Sriram Krishnan: preference

Transcript context

…Oh, yeah. We have and I still, I don't know about Sriram. Sriram comes off as so much more confident and has so much gravitas that nobody ever thinks of it, but we both do, we both deeply have imposter syndrome. Every single day, anything we do, we look at ourselves, we are creators, we have this show on YouTube and then we look around at everybody else who have millions of subscribers and followers and everything and we are like, "Why are we creators? This is not a thing. We should not be doing this stuff. I just think people haven't been honest with us on how much we suck." It's like you have these loops in your head and then every once in a while, you'll see a comment being like, "This was amazing. I just had to stop doing what I was doing to listen to this whole thing. It was so valuable for me." And you're like, "Oh, okay. We are not all the bad. That's, I think, okay." So we go through this a lot. For the longest time, I had really severe imposter syndrome through school, college, getting into Microsoft. Even after I got through the Microsoft, which we were one of the youngest product managers there, I still was like, "Oh, someday they're going to figure out that this was all... they'll know the real me and they'll be like, 'Oh man, we made this mistake with her.'" And it was just such a real crippling thing for me. Even now I feel like maybe it's not 100% true, but I can kind of see the gradients there, so very real thing. Yeah, it's so true. I have a hack or a technique of how to get over imposter syndrome. But I'll just say, and this is just if folks here feel it, every new job I've been in, I have always felt that I didn't deserve to be there and I mean I genuinely. When I joined Microsoft, I was a young student, I was like, "I don't know anything. These folks are professional, they've been doing this job for years. " When I moved to the US I said, "Look, my accent is super intense, I'm Indian, these folks have been doing this for many years, they have very different lifestyles, I don't know what I'm doing here. " When I move to Silicon Valley, I got no hired by probably four or five different companies and one of them told me, "You work for Microsoft so you can't really cut it in Silicon Valley because you're from Seattle," which I'll never forget. And I look at the person from LinkedIn from time to time, I'm very typically like, "Well, I've cut it now," and I'm very petty that way. And then of course and then when I start running large organizations, several hundred people or more, I was like, "I've never done this before." I'm in a meeting, everyone is looking to me, "Do they know that I've not done this before? Because I haven't done this before and can they tell?" And it's every step of the way. So it just pushes every step of the way and in the beginning, it was quite crippling, but over time, you build things to help you. And I think for those listening, if you feel this way, the thing I've learned to do is you have to retreat to a place where you feel real mastery of. So for example, when I was at Microsoft, I was like, "Well, I don't speak the language very well, English," and I had an accent, et cetera, but I knew that I was the most online developer person out there. I knew every single online community, I was very plugged into open source, so in every meeting when the topic would come to, "Hey, what is happening with Ruby on Rails?" I was like, "I know this better than everybody else," and I learned to put together a presentation. Because then you start with the base of something that you feel super comfortable in and you build from that. And what you realize when you build from that is you are like, "Oh, actually you know what? People really respect that and they react to that." And I also learned not to do other things. For example, for them for years where I would listen to people from a certain academic background or I'll be like, "I wish I could do slide decks like they could," or, "I wish I could have these intentional... but I was like, "That doesn't really matter. You just need to come from a place where you are confident you've done the work." ide decks like they could," or, "I wish I could have these intentional... but I was like, "That doesn't really matter. You just need to come from a place where you are confident you've done the work." So if you folks are listening and you feel imposter syndrome, next time you walk into a meeting, just think about, "Okay, this is a place where I know I spend so many nights and weekends," and it can be super tiny, it can be one little button, one customer, but you've done the work, you've had multiple conversations, it is [inaudible 00:51:54]. And you start from there, you talk about that and you build out from that and you will feel comfortable. So I've done that in pretty much every role now and I still catch myself doing-…

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