#281 Leadership at the Intersection of Engineering and Product Development With Aviv Ben-Yosef

0:00:01 - Mehmet
Hello and welcome back to any episode of the CTO show with Mehmet. I'm very pleased today to have with me Aviv with me on the show, aviv. The way I like to do it is I keep it to my guests and to use themself to give us a little bit about their background, and you know what they do. So the floor is yours. 

0:00:19 - Aviv
Awesome. Thank you and thanks for having me. I come from a very geeky, hands-on background. I learned how to code when I was nine years old, I think, and ever since I've been enamored with computers and making them do what I wanted them to do, which, during my high school, was mainly hacking stuff, because I thought if you really know and understand things, you have to learn exactly how they work, and you have to, and then you know how to break them and have to fix them back. So I did all sorts of hacking stuff Teenage might do, and ever since then my career was less about cyber. I'm about mainly about what really made me tick was delivering value. 

At some point early on, I stopped caring about specific technology and cared more about what the tech I'm building actually does, which led me to do some freelance coding over the years, where I was like in one year I worked in like 13 different programming language, for example. I did CTO as a service for a while and for the past few years I'm mainly advising tech executives about how to create teams that triple impact per engineer, teams that are career highlights, and that's like my passion. I created a role around me really caring about creating teams where the CTO isn't the geek responsible of making people type on the keyword faster, but people who are proud of leading teams who achieve amazing stuff. That's my passion and my mission. 

0:02:03 - Mehmet
That's great to hear that, aviv, and you know when I was preparing. You know I've seen you have a very rich career also as well, and a lot of things to us to discuss. I want also to highlight that you have released also your second book, right, am I correct? 

0:02:21 - Aviv
Yeah, it came out a few months ago. 

0:02:24 - Mehmet
Great so there are a couple of things which you know. When I saw, it attracted my attention honestly, and I think it's a debatable thing in tech, but from your side, and you know from your experience, I want to hear from you, especially because you mentioned you, you work as a fractional CTO and you manage teams and you had to hire team also as well. So the place that we were I want to start is this concept that you have, above the growth mindsets versus experience, if you can elaborate on the importance you know of how it's better to interview candidates with the grow mindset you know, and how much is this different from the hiring practices that mainly, as we know, they focus on experience, you know, and which, honestly, you know? The experience thing, of course it's important, but again, it's not nowadays the number one thing that you have to look at. So I want to understand this concept more from you. Aviv. 

0:03:35 - Aviv
Yeah, sure. So I think pretty much everyone listening right now knows how experience filtering works in interviews. Right, you have a set years of experience. That you want is one of the requirements on the job description. You you mainly look for people who are already senior or have been doing this for a while, etc. Etc. And that's fine. I get that, because the reason we do that is that it's an easy way to gain a bit more confidence in the decision to hire someone which is a big decision anytime, even if you're already hiring you know employee number 100 or 1000. 

We still care about making the right decisions, and I get that, and it's fine to do that, even for most of your employees. But I find that we have a lot of companies. Once you have a good basic team in place, you actually can gain so much from not just bringing in those experienced people, but by intentionally saying I want to bring in some people who are still in the molding process. They haven't fixed their ways of operating yet, and these you know. It's a bit like consider a a healthy investment portfolio. If you're not too risk-crazy, what you're going to do is invest in a few solid things so the majority of your portfolio is safe, which are the people who you have track records of seniority and experience, and that's fine. But also you should, all you know, also get some investments that are with a bigger risk but also with great potential, and these are the unexperienced people or less experienced people. I want to see more companies hiring and investing in them, helping them grow, and when we do that, for example, we look into interviews for people who are not experienced or, you know, maybe they have experience in one role and now this is the first time for them looking into something else, and I always look for the growth mindset, which is a concept of you know, not mine, something you can read many, many books about. It's a psychology concept. It says that you want to see people who don't localize their issues and don't think that if something, for example, failed, it's always going to fail like did you do that? No, it failed, and I don't think that's a good idea. Growth mindset is about the opposite of those people who have that sort of innate optimism and it doesn't have to be innate, you can learn it with time but it's about did you try something and what did you learn from it? And what we want to see to detect growth mindset is that when something failed, they don't say yeah, I just can't do that or that's impossible. 

