Farhan Thawar: commitment

Transcript context

…And this framework is the questions to ask about where to go work. That's your framework. Okay, cool. We'll link to that so folks can check it out. The example of you resigning when it didn't meet your framework, is that a story you're up for sharing? Is there something to learn from that? Yeah, sure. So this happened when I was at my previous, a few companies ago, we were running a mobile company called Xtreme Labs. That was the one that Chamath was the major investor in and so we worked with him directly. And what I realized was... And so that company was amazing. We worked on it for many years. It was a mobile app development company. We got to work on mobile apps for the biggest brands in the world, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Vine, the NFL, NBA, Bloomberg, Slack, you name it we worked on those mobile apps, and this is right when the iPhone and Android were really gaining steam in '09 to 2013 era. And then we eventually got acquired by Pivotal. And over time, my role at Pivotal, Pivotal, and Pivotal Labs changed from, hey, I was running the biggest office in the world. I was running the biggest pair programming office. I'm a big fan of pair programming to one in which we were really trying to attach consulting to the product. And I ended up being a field CTO, which really, I mean it was fun to learn about that world, but it was different than what I was doing. And so if I looked across my framework, it was violating all the things that I was trying to work. I wasn't working with the smartest people anymore. I was on IC. I wasn't learning as much as I could be learning. And so I wasn't on this and I wasn't having a lot of impact. I was like, oh, wait a sec, this is completely not aligned. And then I just told the team, "Hey, I plan on resigning." And that, by the way, led to great other things because I'm an investor in new companies that have spun out from there and it was a great experience. I'm just saying it at the time, lended me to say, "Hey, you're not actually focused on the right things." I want to come back to Xtreme Labs. I know there's other stories there that are interesting, but first I want to talk about another theme of things that people often raised when I asked them about you. And this one is intensity, and it's specifically creating intensity in your organization and the value of that, the power of that. I've seen that the way you describe this and I love is how do you expend more kilojoules per hour versus spend more hours on work. So talk about just why intensity, first of all, is so important to an organization.…

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