Executive Interview: WBD's CTO and CPO Discuss Building Out Max for Live News, Sports, and Enhanced Discovery

Speaker 1: 0:02

Welcome to this week's edition of the Dan Rayburn podcast, the show that curates the streaming media industry news that matters most, unvarnished, unscripted and providing you with the factual data you need to know, without any of the hype, the pulse of the streaming media industry.

Speaker 2: 0:20

Welcome to the Dan Rayburn podcast. I am Dan Rayburn. Thanks for joining me today for another edition of my executive interview podcast series. I would like to thank Tyler Whitworth and Avi Saxena from Warner Bros Discovery joining me today. For those that may not know, at the end of Q3, warner Bros Discovery ended the quarter with 95.1 million global direct-to-consumer subscribers across all their DTC services.

Speaker 2: 0:46

So today the gentlemen are joining me to talk about how they think about the video stack, how they develop for not only on-demand content but live Max recently added sports and also CNN, and also just how they think about the user experience when it comes to building products and services that have the best QOE out there. So, gentlemen, thanks for joining me today, super excited to have you here. Let's jump right into the conversation. You've both been at the company long enough multiple years for both of you to see all the consolidation that's taken place between HBO, warner Bros Discovery. That's obviously had a huge impact on your video stack. So first question I really want to ask is how do you set up the product org now to focus on the video experience and what consumers want? When you had to piece together so many different technology and services and solutions in the market. How is it now for you going forward?

Speaker 3: 1:43

As the two companies came together, we had dozens of products, we had multiple technology stacks to drive these products and we clearly had to take time to define our technology strategy going forward. As the companies came together, we spent the time to really identify our high level architecture and then how do we pick the best of both both the stacks from the two companies to build our future. It took us a good three months and then we identified all the right building blocks, we organized around those building blocks and then we built the platform with those building blocks and built Macs on top of that. Some of the key things, like you said, for the platform are the video, quality of experience and other non-functional requirements, the app start time, how self-service the product is and the platform is, and that was the key driver. Tyler, as my product partner, has been driving all the requirements for the customer-facing features and the technology team, as a cross collaboration with the product team, has been driving all the features that drive actually the non-functional requirements and the quality of experience.

Speaker 4: 2:57

And when we came together, it would have been kind of tempting to pick one of the technology stacks, try to move as fast as possible. But we really we had conviction. We wanted to deliver the best possible experience and build on as you said, we've been in the media industry for a little while now build on everything we've learned from the different streaming products, and so we did step back and really looked, as Avi saying of what are the best building blocks, the best pieces whether it's the video platform, how we do personalization, how we do user identity and make sure we could kind of build the best technology stack going forward for both Macs and our other digital products. So we deliberately moved a little bit slower at first so that we can move faster and have a more resilient, better experience for our customers going forward.

Speaker 2: 3:50

And how did that change when you thought about live? Because historically we always thought of HBO as on-demand content and then HBO Max, still on-demand content, and then when you launched sports with the new Bleacher Report Sports add-on and then you added CNN, we all know in the industry. The moment you're adding live into your tech stack, that adds a lot of complexity. So how did live factor into the decisioning of what you built out versus, say, working with partners? How much did you want to control and own? Now you are?

Speaker 3: 4:20

right. Live really changes the nature of the game, nature of the technology. Number one the latencies that you have to work with are much lower. The live ad insertion is very different than a broad ad insertion. On live, the quality is very, very important because people are used to watching their sports on the best quality on their set-top boxes today. So we invested a lot of time to build a live sports infrastructure which really delivers a very high-quality video. We are very proud of the video quality on our live. We have gotten a lot of unsolicited feedback from our customers about how good the quality is on the live. Some of the things we invested is in what we call three-up technology, where we oppress the video to 1080p, we oppress the video from SDR to HDR Dolby Vision and then we also oppress upconvert the audio from 5.1 to Dolby, and this has really helped us get really good feedback, deliver extremely good experience to our customers watching live on the platform.