You want to see those people who believe that maybe, even though it felt, maybe there's still a way to get it done, or if there's something I haven't done yet, I can see how I can get there. So, just for example, I might talk to someone who is an engineer and is looking to get into a different goal or different type of role in their career and I might ask them, for example, what do they think it would take to be a marketing manager at the company, even if they're not looking to get into my? And the reason I asked that is that, for I want to see if they can imagine themselves turning into managers in a Air, in an area that's completely far into them, and I want to see if they can even imagine it and how they would approach it. And if they can see themselves doing that, then I know that they probably have a better growth mindset than many people. When I was younger, I used to think that you know, as a geek, I can do anything that's related to business, but I learned that Pretty much anyone can learn to do anything. You might not be the best in the world at it, but I generally do believe that, if we want, we can learn and then, given our growth mindset, we can really become good at so many different things. 

That's how you see, by the way, lately, a lot of people who are technical, who are cto, is returned into CEOs, for example, and this is something that is possible once you have this growth mindset and you stop pigeonholing yourself to a very strict path. 

And this is something that's amazing because if you bring a few juniors who have this growth mindset, you're getting people who are usually cheaper, usually very energetic and motivated and you can also help in their molding. So they don't have to become accustomed to how you do things, but they actually grow in your company and the way you do things is the natural way for them. So they become amazingly effective and, yes, it's the best because you have to work on it. But if you, if you do it successfully, these tend to compound with time and you get more and more of these successes and I feel like it's like magic in a company that has more than A dozen or so people who are senior. Starting to bring on these people every once in a while can do wonders and really make the team more agile, more fresh and maintain a beginner's mindset. And this is like magic for some companies who feel like that. They are growing and and becoming, you know, heavier let's put it that way with like the big tech sort of teams. I saw them see. 

0:09:19 - Mehmet
Absolutely, and actually one of my guests that I interviewed, you know he mentioned in his book something very similar that after the team grew over a certain number of People who can handle at least you know they there are some senior people there, so Zach Retner, the city of Yembo and I say hi to him from from this episode. So so he, he mentioned in the book that he, he wrote growing fast about you know how he hired someone, even from non technical background, to be Into a software engineer just because he saw exactly what you mentioned. You know, he saw, you know this. You know the spark not only the spark, like he said, like this is someone I know that they would do whatever it takes to prove themselves that, yes, I can do this day, even if they do something wrong. They know, okay, it's about the gross mindset that you talked about. Even the whole growth mindset is all about yeah, it's, it's. You say, for example, I can do it, yet right, I failed. You know, I learned from my mistake, or not repeat it again. So this is you know. Of course, as you said, there are a lot of books, resources, about the growth mindset. You know what you mentioned now, with that really, really life example, I would say. 

Now, one of the other things which also attracted me, although, by the way, just for the sake of transparency, I never work as a city or I work with city o's and I was in in in the technology department. I would say so more or less. I know how city o's they think, especially because I know this is rated to take companies and I've seen it all because I work also with tech companies and we're used to see, you know, this story of every year they used to have one hackathon where they bring everyone To try to do the next big thing and you advocate that in order to make innovation and creativity, you need to make this as a habit. So how is it? And someone might say, but you know we don't have time to always do these kinds of activities. You know like we need the team to be focused on. You know this project. You know we have a big release coming out. We cannot do something like hackathon every, let's say, every month. So what's your take on this? I'm very interested in knowing the answer. Yeah, alright. 

