#283 Innovative Leadership: Coaching Tech Founders Towards Success with Vladimir Baranov

0:00:01 - Mehmet
Hello and welcome back to a new episode of the CTO show with Mehmet. Today I'm very pleased to have with me joining from the US, Vladimir Baranov. Vladimir, thank you very much for making it on the show the way as I was telling you. I like to do it. I keep it to my guests to introduce themselves. The reason is, I believe no one can introduce someone else better than themselves. So the floor is yours. 

0:00:23 - Vladimir
Well, there's always exception of your mother. Hi everybody, mehmet, thank you so much for having me on your show. My name is Vladimir Baranov and I'm an executive coach for tech leaders and founders. My career spans from doing anything in robotics, financial technology and space technologies, across which I had a pleasure managing, incorporating with a lot of technology folks, and I got to learn, and all that learnings I was able to incorporate into my current executive coaching practice. 

0:00:56 - Mehmet
Cool, that's perfect. Now let's start from your intro, actually, Vladimir. So how do you define first the executive coaching, especially in the context of tech startups? 

0:01:13 - Vladimir
Absolutely, absolutely. And I think one thing I want to mention is that coaching has many definitions between different practitioners and for me personally, I feel it's more like a co-pilot, it's a second brain that you have as you're talking to the coach, exploring the possibilities in your world. And I want to break down a little bit definition twice for the listeners and viewers, if there is any confusion. There's generally four categories of the type of advisory or coaching that is available Mentoring, consulting, therapy and coaching. In consulting, you pay somebody and that person provides you a product exactly as you wanted. In mentoring, you're asking somebody to train you, sharing their experience and telling you how you want to build based on their experience. In therapy, we go into your past and try to figure out how the past made you who you are. And then there's coaching. Coaching is before therapy but after mentoring. So that means I'm there but not offering any consultations. I'm there as a co-pilot, helping you navigate through whatever obstacle. You're there, but within the context of technology, if that makes sense. 

0:02:31 - Mehmet
Yeah, absolutely. Now, you know, it's nice. You just made the difference between coaching and mentoring, actually, because I think and I believe people mix them sometimes, right. So how do you balance? You know, because in coaching, you mentioned, you are a co-pilot, right? So what is the limit? You know that usually you'd like to put from, you know, to balance between offering the guidance versus, also, at the same time, because you work with tech leaders, right, so you work with someone who's supposed to be a leader. So how do you do this balancing between, just you know, taking the driver's seat versus letting them actually take that direction, if you get what I mean? 

0:03:30 - Vladimir
No, absolutely so. In coaching, the client is always in the driver's seat. A coach who's familiar with context let's say technology context or startup context that I coach in is that I know the lay of the land, but I do not give direct advice in that session. As a coaching responsibility, my responsibility is to say, hey, what about that hill, what do you think about that hill and what do you think is behind it? And when the person replies back, we can take that answer and let's say, rearrange it. Okay, you gave me a vision of that hill. How's that vision of that hill will help you get to the place where you're going? 

And, as you mentioned, we are all leaders and we're kind of supposed to know what we're doing. But what in my experience has happened, and also with my own leadership experience? It's always good to have somebody else to look at what you're seeing, to look at your facts and see what other possibilities are there and what other conclusions can be made. And through coaching and through inquisitive questioning, we're able to explore and discover within your context of what the possibilities are. Because when I am coaching, I don't always know the details of what things and events that person who is being coached is experiencing, and only they would be able to pull up all the details. If I'm starting advising just pulling things from my experience, I'm in a little bit of a danger of giving advice which does not necessarily match the context. So it is my responsibility to keep that consulting to the most minimum. 

0:05:14 - Mehmet
Got you Now at what stage, Vladimir, usually you advise people to start having coach. 

0:05:22 - Vladimir
Before they want to start coaching. Generally, it's a good idea to be exposed to such practice because, as leaders, we need to be aware of all the different tools and approaches in order for us to navigate a challenge. And, as I teach my daughter and also as I teach others, exposure is number one thing that helps us understand how to solve the problem. We don't necessarily need to understand all the details about the approach, but knowing that it's there, knowing that you have somebody to call, knowing that you can read something about that topic in the context, helps you that. So, to answer your question, exposure to all methodologies, including coaching, as early as possible is better as you are venturing into the depth of leadership. 