Speaker 2: 5:31

That's pretty interesting. So on the platform side question around, that is, istream Planet was acquired by Turner Broadcasting in 2015. And obviously Turner falls under the Warner Bros Discovery umbrella. Are you still using any of that technology or platform on the live side? No, we absolutely are.

Speaker 3: 5:47

Actually, previously we used third-party technology for live platform, but after the company's integrated, we decided to choose the technology that was originally iStream Planet. Of course, we have built upon it a lot since then, but that is the foundational piece for the live technology.

Speaker 2: 6:05

Interesting, tyler, on the product side, how do you define the experience? So the reason I ask that question is in the industry there's no set standard pretty much in anything we do and everybody runs around using the word quality but most cases never define that. Even when it comes to say, 4k video, there's no agreed upon definition online. Of course, in broadcast we have definitions and standards. So how do you guys define from a methodology standpoint what the quote quality should be for the consumer experience?

Speaker 4: 6:36

So we look at it a couple of different dimensions. We kind of develop the standards of how the app and the video experience actually works and making sure that it works reliably, smoothly, consistently and so on our app performance, on our video performance, we've set standards of speed, quality, how often things get interrupted or actually interfere because, as you know, customers don't want to spend, they just want their streaming product to work. They want to find their content, they want to watch it and the most frustrating thing for them is that you know, if they is, that that doesn't work. So we measure things, our own internal metrics around the video and app performance. We measure things like tech contact rate, how often customers actually contact us for technical related reasons, continually trying to drive that down. You know we look at qualitative feedback, app store ratings, csat. We've actually developed an internal product experience metric that takes qualitative elements into assess that.

Speaker 4: 7:39

So on the first that's kind of our first step is making sure the product works and using a variety of different metrics and standards to make sure that we're confident that that's not only working well but continually getting better. And then you know, within the experience we look at, you know what customers are doing and how quickly, how smoothly they're doing that from a quantitative standpoint. You know how fast is it to take them to find content, how much different content they're watching to, to qualitative input as well. So we try to kind of paint up a pretty holistic picture to give us a sense. You know, any one metric is not going to tell us exactly. You know what we want to do, but we look at that. You know, holistic, from what we measure to what our customers tell us to get an idea of. You know, are we delivering the quality that people expect? Or our customers feel good about it and you know, is it? Are they able to focus on the content itself, which is ultimately what they're there for?

Speaker 2: 8:42

And how much of that data that you're collecting is real time enough to where you can make quick changes to the product.

Speaker 4: 8:48

I wouldn't say on the fly, because it's probably not the same day, but how much of that you know our, you know all of our data that we collect is near real time and we look at it, you know, on a very regular basis, and so we look at it every week. We're looking at a whole suite of our metrics, both from a technology performance perspective, but also how customers are using the product, and we have a number of different forums where teams you know the teams that are focused on video are really going deep on that, and so we have teams that are focused on browse and discovery are going deep on that, and then, as a leadership, we're looking at that really on a weekly basis so that we can, you know, address anything that is concerning we can build on things that are working well and continue to optimize the product. But it's really always on, you know, always on process.

Speaker 3: 9:41

And I've said to that that we are really data obsessed culture. Every aspect of our product is measured. Every feature, the usage and the customer experience with that is measured. The most of the data is available in real time and you know we make a lot of decisions based upon that. Actually, we have a great experimentation platform that we have built so that we can figure out every small change in the product and how is it impacting the customer and how is it impacting the non functional things like upload time, app crash rates, free buffer rates. So we have a great data platform which is live, and then we built experimentation on top of that to quickly kind of change what we present to the customer.

Speaker 2: 10:27

That's pretty cool. Now for listeners that don't know, if there was some award I could give out into the market, I'd give it to you guys for information sharing, because you are the only OTT platform I'm aware of other than a few things and some Reddit message boards but you're the only platform I know of that, every couple months, releases to certain members of the media. Here's all the things we worked on to fix on our platform over the last however many months. It is, and it is extremely detailed and not only does it talk about what you fixed, but then it also says because we fixed this or changed this or added this feature. Here's the impact it had on users, and you were mentioning here's how many fewer rebuffers or issues with the player or whatnot, and I think that's incredible. I wish more companies did that.