0:11:49 - Aviv
So First of all, I think that hackathons are probably better than nothing, and most companies have a hackathon or two a year, but what they end up doing once you do these for a year or two is that they become cages of creativity. You're essentially telling your brilliant people that you spent so much effort and so much money bringing in, hiring, training. Hey, you can only be innovative. You can only be creative one day a year or two days a year, and I feel like that's just. It makes no sense, and what I want to see is teams bring in their creativity and novelty to the table Every day. And it's hard to start with that because usually, as you said, everyone has a deadline and we need to get things out. We need to show you how to do it, we need to get things out, we need to ship, we need to deliver and how can you start taking all of these risks, and there's a bunch of stuff that I advise companies to do and that I do with my clients to get creativity to the next stage. It starts usually with shifting from hackathons to. I call these intermissions. So think about three, four times a year. We take, not a day, or usually hackathons are not. Usually some startups do it During the night you know the evening which I think is terrible. We don't do those and instead we take three to four to five days, three to four times a year, where the entire team works together and they do this sort of an intermission, which is an innovation week. We work on things that we feel might work. You don't do you know the chores and the tasks and the tech, debt, etc. Because that's not innovation. That's just a bunch of small tasks you want to get to, but you do things that are really innovative, as in they might network. We might spend three days on this and realize this isn't useful. That's what innovation means. Right, if it's guaranteed to work, it's not really innovative. It's not an experiment, it's just an upper task, and if it's just another task, you can ask your boss to prioritize it. We're talking about real experiments. Sometimes this is just pure tech. I want to play with the new API, open AI created. Maybe we can do something interesting with that, and sometimes it's, for example, internal tooling. I saw so many companies where the engineers set with someone from customer success or from marketing or from sales and Created a small dashboard or a tool or some automation that made the lives of other people in the company better. So this is a week where we try to amass tech capital, be it new technological capabilities, be it tech tools that make other people in the company better, and not about creating more features for any users. That's one and a couple of more things. That can help with making innovation more habitual is, first of all, being okay with Some failures from time to time. 

As an, I don't want teams to feel like, if I didn't deliver a hundred percent of the plan Every quarter, I'm failing, and I see some companies that have that as sort of a track record. We deliver one half percent of the roadmap quarter after quarter, and some people think that's a good thing. I think that's a bad thing because it usually means that we are buffering ourselves too much. If we are way too Too much into the safe zone, we're not taking any risks. I want to see us embracing some risks so that people will be a bit more innovative. So if I'm I have a new task and I think you know this might be a good opportunity to try that thing. I don't want people to do it every time because that's gonna be too slow, but if we have a bit of a buffer here, then we can Start playing around with things from time to time and and tinker, and that's where you get real creativity. 

And lastly, I Really do believe that engineers as much as we love, you know, ask any engineers, they would all say they don't want any meetings, they want, want to talk to anyone. Most of them will tell you, just give me the Perfect product specs so I can just do the feature and I don't have to talk to anyone. And that could be amazing. And I get that because we feel like we just want to be productive and crank out code. But I do believe that if we connect them to the business and you know, we can put any software engineer on like a spectrum. On one end we have the, those who are very technical I don't care what the code does, I don't care about the company, I just want to program and rust. And on the other end of the spectrum we have people who are product oriented, would say I'm willing to write assembly code on a mainframe Because I care so much about what we are trying to achieve. 

And I'm always saying we need to push more people as a whole, not every Single engineer, but more of them towards the product end of the spectrum. So they care about the impact and they don't try and create the perfect code, but they try to do things that actually reach some business results and that's just a win-win win for everyone around. But to get people more towards that end of the spectrum, what we need to do is actually have more friction or more vision for the engineers with the rest of the company and with the users. So as much as I tend to try and minimize meetings, for example, I would still want to make sure the engineers see what the users are saying or Sit in some user interviews or listen to a product sick every Month or two. So I want them to really understand the product and understand the users and see what people are doing, and that's how you get those ideas for the intermissions, for example. So if I, as an engineer, understand what the marketing people are doing, I might have an idea for a marketing automation tool, and if I see what sales are doing, for example, I'll tell you. 