0:06:10 - Mehmet
That's fantastic. Now, maybe a little bit odd question. I would say how I can measure the impact of this coaching practice. So how I can, if I'm coming to a coach like yourself, Vladimir, so how I can start to see improvements and, from the same time, if I am the coach, how do I know that whoever I'm coaching is also following the path that we want them to be on? 

0:06:48 - Vladimir
That's a fantastic question and let's say, for those who have not been exposed to coaching before the stereotypes generally come up, is that it's some through through highly emotional, very filling, based not necessarily factual experience, and maybe some of it is true from stereotypical point for therapy. But coaching sessions are usually incredibly structured. For each session the client has to bring a specific topic, maybe a couple, out of which we select one or two, and that's what we focus on Initially in the session. We also establish goals for that conversation. So at the end of the conversation we know whether we have actually accomplished that goal or not. And as the client goes through the facts, through the emotions, through the sessions, through the questions, it is a coach's responsibility at the very end to wrap up to see what client has learned over the session and also any sort of commitments that client can make in the relationship to the specific goal over time that client selects. 

Now what happens after that session? In the following session we get to review all those commitments that the client made and see whether they were completed or not. So you can see we do dive in emotionally, we do that factually, we do have exploratory in the problem, but when we emerge. We have a concrete list of things that the client is committed to accomplishing. That allows us to measure the success. So those metrics are both used by the coach and also used by the client. 

Now I just want to make sure, I want to mention something Coach is not there to judge where you have completed your tasks or not, because you're a co pilot, you're not a manager, you're not a judge, you're not a mentor, and in that way, client holds all the responsibility for commitments and, let's say, for the following meeting, if the commitments were not completed, it is up to client to select, let's say, a topic mentioning like hey, listen, I think I would like more accountability, or I would like to figure out why I was unable to go through my commitments. And then, as a coach, you can go ahead and work through those details and see how those commitments can actually be completed for next time. 

0:09:11 - Mehmet
That's fantastic, Vladimir. 

Now, I'm not sure if you would agree with me or no, but especially for people in tech, and we are like kind of stubborn people and sometimes we say why even we need someone to coach us, and sometimes, you see, I'm talking here also about myself as well, at some stage in my life, like I'm the genius that knows everything, why I need coach, and I'm sure, like as someone who I've seen a lot of Vladimir. 

So what are usually other challenges you see? So the first thing, like I can know from myself, and then, of course, I need to work on my own mentality and the growth mindset and all this and to figure out, yeah, I need some people to start to mentor me and then maybe to coach me and so on. But what are, like some of the challenges you see, especially in tech leaders, whether in established organizations or in startup they face? To figure out that actually they need some coaching and how you tailor your approach, because you mentioned something like a few seconds ago, like you have also the personality trait as well. So how do you manage this aspect of different personalities, different mentalities and so on? 

0:10:30 - Vladimir
Absolutely. That's a great question. I hope I'm not gonna fill up the rest of the podcast with my answer. 

0:10:36 - Mehmet
That's fine. 

0:10:40 - Vladimir
We are all humans from the same genetical line, so in the sense we are all smart enough. If you take a couple of us, put us in the petri dish to do a simulation and over thousands of years we're probably gonna end up in a similar version of civilization that we live now. So in the sense we accept that we all have the potential to figure out the things over time. The big question is how much time do you have to figure them out? And that is the main question that I asked the technologists who are merging from individual contributor phase into more leadership managerial how much time do they have to figure out how to solve the problem? Because there's a great pressure on technologists who, from early educational level, have been probably commended for their mathematical skills, for their engineering skills, for their logic skills, for their puzzle solving skills, all of the work which they have done on their own. So that means that in isolation between them and the puzzle, between them and the problem, they figured out how to do that well and they try to transfer the same kind of learning experience and problem solving experience to when it comes to problem people, problem solving, and it doesn't necessarily work because the problem does not get hurt when you try to solve it incorrectly. The puzzle doesn't get again upset when you're not putting it correctly. So when you're trying to do people management, it's very crucial that you are doing things as good and as perfectly as possible during the initial phases. 