Speaker 2: 11:18

It's obviously showing that you're having some pretty unique data collection that you're doing in methodology, because not only can you see the changes you're making but, to your point, you can see them nearly in real time. And part of that, tyler, you mentioned just in terms of it, starts with the application. So many of what we're seeing, so much of what we're seeing with user issues, everyone always thinks it's oh, it's a video CDN issue, but many cases it's the actual application itself. As you well know, crashing, doesn't open, doesn't load. So you have re-platformed the MaxApp completely On the Roku, apple TV. You've also made updates for Android TV set-top boxes, samsung TVs, huge amount of just smart TVs as well. So you guys have been extremely busy over the last 18 months really improving the experience overall, re-platforming a lot. What are some of the benefits you've already seen from that?

Speaker 4: 12:16

I think from some of the metrics that we look at, we've seen, since we've done that from a customer perspective, we've seen really good feedback at high app store ratings, some of our qualitative measures from customers and even some of the measures that I mentioned things like tech contact rate. We've seen a market improvement from where we are at with HBO Max that's, how frequently customers run into an experience where they're frustrated enough to actually reach out to us. So on our internal metrics, we've seen pretty significant improvements going forward as well. So I think across all those boards we've seen material improvements since we launched Max with the launcher Max in May. But even since then that give us confidence we're focused on the right things. But, as you mentioned, we try to be pretty transparent about it and we're pretty relentless on this because, at the end of the day, this is the thing that customers probably care about the most is that it works well and that we keep a pretty honest and open look for areas that we can get better as well.

Speaker 2: 13:26

And what makes it so hard to keep such a good quality experience across a uniform set of platforms. So, for instance, I don't know if you'll answer this question, but what is it about Roku that makes it so difficult? Why is it? Every OTT platform out there talks about the complexity of developing on the Roku platform. Is it the SDKs? Is it there's not enough support? A couple of problems.

Speaker 3: 13:47

You know number one, the SDK, the platform, the language. There's only so much talent out there who understands Roku platform really really well. In addition to that, you know, like most platforms, I think Roku has more of this there are a lot of older, low-spec Roku devices out there. So when you go build a product, you have to really go and validate the product on the low-spec devices and it's a very hard problem. You know like you're talking about video buffering. You know there could be CDN issues. There could be platform issues on app performance. Even though it's not our mistake, it is still our problem. It's our customers who are suffering. So I think this is where you know whether it's the CDN or just the platform issues. We take them extremely seriously to build an app in a way where it works reliably on every platform and on every version of the platform.

Speaker 2: 14:43

Interesting. Okay, makes sense. I'm not surprised. Now let's talk about latency for a minute. You know, with your new Bleacher Report sports add-on for those that don't know you added live sports. It's currently free. Now In the new year, customers that want to keep it will have to pay for it monthly. Now you've talked a lot about latency out there. Just in terms of what you're doing with the latency and for sports, we know there's a certain amount of latency that consumers would like. At the same time, there's always a trade-off of what's good enough, you know, cost-first quality, low, ultra-low latency. We've heard other OTT providers and also some sports leagues like the NBA and others come out and publicly say we think, you know, 10-second latency is as good as we need to get to. We don't think it needs to be any lower than that. It's not right or wrong. That's just their opinion for the experience they want to have. So when you're thinking about latency, what do you think the lowest latency needs to be for you? To? Where it impacts user experience or your business?

Speaker 3: 15:41

model. I think the latency needs to approach the broadcast latency Couple of reasons. Number one when you're watching sports you know a lot of products and a lot of blogs. You know they trigger notifications, you know on basis of broadcast channels and you don't only want your customers to get surprised, you know they get the touchdown or you know goal or something else from the broadcast through their other apps before they watch on the streaming. So we really, to preserve that customer experience, we have to achieve latencies which are almost as close as broadcast, if not better.