I'll take a minute to Tell you a real life story. I was working with a company that actually was working in real estate a startup Selling to real estate and they were tracking down neighborhoods and big cities in the United States and the engineer saw that the salespeople listening just had a list of buildings and they would go building by building, trying to solve their software. And one of the engineers said you know, give me two days, I'll try to do something. And he went off and created a small tool that basically Took some open government data and open data from the internet and put all of that on a map. So they took everyone that they had under leads and the sales software put it on a map and ranked it so you can see where there are clusters, like neighborhoods, where more, more buildings are more likely to be the Sort of client you're looking for. 

And all of a sudden you know the salespeople their heads like exploded because they can go To specific neighborhoods and actually in one day get a lot more done and get more deals closed. Then they used to before and this is not something they even could have thought about. But just because that engineer had enough friction with the salespeople to understand what they were doing, he had that idea and that's the sort of innovation I'm looking for. Right, not Everyone has to be Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. But these things, small internal tools, can really add up to a bunch of, you know, superpowers for everyone in the company, and this is what we need to do, and need to do more of. 

0:19:27 - Mehmet
That's great. But here the question I mean, like don't you think that leadership mentality need to change to, because you might have someone on the team who's willing to do this, but if the leadership you know, maybe some of them, they are not convinced, so the voice of you know, even the geeky one, as we call them, would not be heard. So how we can change actually the culture, let's say, to open the road for such, you know, you gave very nice example here for someone, even, you know, from a pure technical perspective able, was able to understand the business requirement, and then he or she can go and they can do something about it and get solved it. So how we can change the leadership mentality in your opinion? 

0:20:22 - Aviv
So this is actually something that I do a lot in my coaching, one-on-one with people. When I work with CTOs or VP's of engineering, I help them what I call move upstream. I help them realize that they're not just the ones in charge of the geeks, but they are real executives in a company. An executive has to understand the business right. If you are a tech executive, usually you have the tech part really, really great but the executive part being an executive is something that we need to learn and that doesn't mean that you're just a glorified manager with a nice style. You have to genuinely become an executive. Meaning moving upstream is making sure that you're in the room when there are discussions about the business, about the roadmap. You don't just wait to get the roadmap Right now. You know we're speaking right now, at the beginning of 2024. Some people are just going to be handed over the roadmap for 2024 and be told this is what you need to do, but a good executive is going to make sure that they are in the room as this roadmap is being formed. They help shape the strategy and just by sitting in that room first, you're already going to learn a lot and pick up on the important stuff for the business. If you're going to speak up and ask questions, you're going to understand even more of that and with time, if you're in the room and you're asking questions, you can also start making suggestions and shaping it. And this is something that I've seen people do with time, even if they're co-founders in the startup, but they're technical all the way to people who are hired executives who never did any business work with. With time, getting that confidence. 

And in the beginning of my second book, capitalizing your Technology, I talk about the importance of every company nowadays to realize that technology cannot be another tool. 

Technology needs to be something that's an integral part of a strategy. So you don't think about a strategy and then strap on the features you want for engineers to code, but you have to realize really what technology enables in your world and think about a strategy that encompasses that in a way that achieves maximal impact. And to do that properly, it means that you have to get your tech leaders involved in shaping the strategy. And if you have that understanding from the board and from the CEO, that realizes we need to pull tech leaders into the discussion, and if you have the tech leaders realizing that they need to move upstream, not just be delivery executives trying to deliver what we're at, but actually take part in what's decided in the room up above. Once you have those two parts working together, then it clicks. But sometimes we have to work on one of these to make it work. Sometimes we have to work on both, but it is possible and I've seen a lot of times in many, many countries. 

0:23:20 - Mehmet
Absolutely. I remember back in I think it was 2008, 2009,. When I started to say, guys, we need, you know, we need our, because I was a junior guy at that time. You know, and I'm saying you know, we need the technology leaders to sit in the board. Actually, it's not the board that needs to come and say what we need, because you know they used to see technology as especially I'm talking in general, of course as a cost center, right? 

