineering side, what would you tell the general public of what, what, what can they expect, you know, regarding HubSpot that's going to like, you know, that they should be on the lookout for, or what's going to wow them? Is there something like new developments that, that we shall be like, you know, paying attention to just, you know, very gen gen generally speaking, what would you tell viewers and potential users that to be on the lookout for what to expect in 2024?

Kartik Vishwanath (26:31):

Yeah, I would, I would definitely say that, you know HubSpot is a, is a, is a rocket ship, I would, as if you are customers, you should be very excited. There's a lot of internal innovation that's happening at an incredible pace at HubSpot, right? We've really embraced you know, gen ai. There's a lot of really, really honestly, like, you know, some of the product features we've been talking about are, are, are honestly really, really exciting, right? So, and on top of that, like I said, we have a very aligned platform strategy, like an infrastructure strategy. So we'll enable our teams to ship these things also at a very fast clip. So I am really excited for the, for the upcoming year. I feel like HubSpot's got a, a got a great team of, of engineers you know, outstanding team of engineers who are, who are really passionate about are obsessed about our customers. And so I'm really excited to see the, the, the, just the, this, this, this innovations that are going to come out of the HubSpot ENG team next year. So I'm, I'm looking forward to it. And I know from internal, like, you know, plans, we have a ton of of features and a ton of really exciting things planned for our customers next year.

Carlos Ponce (27:54):

Yeah. And I'm one of 'em because I mean, I'm, I'm going to be on the lookout for these innovations as a HubSpot user myself. So the only thing left for me to do, Kartik, is thank you. Thank you again for having been with us, for sharing your journey, your insights, and just for being here. You know, I think it's a great experience to talk to someone who's from the, from, from the heart of a platform that we all know that we're all use and that it's just a, a monster, right? So thank you again. And there's well, there's only one quick announcement if I, that I would like to make this, this, this show. This interview is the last one off season one of Tech Leaders Unplugged. So there's going to be a few it's going to be, there's going to be a few changes in terms of format and content also, so in that sense, this is going to be, so this, it's a way, a heck of a way to close season one with Kartik, our guest here. And please, for those who of you who are watching, look down below, that's our website, Tech Leaders Unplugged, be on the lookout book market because we're going to be announcing the new the new themes and the new formats and lots of changes that are coming in the next few weeks. So stay tuned on Techleadersunplugged.com, right down below. And that's all I have to say right now. Thank you again, Kartik. Thank you, Wade. And please, Kartik, stay with us as we go off the air. Yeah.

Kartik Vishwanath (29:35):

Thank you so much. Thank you so much. This was great. Thank you.

Carlos Ponce (29:37):

Excellent. We had a great time, Kartik. Thank you. Alright, see you next time. Stay tuned.