Speaker 2: 16:17

Which you define as what? How many seconds? No, which is like six seconds.

Speaker 3: 16:22

Five to six seconds.

Speaker 2: 16:24

Okay, okay. And if you go any lower than that, is there any business benefit? Because one of the things I see our industry arguing about is like everyone should just do ultra latency. And then I ask well, why? And most vendors say, well, because you can do it. Well, that's not a business reason.

Speaker 3: 16:40

It is a cost benefit argument here, how much you want to invest. Of course you can go lower. If you are going to enable features such as online gambling on your product, then you really want to have as low latency as possible. So that you know this the scenarios of online gambling work good on your product. We don't do any of that in our products today. So I don't think you know we have a need to go lower than what we are today. But if tomorrow you know that happens and that's one thing we'll have to go back and consider is how do we get to ultra low latency?

Speaker 2: 17:16

Tyler, let's talk about personalization for a minute. We talk as an industry. I would say we use the term personalization a lot. I would say some services doing much better job than others, personalization there are some out there where, to them, personalization is you get to change your avatar and that's about it. And sorry, you know OTT platforms that do that, but that is not personalization.

Speaker 2: 17:38

So for me as a consumer here and okay, I'm not the average consumer with all the accounts I have, but personalization for me and I think for most of us, comes down to content. So what are you using to really personalize that user experience and do you think we get it to the point of where it is truly personalized? And the example I give is you know what I hate with Major League Baseballtv, with their app, is I've only ever watched the Mets games. I've only ever watched them with, you know the local SNY feed. And yet every time I go in, the app of a game is already on. They ask me do you want to watch the game? And I say yes and they're like well, do you want to watch the home or away fee? It's like why not just put me into the live game? It's all I've ever watched, for 15 years in this app. So what are you doing right now? Where do you think personalization can really go?

Speaker 4: 18:24

We agree on the importance of personalization. Launch Max, we thought it was even more important, taking the catalog from HBO Max, adding all the discovery content you know. Then you think of adding sports news. We have a really diverse content catalog at this point, and what matters to Dan versus what matters to Tyler, what matters to Avi, is very different. And so you know, with the Launch Max, we significantly expanded the personalization we use in HBO Max. We really focus on personalization on the homepage and we extended that throughout the whole product. We extended how we used it, from not just how we order content, but how we order the rails, the content we select for you and really have kind of a. It's really one of our primary focuses.

Speaker 4: 19:12

We do think and we think we made a lot of strides with the Max product, but we think that there's a lot more we can do to show you you know the content that's really relevant to you. Again, maybe you love, you know house hunters and you know the perceived HBO dramas and that's the. You know the things that you want to get into. You know we still see opportunities there to get better and so we're. You know, even right now we're testing new improvements to our personalization models. We're testing some pretty systemic, structural things of how, you know, the page gets constructed in a way that really is relevant to you. You know we're interested in getting into places and getting some signals from customers even you know more explicitly that can help us feed in.

Speaker 4: 20:02

But we think it's, you know it's really one of our prime focuses now and in the future, because you know the customer comes in they want to spend a few seconds finding what's relevant to them, to the, the Mets example you use. If we know that you always watch the Mets and you always watch your feed, it really makes a very little sense to make you do any work to do that. You know I feel the same thing. I'm a Mariners and Seahawks fan. You know. If I want to see those things like it should just be easy and intuitive. So we have a pretty extensive roadmap on things that we want to improve in personalization. But we think, you know, strategically it is one of the more important things to do, because we're all different, we have different interests. With such an extensive catalog now, you know we can't really afford to waste our customers time and showing them a lot of things that that they're just not interested in.

Speaker 2: 20:57

Yeah, and you've done a lot on the homepage you have. I will say you've made a lot of changes as far as the personalization goes. Finding content is easier, especially when you add it to sports. I can find sports right away. Good luck finding even Thursday night football on Amazon. It's not even sometimes on the homepage, which just drives me nuts. But I've found what you've done on the homepage personalization over the last call it, you know two quarters has been been really good.