So we know this like, oh, these are the guys who keep sending us the expensive bills, and I was saying, yeah, but we need to change this. Unfortunately, it took long, long time and still a lot of folks need to happen here. But, yeah, and this is also maybe why it's important for also, but to be fair I mean to be fair I think there is a small percentage, I would say, of the formula is on us as technical people, because, you know, and it's something, maybe by culture, maybe something I don't know, like the geeky guys, the techy guys, they don't understand business or they don't want to learn about business, and I think this is a big myth. And you know, if I can go back in time, I would go and, as a technology technologist, like I would go learn about sales, marketing, use cases, finance, you know, because this would help me from a technology perspective actually to make better products and to make it more appealing to customers. I would say so, yeah, I like this approach honestly, so 100% on this. 

Now, yeah, one of the things also you talked about in addition to this and you know this is again, it's an interesting one so you mentioned in the book the concept of scaling out rather than scaling up for profitable R&D growth. I want to understand more about this concept and how it's different from. You know, like the strategies that typically advocated by venture capitalists. Right, so we know like when you about the growth, you know the mind goes to the investor, so I want to hear your opinion on that. 

0:25:44 - Aviv
Yeah, sure. So I think that up until like a year ago, when the zero interest rate policy stopped being a thing, most startups funded by venture capital essentially had one mode of operation we take a bunch of money and we throw gobs and gobs of engineers at the problem and essentially half of the companies were in hyper growth and everyone had like 50% of their people just busy hiring more and more people, and that just doesn't make a lot of sense. 

This is like the scaling up sort of way where you know, some people called their sort of scale ups because they were just growing and growing, and that's as we now see and as happened. That's no way to create profitable, real businesses fast. That's a way of creating businesses that burn a lot of venture capital money fast, and it's also usually not how you get a lot of impact fast, like I have some examples that I love to think about, like WhatsApp. When they were sold to then, facebook had about 13 engineers and over 100 million users, and this is think back to an age where you had to have two really native apps. You didn't have all the frameworks we have now, you didn't have AWS and all the cloud tools, and still they did that with about a dozen engineers. And the same, by the way, with Instagram, which had a similar number of engineers and tens and tens of millions of users when they were acquired. Or, even more recently, you look at Tesla and Elon Musk's operations and what he did. Right now, I don't think Elon Musk is a great manager in many respects, but one thing you got a hand to the guy took Twitter from many thousands of engineers to less than a thousand, and the site is still running and we're seeing new features, and I believe that this concept of just scaling up doesn't make sense and contrast the dozen engineers working at WhatsApp and Instagram, with tens of millions of users, with the fact that nowadays, any SaaS that does barely nothing, that has like a few database tables and in some screens, has 20, 30, 40 engineers and they're like where's all the work going? 

And Scaling out is the concept of we realize that we want to work in smaller teams that are focused on business value and we realize that the systems that we're building have to be systems that allow for profitable growth. So you can't have, if we try and make a graph of it, where, as the business grows and the number of users grow, we have R&D grow in a way that's linear with it, because that means that you're always assuming the business succeeds, you're always going to have to get more and more and more engineers in a rate that's not sustainable. What we want to do is create a system where R&D realizes that the most important thing for us is to ensure that, if business really takes off, we are not the bottom line. We never have to bring in 10 more engineers to make sure that the business can do what it needs to do. And then this is once you realize that we're not going to scale up, but we're going to scale up. We're going to have this part of the system work really well and then engineers are going to move out and work on another part of it. 