Now that transition is an important one that I want to explore with the technology leaders, where they don't need to learn a lot of things from scratch. Like, in the same way that we're not going to a library to search for something that we're using Google, it's okay to go to mentors, it's okay to go to consultants, it's okay to go to coaches for various difference of problem solving ways to get to the place where you actually end up with that learning. We are really having an argument over which learning curve is best for you in the moment. If you need something to be figured out in these weeks, then probably it's not something that you should be doing by yourself. It's good to have a supporting staff. 

If you have all the time on this, if you have a thousand years to learn that craft, to learn that interpersonal relationship with every single person and the way that it's supposed to, then that's up to you. 

You go ahead and you do that. But no matter how smart you are, no matter how experienced you are, there's always places in our life where we're experiencing that other perspectives are very important. Remember the internet meme couple of years ago about the blue dress and gold dress? There's no way, if you're a blue dress person, you could have figured out that there's another person out there in the world who has a view of the dress being gold, unless the person stood up and told you that they have that perspective. As a leader, you kind of have to guess what perspectives are in your staff, in the people who report to you before you make a statement, before you make a project, and having that openness, open-mindedness or having consulted or coached on this kind of issues before helps you understand and empathize with the people that you work in order to be that great leader, if that makes sense. 

0:14:35 - Mehmet
Sorry, that's 100% makes sense, Vladimir, and I love the lost piece, and I think a lot of us, at different stage and times, we forget to look outside and try to see the world from different perspectives. So we always look at from, I would say, the perspective that we can see and we don't go and ask for feedback, and I think this is one of the main thing that great leaders they do. Actually, they seek the feedback from other people, which I think it's something that every leader should do. Now, from your point of view, how do you think, on the long term right, an impact can be left through a leadership coaching, especially when I'm talking here, maybe founders in the startups that they might not immediately see results, and we talked about how you can measure this. But what do you aim usually to see on the long run when you engage with someone for coaching? 

0:15:55 - Vladimir
Absolutely. I think the first word which comes to mind to answer the question is autonomy. It's how we learn to walk, it's how we learn to drive and, for very few of us, how we learn to fly. The first steps are stumbles, but they get us in the direction in which we wanna go. But over time we take off those training wheels or we release a hand of our parent and we're able to go on our own, thus achieving full autonomy in that task. 

And that is also responsibility of a coach, where the client will come in with a specific topic which they want to get growth on. We have couple conversations and over time there is that autonomy within that topic that the client can now lean on, because the client developed it themselves without me telling me exactly how to do that. Over time they can leverage in the future. But also there's an introduction of inkling of a different kind of autonomy, because once you get exposed to a couple of coaching sessions, there is enough retrospection where each individual tries thinking what if I start asking the similar type of questions for any new topic? 

0:17:18 - Mehmet
that comes up in my life. 

0:17:20 - Vladimir
So that's a different kind of autonomy. That's kind of the exploration, questionable, inquisitiveness, autonomy that is left so over time, while we do resolve some of the initial topics, we're also introducing new concepts that make it even better for the person to approach the topics in the future. 

0:17:40 - Mehmet
Fantastic. Now I want to shift a little bit to something you know, another topic that I believe we, by the way, we didn't discuss it and I think it's underrated and it's it's somehow related to coaching, because I believe if leaders get this, they will have better operations, they will have better results in their organizations. And what I'm talking about here, Vladimir, is you know the interplay of technology and organizational behavior. Right, and the place I want to start from is you know the technologies influence on organizational behavior. So, from your experience, how you know, you know you see technology shaping or redefining organizational behavior, especially in startup environment. 

0:18:34 - Vladimir
Absolutely. I think it also depends who are the individuals are that are part of that initial startup makeup. Generally in startup, we like to break down people into two groups the non-technology people and technology people. When you take technology people and including myself with immediate inkling of feeling is that technology is a solution to everything. 

And forgetting the user as the important component of that solution. We look as technologists on the technology itself as an isolated, perfect product that we have built and it has all the answers in the world. From the way that we see the, the technologists see the universe, and a lot of technologists, a lot of people rolling out from school or from incubators or pre-IDA stages again including myself I had to go through those stages. 

We think that technology in the end will solve all the problems if you use it the way that we think it should be used. And then we take this technology to the market. We take that technology to the first users and nobody's using it in a way that we want it to be used. 