Speaker 4: 21:20

Yeah, we've been happy with some of the strides. Again. We've, you know, used personalization again, not just to pick the content, to pick the order of the content within Rails, pick the order of the Rails that we show you, pick what we highlight in the, in what we call the hero in the top section of the page. But we think it's a, it's an area that you know we can do a lot more in and we're we're excited about a lot of things that we're testing right now.

Speaker 3: 21:48

And I should add that we are taking personalization outside of the homepage in other areas, all right, and also our search pages personalized. Our video player Once you finish watching a video, what the recommendations you get on what to watch next, they're all personalized at this point.

Speaker 2: 22:04

Yeah, I've definitely seen the. The level of personalization has changed, which was great, and I think the more that you work on. Also, you know one none of the companies, including yourselves in the industry, talk about trying to retention from a number standpoint. So obviously you're going to have a direct impact on that and that is the goal. As we all know. Do more with less. Get the product profitability. If you show me the content I want to watch faster, chances are I'm not going to cancel. Pretty straightforward there.

Speaker 2: 22:35

Let's talk about advertising for a minute. So I've had some really good executive interview podcast lately with folks that are tied into the ad tech space all day long, so we don't need to drill down details here in technology. But just when you started rolling out the AVOD offering and now that you have sports, which again, as we mentioned, live ads a lot more complexity what are some of the challenges you're really having on the ad side? Because across a lot of services in the market, you know, I see a lot of issues with triggering, and I think triggering is an interesting one because I find it interesting how some OTT services know where to place the ad properly in in S-VOD and then others they cut it right in the middle of somebody talking and it's just it doesn't pick back up properly. So what are some of those challenges that you're experiencing? Actually, this is a great question.

Speaker 3: 23:30

A lot of our content was originally designed for linear TV, especially for discovery, so we have good ad markers which are manually curated.

Speaker 3: 23:41

However a lot of HBO content doesn't have that, because it was never monetized using ads. We have just rolled out some technology where we use AI to really identify the right cue points for ads, so open over there to scene change, dialogue change, and it goes through all the content and identifies all possible ad blocks. It is really enabling us, number one, to create a variable ad load. So you know, if you decide, hey, we want to have three minutes of ads in this content, we have a lot of potential ad markers already known and we can pick where to place ads. Sometime in the future it could also enable us to do contextual advertising, because we know really where is the ad block. This is after an off-road car scene and I can place the right ads there. So we invested a ton to figure out what's the right place to put the ad blocks and then we can at runtime, figure out which ad blocks we really want to populate with ads.

Speaker 2: 24:47

And do you see AI playing a role in that going forward at all? One thing I hear with AI is just sort of ad triggering is what some companies say, or do you not think it's a good idea? No, it is totally needed.

Speaker 3: 24:56

I think you know if the ads are relevant, if the ads are contextual. People interact with ads much better than trying to forward the ads or change. You know what they're watching. Ai has a big role to play in there.

Speaker 2: 25:11

Okay, makes sense. I know your guys' time is limited so I appreciate you being here today. Let's cover a couple more things if we can. You're continuing to expand outside the US. You've been outside the US for a while, but you're going to be rolling into Latiname, some other locations. You're obviously talking about how, in some areas, more viewing on mobile devices, obviously limited in terms of some broadband usage. Really, the consumer behavior is different, as we all know, in different countries and different regions of the world. What are some of the things you're thinking from a product standpoint and how the experience still needs to be great quality but does have to adapt.

Speaker 4: 25:51

We think about rolling max out globally. As you mentioned, we're rolling out in Latiname next year in Amia and have a pretty extensive plan to roll it out. There's some things we're thinking about just in terms of making it make sense and usable. So all the globalization aspects, language and payments and compliance and some of the features that are relevant for traveling.