Once you have that mindset, you build systems differently. You don't have the assumptions that we're always going to have a bunch of engineers to think of this or that you build systems that are more robust, that actually enable the business side of the company to be free of these sorts of stuff. So, literally earlier today I was talking to a CEO who told me yeah, we're closing seven figure deals, but all my team has just sucked into working on scale for all 2024, the way it seems right now. And I told them precisely this you have to find a way to disconnect the number of engineers you have and the amount of work you have to put in with the scale of the business, because they need to realize we need to fix this, at least for the next order of magnitude of growth and then be able to work on new stuff. You can constantly be, like you know, building another step as the business is growing. That's what you do, maybe during the first year or so of a startup, but not when you're creating a real, solid business that's growing. 

0:30:28 - Mehmet
Absolutely. I was on a call last year it was a VC pitch call, right, and you know the question came. You know, and some people they don't believe that you can sometimes do more with less. There's a misconception. I would say that in order to make something really big, you need to have these big teams and all the skill sets that you can do it. Yeah, I believe once you become a big giant, maybe like I don't know, just to mention names only like Google, meta, you know the others, microsoft yeah, maybe I think it would make sense, you know, to have this large scale, as we call it R&D. But, you know, when you are a small startup, I believe you need also to think about how you spend your money and you don't want to spend the money also in the wrong direction. 

And unfortunately, I've seen this couple of times where companies they go, as you said, especially before the pandemic and during the pandemic, when they start to hire a lot of people, putting them on some features, and then also discovered we don't need that. And the story of Twitter, which is now called X, people thought literally and I was watching oh, the site will stop. You know, the app will stop. Elon is firing every single senior engineer there, so no one will be able to take care. There's no site reliability engineers, nothing. And then still the platform. Till the moment we are recording this episode, it's still working up and running and they are shipping. I think, yeah, I think they are shipping every two weeks some new features also, so they have big ambitions. 

Now the question that also, you know, come to mind when it comes also to do some kind of balance, because we're talking about the balance right. So how, you know, from a CTO perspective and maybe it's also a, I know, in some places it's the same person like the CPO or Chief Product Officer so how we can make a balance between you know, a hype that is outside right, done by something like AI. You mentioned a couple of minutes back open AI and someone saw an API which is cool. They want to try it so how we can balance to make sure that actually we are integrating the right technologies at the right moments. I think this is something we didn't discuss much before and I don't see a lot of, you know, people talking about it. So what's your take on this? I mean? 

0:33:24 - Aviv
Yeah, so there are a few levels here of looking into new possible technology. First of all, there's like the smaller scale tech or the really, really bleeding edge stuff. So small scale. As an engineer, I saw a new tool. I think it can save me some time. I think it can be nice, in which cases I'm like as an engineer, you should be able to make the case for why you think this makes sense. It's probably going to add X amount of hours or days to this big feature and, with product, your product counterpart, have a real business discussion about what this might achieve and the cost of the extra time and get the time to do it. 

This is not easy, right? I'm saying something. It's simple, but it's not necessarily easy, because it means that engineering and product need to be able to speak to one another in a way that's collaborative and not adversarial. That's not always easy, but once you have that, the small stuff takes care of themselves. Then we have the bleeding edge stuff that no one knows if it's even going to work. You know, open AI has something new and just might be useless or very hard or whatever. 

Usually I try to have those happen during the intermissions and, as I said, we have like every three to four months, and during these, engineers can have these almost a week of working on something and showing at the end of it something real to the world, not like a demo that you have after a list of a day, like we have in hackathons, but you have a small sprint working on it and then you can show it to product, you can show it to your managers and say, here is what I did in a week and I think this would make sense or realize it didn't work. 

So, thinking of new ideas for the next intermission and that's level two. And level three is the level of the executive leadership, where we look at the next year or two or three and we're saying, technology wise, what's probably gonna happen and do we need to have dedicated teams working on this? Maybe it's a research team, maybe it's the development team doing it as part of the product development right now. But considering things, so, a year ago people probably didn't have AI on the roadmap. Now, after 2023 is done and we have so many tools, I'm guessing more companies have AI as a real part of the roadmap because they realized some use cases for them. 