And I think it's one of the first learnings that technology startup founders are getting is that how important it is to talk to the users first, how important it is to talk to the clients first, how important it is to solve the human end of the problem with imperfect technology and then iterate after, versus building a perfect technology solution for our vision of how the world works and then pushing it onto users so they are using it. 

We see examples of it in a large enterprise organizations which do not have a lot of budget to optimize for each UX UI experience, be that government or a large enterprise and user suffers as a part of that. 

And going back to our original set of configuration of the startup, another combination that you have is you have a non-techy person and you have a technology person. 

There you have a little bit better setup because in an immediate starting point you have a person who introduces the person interface, the non-techy person, to the technologies, but you get conflict immediately because you have to resolve the differences of how this two people view the world. 

So the contrast that with, let's say, two technologies starting the company, where they are aligned, but they're aligned not necessarily in the right direction, and the second setup is where you have two humans which are slightly disaligned in the world view. Now it's a problem, but also it's a great thing in its making, because if that conflict is resolved, those two individuals learn how to cooperate, going forward through their differences, not their similarities, how to merge the ideas of the human interface with the technology interface in order to achieve that solution that the end user wants. So technology there going back to your question is acting as the proxy to the solution that we're trying to bring to the user, and whether it's implemented with one vision or the other vision, that's the crux of the problem that we have at the initial stages of the startup. 

0:22:34 - Mehmet
And I think, Vladimir, this is why, in every single book I read and every single article, they always advise founders, especially technology founders or tech founders, to find someone who has the skills that they don't have, which are maybe the human skills, maybe sales, marketing, hiring, and all this so they can complete each other. Of course, like I know for a fact, like and I have a lot of stories, you know where they clash at the beginning, maybe two or three founders, because they come from you know different worlds, I would say. But at the end, as you said, once things start to settle, they start to see their personalities completing each other. So it becomes like a, you know, an orchestra or a harmony of people working together. Now, back to your point. 

I think the human element is very, very important, you know, and the aspect for this. So, maybe in startups, it's easy because you know the number of people we need to deal with is small, and you mentioned about enterprises. So, usually, like, when we talk about large enterprises and I know that I focus on startups, but I again, I always believe in, you know, putting an end in mind or thinking about the end in mind. So, down the road, what are like some of the strategies that you know the founders they can put so they keep maintaining this balance when they hire more people and they start to scale and they start to grow up. 

0:24:09 - Vladimir
Absolutely. That's a great question. There is, I think, no perfect solution because every industry is different and industry, not technology, usually dictates the culture of the organization. There are certain things about culture that could be scaled and certain aspects of the culture that cannot be. When you have a small organization of two, three, five, 10, 20 people, where everybody knows everybody's first names, their children names, their parents names, it's much easier to naturally have a human bond with everybody in the organization and carry that mission across. When it comes to a large organization, so thousands of 10,000, so 100,000 people, it's impossible to even know the first 200 people which are working on the floor, even if they you are working the same floor. You might not be working the same function on the same project, and so on. What some of the great companies have done at scale and that's probably having identified those unique cultural characteristics and attributes that actually define the brand of the company and perpetuating them throughout the organization through training, through onboarding and, importantly, through practicing of those by the leaders of the organization. 

So if let's say you have a value with client is number one and what. I'm not going to argue whether that's a good value, not value. But if at some point leadership in the organization does not practice that value, it deteriorates the brand of the company internally and anybody else who is not in the leadership looks at them, says oh, it's just words, it really has no meaning. But when you have organizations where the leaders are practicing the values of the company day to day, in the emails, in writings, in speeches and appearances and their actions, that cultural cohesion become much stronger. Now you will never get to the place of strong bond as it is in a small organization of 20, but you can at least know and expect that people in various parts of a larger organization would be looking at the same leadership practices and you're gonna be able to cooperate them with expected matter, with expected cultural attributes. 

0:26:41 - Mehmet
Yeah, so here I think we go back maybe to the, because you talked about leadership. I think this is where the coaching become a very important part of that, right, Vladimir? 

0:26:52 - Vladimir
Absolutely absolutely. 