Speaker 4: 26:16

Once you roll that out that we're putting a lot of time in right now and a big focus on, we are thinking our low device, our capabilities around devices that may not have as good a memory or good a capabilities that become more relevant as we get to other markets. We are thinking about some mobile specific features, capabilities, whether that's from an identity standpoint or discovery standpoint. Then, as we get into Europe, we obviously host the Olympics in Europe. So there's a lot more we're building out on the sports side that will obviously benefit us in the US and other markets but become really important for next summer when we host the Olympics. On max and discovery plus in various markets throughout Europe, there's a lot of market specific features but we think we get benefit on those in a lot of places as we build them out.

Speaker 2: 27:24

How do you think about the lack of standards in the market? Frankly, do you really care? We have no standard. We would all say no standard. Bit rate, codec, aspect ratio, player protocol yeah, a lot of stuff now HTTPS, hls, it's SEMPEGDAT. We have some depending on the device, on the platform, but there's always been this argument that many listeners may not know. You're new to the industry, but 2023 marks the third decade of streaming media technology. This industry is a lot older than many realize. We've been for at least call it, 20 of those years arguing as an industry about standards, but we're never going to get all these different platform companies that you have to build your service for and to get on devices. They're never all going to decide to just work together one day. Where's the trade off for you in terms of what's out there that you try and push forward as a standard versus what it's? Hey, we could try and do that, but it's really not going to benefit us from the service.

Speaker 3: 28:22

I think that's a huge challenge, especially as you go outside of the US where the device the first cycle is much longer than it is in the US. We believe that in the 80-20 rule, 80% of the consumption really happens on 20% of the devices. If you go outside of this country it's probably 70, 30, but still the bulk of consumption is happening on the standard devices with the standard formats, standard bit rates. We first cater to that before we go to the long tail devices. That's number one. The number two is on the other things, such as ratings for content is different. There is no global rating system for content.

Speaker 3: 29:08

Tyler talked about compliance, tyler talked about taxes. These things are extremely localized when we build the product. The lack of a one standard way to do compliance, privacy or something else, one standard way of doing content ratings that makes our job really, really hard. As Max goes from one country the US into 30 plus countries in Latin America, it's very hard to see. How do we operate the product, how do we do the ratings on the content? How do we do compliance with different ad regulations in different markets? How do you do currency and taxes in different countries? How do you work with different distribution partners. A lot of our distribution happens through the affiliates in each local market. They all work differently. They have set-top boxes that are different. They have their authentication and billing models, which are different. As you go into a broader world, an outside of US, your challenges increase exponentially. We have been working on that for the last few months as we prepare for the Latin launch.

Speaker 2: 30:19

I didn't even think of ratings. There is no standard for that. That sounds like a terrible problem to have to try and solve.

Speaker 3: 30:25

The amount of effort it takes to localize your content for each market is insane.

Speaker 2: 30:34

That's a lot of work that goes into it. Let's talk about 4K for a minute. Your service, netflix. There's a lot in the industry where if you want 4K, you have to pay more. You have to pay a lot more. How important is 4K really? No OTT service breaks out what percentage of their user base takes what package. We don't really know what the adoption is of 4K. We do have some services tell us that it's not the most popular package. We have a little bit of indication. But does 4K matter from a business standpoint? Does it help you sign up more users or retain users or keep them from churning? It's pretty darn expensive. If you want to do 4K, I think it's OTT service.

Speaker 4: 31:16

What we've seen learned is there is a segment of customers that it's really important to and they're willing to pay. They're willing to really prioritize for that either, for their viewing experience, the kind of devices they have in their home. Now it's not most customers, but it is a sizable kind of important group of customers. We think it's an important part of the offering. We significantly expanded our 4K catalog with the launch of Max, but we do think it is a lot of complexities around it.

Speaker 4: 31:56

We do think it is valuable for an important segment of customers and think it warrants being in that ultimate tier that we have, but it's not every customer on the street.