Another example would be because I have clients in crypto. You know that there are different regulations that are probably coming up in crypto over the next year and if that's the case, start thinking right now as a company what do we need to do? Technology right now so that when those regulatory changes happen, we're ready. We don't stop working for three months, but we actually have a solution ready. And that's like a tech decision based on your understanding of the strategy as a whole and of the market. So the level the single engineer, the individual contributor talking about a small tool, the team thinking about an idea, at the level of the intermission, to check it out and see if it makes sense and then, if it works out, solid to product, for example. And then at the higher levels, where we're talking about big technological shifts, where we are very business and market and world driven and not working from the inside about the technology we already have. 

0:36:54 - Mehmet
That's great. Now, as we are approaching the end of it, what are your advices for someone who's interested to become in a leadership role, like a CTO? So anything from your experience you can give them a piece of advice, I would say, especially because things are changing very fast. So what you can tell them. 

0:37:23 - Aviv
Yeah, if you're looking to get a tech leadership, tech executive role, I can say that, first of all, what CEOs and co-founders and startups are looking for is someone who is not just waiting to be told what to do, not someone who's going to be a great executor of ideas, but someone who seems to take the initiative. So, right now, in your current role and when you're interviewing, come up with ideas. But even in your current role, start coming up to those above you and, instead of putting something on their plate just saying, hey, we need to think about this, we need to think about that, do the opposite. Find something that you see that is a problem. Have an idea for how you can try and fix it and come up to them and take it off their plate or suggest you do it, say I know that this is an issue. I have an idea, let me take care of it. I just need two weeks, or I need that guy for a week, or something like that. Once you take that initiative, you really yourself, you get the experience of taking the lead, being a real leader, not just another manager, and you will have a track record of things that will really make it easier for you to sell your leadership, to get the promotion or to get a new job as that role? 

In second, always, always, always, think about the business. So, right now, start talking to people in your company who are in sales, in marketing customer success, really understand what they're doing. Because I'm guessing you have the tech part nailed down. You don't need to be focusing too much on that. Yeah, ai changes. Okay, learn about that as you go along, but the thing you really need to do to get that next leap is open yourself up to the rest of the company, the rest of the world when it comes to business, and focusing on these two like for your own personal growth in 2024, can really help enable you to become an effective tech executive. 

0:39:27 - Mehmet
That's a great advice and I think we've covered a lot and great insights to give us today. Aviv Final thing I asked my guest where people can find more about you and about the book. 

0:39:46 - Aviv
Yeah, sure. So I have a newsletter coming out for free every week at avivbenyosefcom, and on that website you can also see my two books and links to my Twitter, where I write something almost every day, et cetera. 

0:40:00 - Mehmet
Oh, that's great. I will make sure that the links are in the show notes. Well, aviv, really it was an amazing I would say discussion with you. Thank you for all the insights. 

It's like I felt it's a masterclass condensed in a very short time, but I think what you mentioned are key components for success, for both startups and scale-ups as well, and even for any technology company. And also I liked the way, especially at the end, when you mentioned about you need to hire someone who can know how to do it. Just back to the first question we started with to know what they can do by themselves and this reminds me of what Steve Jobs when he said we hire smart people to tell us what we should do, not to tell them what to do, which is obviously is the best leadership ever that we've seen. Again, like agree or disagree with the guy, same what we talked about Elon Musk. We can agree or disagree with these guys, but at the end of the day, they are example of leadership in technology. 

Aviv, thank you again very much for being here today, and the way I end my episodes is I like to thank the audience for your feedbacks, for your messages that you keep sending me and we are in this new season in 2024, and we are going to see different topics coming. We'll talk to them, for example, about mainly our NDE and the CTO role and how the team should be handled, and we're going to have a lot of topics around technology, startups and entrepreneurship. So keep tuned about this. If you are first time listening to us, you can subscribe whatever podcasting app you use and please tell your friends and colleagues about it, and I hope you are enjoying the content. Thank you very much for tuning in. We'll meet again very soon. Thank you, bye-bye.