0:26:55 - Mehmet
So now let's go back to the leadership a little bit, and you mentioned like something regarding the culture. So now, out of curiosity, and I'm not sure if coaching can fix this problem, but I gonna tell you my own I would say observations. You mentioned people might agree or not about the value customer first, all this. So usually in any startup environment or any startup, they put some let's call it vision plus culture, right. They say we're gonna be the number one to do this, we're gonna be customer first, we're gonna be this, that. Now, that's fine. And then they have also their own internal, from organization perspective, their culture as well. So we see this and I asked a couple of people and there are different opinions. Now, okay, first year everything is fine, working perfectly, no problem. And then we start, they reach a point where everything start to change, although, like, still the founders, they talk yeah, we still need the value. We will be the company that will be iconic, we will be the company that we want people to work for us for tens of years. We want to be. 

I'm just mentioning some, I'm making that out of my head, but if you come to the reality, to the ground, as we say, to the field, we see something completely different. Why do you think this happens, Vladimir? And do you think really and you know, some people told me you know what Mehmet like once the organization scale, there is no way that you can keep this culture, things gonna start to deviate. I believe, yeah, but we know we can still stick to the basics, but we don't. Unfortunately, especially, you know, in this time I'm not seeing that a lot. So, first, why do you think this shift happens? And really, is there a way to keep it, to make it, even if we are like 50,000 employee, 100,000 employee, we can go back and stick to what we started the company with from culture, values and vision perspective. 

0:29:04 - Vladimir
That's a fantastic question and it actually keeps me up at night sometimes. I think that culture is an emerging property of the individuals which are part of the group. If you take any two unique individuals and you put them in a room, regardless of what their beliefs are, the implementations of those beliefs and values within there, between those two individuals, would be different. If you take any other two individuals and you put them in a different room, even if their definitions of the words would be the same, it's just. There's so many things that is in our head, so much experience, so many different visions that we have, so when it comes to incorporating that blue dress or gold dress, it will come out differently. There are some videos out there, I think on Instagram, where there's a piece of paper stuck to the person's back and you're trying to draw an image and the other person tries to interpret of what they're doing with this. 

So kind of that broken telephone situation is happening here when we're trying to implement the culture. Now I think innately we have all good intentions for what we want us to experience and for the others who work in our company to experience. But at the end it's gonna be slightly different between the two groups. So what happens as the company grows and new people get added all of a sudden we need to make room for interpretation of that new person joining. So that means the culture that starts to emerge between the two people has to change when the third one comes in, fourth one comes in, fifth one comes in and so on. But over time each additional person makes a smaller impact on the culture of the organization because that culture has already been predefined. So in the beginning the new journeyer says like hey guys, let's do culture this way and the organization says okay, let's change for that. Or when the last person comes in and said 20,000 person organization, they come in and say like hey guys, tell me what the culture is so I can adjust myself to that and be the most productive. 

I don't think that small group values can exist in a large group without making adjustments. If you take a basketball team which is always five people, it's hard for that basketball team to identify as a full soccer team which is double its size. Now, it's a very simple argument. There are certain restrictions for identity when it comes with certain values. You're fast and nimble, but it's hard to be a hundred thousand person organization which is fast and nimble because you have different attributes of culture of a hundred thousand organization. A hundred thousand organization usually has things like reliable, powerful, could be effective, scalable, fundable and so on. Those attributes cannot be translated to a smaller organization which definitely is agile, definitely is extremely flexible, definitely more 24-7, definitely can operate on all different frequencies at the same time, while burning the founders out, of course. I think some values, individual personal values like kindness, could be translated, but some other attributes I don't think are scalable because they're no longer applied to the identity of that in-group person who is part of the larger organization. That makes sense, yeah makes sense. 

0:32:52 - Mehmet
But I think there should be some transparency, Vladimir, from leadership perspective. And of course, I don't blame especially first-time founders, because they never had to scale a business before I can fully understand. And this is where the coaching is needed, I believe, because someone needs to tell them like, hey, down the road. We believe that this culture I'm not saying it's bad, but down the road it will not be applicable anymore or it will not make sense anymore and people will actually mock you if you still repeat this. Now you mentioned something, and I have. 

Usually I don't make long comments, but you mentioned something I like too much is when you gave the example of two people and actually, even if they have the same belief, actually they're going to maybe behave different way. And I always, when I see someone comes to an organization and says, hey, we did this at X company and we saw a huge success, I said, hey, that could be true. Of course it's true, you have your record there, but you need to understand like it's like it is three-dimensional thing, so you have the X, y and Z, so at any point of time you can be in the same location. But the time has changed, you know, and people forget, you know, this fourth dimension thing, and I think if we apply the same processes, the same concepts, I'm not saying they're going to fail, but they forget to assess. You know, are we actually 100% in the same location as we were doing this before? And I hate when people come and say this is how we used to do it and this is how we used to do every time we did. 

I'm not saying you didn't win, but you forget that your coordinates from time, location, you know market conditions. We can put a lot of coordinates over there, right, it cannot be the same one that we are talking about today. No way. You know, like the people are different. Maybe the product, service, whatever we're trying to promote, is completely different. So this is why you know, it was really, you know, something that clicked immediately in my mind. So thank you for bringing this. 

0:35:05 - Vladimir
Absolutely, and actually I have to add something to that. 

0:35:08 - Mehmet
Please. 

0:35:09 - Vladimir
That's the main reason why I named my company Human Interfaces, because every person and this is a technical language now, so I didn't say technical, I understand each person has their own language and their own protocol, their own cadence. 

So it's an interface that another person has to convert the protocols and adapt to. If you want to have a visual picture, everybody is like an octopus with a million tentacles when they meet and only some of those tentacles will connect to each other and communicate in the language that those tentacles permit. But now, if we scale it at the level of organization, we're hidden upon the restriction which you just mentioned. Well, it did work at previous organization. It's only because a specific set of configurations over a million possibilities have connected to make that result and it was also iterated and perfected over time so you wouldn't have an organizational learning curve has already been done. So when you're transferring it in a new organization, while it is great to know that it's possible to be done in a different way, you might not have all the Lego bricks to put that kit together to look at perfectly the way it was before. 

0:36:23 - Mehmet
Right, and I think leaders should acknowledge this because, unfortunately, what I start to see, Vladimir as well and this is a feedback I'm hearing also from a lot of people, and you know, this is, again, while I believe, having you might or might not agree, I don't know you might need to have multiple coaches on multiple things at the same time. So you know, they bring someone and they say, hey, they tell the founder you have to do this. And then the founder said, yeah, I have to do this. And then you know they spend time and they put pressure on people and then still things not moving. Oh, you know what? The team is not good, we need to get rid of the team. And then go bring in a new, like, let's say, sales team. And then the new sales team comes oh, it's the front end manager, front line managers, who need to be changed. 

And then you know they keep trying to justify their concept, which I'm not saying it doesn't work, but it doesn't work for this particular startup, right, so it worked for other startups, because they are in different domain. They, they, they. Their dynamics is different. But I feel sorry for these founders that you know they blindly and you mentioned this before, when we're talking about coaching, that they are in the driver seat, they need to take the decision, they need to assess, they need to measure, but some I think that some of them they become reluctant and you know they say, okay, let the coach or whoever I bring the consultant do the job. I will review it every quarter and see what we need to do about it, and I think this is very, very dangerous. 

0:37:57 - Vladimir
Absolutely, and let me comment on that. Going to the beginning, I completely agree that multiple types of coaches in very different industry or just experiences, extremely useful. Going back to the concept of exposure, you know there's light at the end of the tunnel. You don't have to walk through the whole tunnel, you just need to know that there is light at the end of that tunnel. 

Then you're ready to invest the time and money and whatever you need in the effort to get to the end of that tunnel. But if you don't know the tunnel exists or the light exists at the end of the tunnel, it's harder to proceed. And for your second point, it's hard to be in a driver seat, especially if you haven't done that before. And I've been there and I'm doing that regularly, month in month, in different kind of situations. Because, again, context changes, people changes, problems change. What is important to figure out in those moments is how can you make a decision without having exposure to the experience? 

One of the methodologies that worked for me and I learned it from others is that when you are trying to make a decision between a couple of things that you have not experienced with, best is to compare them against each other. So if you are trying to, if you're a founder, a technology founder, who has no experience in legal, how do you find a good lawyer, right? So you don't know anything about contracts, you don't know anything about clauses. How do you compare them? Hire three of them at the same time, have them do one contract, go through that human experience, and then they have a fourth one. Verify what they've done. 

Now will you become a better lawyer? I don't know. Maybe not, but what you see is the properties and features of the things that are emerging during that contrast where in the conversations of lawyers that you can realize proxies as assessment of their intellect or their sorry, not intellect their talent when it applies to the illegal experience of the legal product that you need to receive back from them. It's the same concept, unfortunately, when it comes to referrals, because referrals only tell you what has worked in the past in the other organization and their context. It's much better than no referral. But still kind of the same system applies for you to pick the better person who can solve the problems for you in the context that you don't have much about. 

0:40:25 - Mehmet
Yeah, Vladimir, one more thing because we come to close Now. I know because you have the chance to work with multiple founders and multiple clients of yours, so this out of curiosity from you know, trends perspective. So what are some of the trends in technology that you believe it's coming and it's, you know, being affecting and leaving impact, and how you know for you as coach, you know you get the exposure to see these technologies coming and how it might affect our future. 

0:41:08 - Vladimir
I'll be a little bit biased but, anything around personal development technology has been making a tremendous impact on the cultures of organization. I think, as the world, and not just technologies, we have evolved to respect thoughts as a different dimension that has to be navigated can be navigated with help of others. It's not our how shall I say? I don't wanna say your responsibility, but it we don't have to be in our heads, our own heads, all the time. 

It's okay to let other people enter heads through the help of coaching, mentorship or therapy in order to navigate this world, because our brain is incredibly complex and the way it's processing information is not very how shall I say? It's not always intuitive like you're using your own brain to analyze others, and it's good to include other people as part of the process, and I think it's a very new thing for the world at large. 

And we're also seeing a lot of technologies which are trying to help us, whether it be chat, gpt, coaching or type of coaching, where now virtual coaching is available over the internet to majority of the population who want to try this kind of thing, and if you take five, 10 years ago, that technology has not been available. I think what we have right now is actually shortage of therapists and coaches to address all the needs. And that gets me excited about the future that we're gonna be more sensitive, we're gonna be more understanding, we're gonna be more empathetic of others when we are talking, when we're discussing, when we're building, which makes a much better world. 

0:42:50 - Mehmet
Yeah, I'm also excited about that because, at the end, we need to see more breakthrough technologies that can make our lives better, and it's like no more exciting time, as they say, than this, and I agree with you, and this is why I'm encouraging everyone now to seek for someone to coach them. Seek someone, because if you keep this idea in your mind and you never share it with the other people, it will not be able to come to life and to reality. And thank you, Vladimir, for you, because you're playing a role in this from the place where you are, and this is usually the question I ask at the end how people can find more about you and interact with you. 

0:43:35 - Vladimir
Absolutely. Thank you for asking that question, and I actually have a special for today's show. My website is humaninterfacesco and if you append slash memet at the end of it, then you'll get a free 45-minute complimentary coaching session oh nice. That you can schedule with me and we can address any of the growth obstacles that you currently facing. 

0:44:01 - Mehmet
That's very generous from you, Vladimir. The link will be in the show notes. So if you want to get the chance to have this consultation session with Vladimir, go to the show notes. You will find the link Over there. And, yeah, so I hope, from my perspective, I could let someone benefit out of the session also as well, because we met and we did this episode today together. 

Vladimir, you know, honestly, it's always nice to talk to people like yourself, Vladimir, who are trying to make the world a better place, and just by sharing their knowledge, by sharing their perspective, I would say, especially in a field which is very close to my heart technology and startups, entrepreneurship. So thank you very much, Vladimir, for the time today and all the insights you gave, and I highly advise everyone to go seek for a coach. I figured out that very late in my professional life, so if you are just starting out, you should go and seek a coach. So this is something you should not neglect and say, hey, I can do it all by myself. And, as Vladimir said, if you are listening or watching this, you can benefit from the link that Vladimir has generously gave us for this consultation session, and this is the way we end every episode. 

Thank you for tuning in. If it's your first time here, I hope you enjoyed this episode and you can subscribe to the podcast on any podcast application you're using today. If you're watching this also, don't forget to subscribe and share it with your friends and colleagues, and hope to see you again very soon in any new episode. Thank you very much. Thank you, Vladimir, for your time today as well. 

0:45:55 - Vladimir
Thank you for having me. Matt, have a great day. Thank you.