Speaker 2: 32:10

I never, ever say yeah, okay, so it's limited for customers where they see the value and they're willing to pay for it, but that is not the majority. That's the reality of it. And listeners, you can argue all day long in LinkedIn and they seem to want to in the industry about how important 4K is and everything has to be in 4K. Okay, listen, here's an OTT provider telling you it's great for some, but it's not driving the business. And that is what matters here is the technology you're adopting is based on what drives business. You have to get the profitability. That is a goal of every single company out there with their DTC service. Do more with less. Get the profitability. So maybe two final questions for you. The first one is just real simple is smart TVs.

Speaker 2: 32:55

We've seen a lot of reports come out lately and frankly, I don't trust them. At say, streaming usage and adoption and just more hours reviewing is not being driven anymore by streaming boxes or dongles. It's all being driven by smart TVs and that's the future. I don't really understand where all that data comes from, considering that if you look at Black Friday and Amazon Fire TV Stick was $18. It's about as cheap as you can get. I think we're only at some point not too far away from Amazon saying, hey, you sign up for a prime account, we'll ship you a free Fire TV Stick, and they're almost giving these things away, so they're selling a lot of them. Can you comment at all in terms of like hey, half of our usage is still on a streaming stick as opposed to a smart TV? Can you give us any indication of what you're seeing there going forward?

Speaker 4: 33:45

I mean, I think that the streaming sticks remain very important. If you look at usage, especially in the US between Roku and Amazon, it's a sizable amount of the actual streaming behavior. Now, that said, the smart TVs and Samsung and LG are also sizable audiences and important. So I think, as we think about it, they're both important. We don't really think that they're.

Speaker 4: 34:16

So, you're not seeing one drop off. We don't see sizable changes in that behavior in the US. Again, whether it's the streaming sticks, whether it's the smart TVs themselves, which again are very important, or even the gaming consoles, we have a sizable segment of customers that watch on Xbox and PlayStation. So we think all three are important and we've built Avi and team, built the apps in a way that it's easy for us to develop kind of across those platforms and scale it. So we think they're important, we continue to invest them and we don't see any notable trends in the US that make us think it's radically changing.

Speaker 2: 35:00

Good, that helps a lot. Great to hear that. Appreciate that information. Let's go with the final question here. So I do want to cover for a minute.

Speaker 2: 35:08

You're both sitting in very unique positions inside the company One from a product side, one from an engineering, technology side. There's been a lot of change in the industry, as we all know A lot of layoffs, validation. There's a lot of people in the market looking for new jobs, people who are looking to advance their careers, especially when they're in product positions or engineering positions. They want to know how do I really excel in what I'm doing in the field that we're in? Do I need to get another cert? Do I have to learn Gira, sql or something or anything you know?

Speaker 2: 35:40

So if each of you could talk to us from a product and a technology standpoint, when you're going to hire, what are you looking for in people? What type of background do you want them to have? And outside of the technology, I've always been saying that people, skills and life experience, how well you speak, can you speak intelligently and intelligibly, resiliency these are all attributes, human attributes, that are very important in the job. So I'd love to hear from both of you you're responsible for hiring the type of people you're looking for.

Speaker 3: 36:09

I can talk about the technology side. We hired a lot of software engineers. One of the key thing we look for is very strong computer science fundamentals. Can you program in any programming language? Programming languages change all the time, but once you have strong computer science fundamentals, you can adapt to a new language very easily. How do you design your systems? How do you learn the new languages? How quickly can you adapt to change? I think that is extremely important. The key attribute that I look at in the employees is the ability to learn. Is the employee curious, asking a lot of questions about hey, why are we doing this this way? Why don't we do this? I want employees to have a sense of ownership in every decision we make as a company, instead of top down the leaders making the decision and employees just going and executing on them.

Speaker 2: 37:12

Good feedback.

Speaker 4: 37:13

Yeah, similar to what Avi says. When we're hiring product or design professionals, we're obviously looking at their product thinking, their design skills. Are they customer centric? Are they good at analyzing evidence and looking for value? What's important I would say really the three things that I think are more important in hiring is obviously one people that are strong owners and good problem solvers. They look at problems and they want to dive in to try to solve that, to figure out the best way, I think.

Speaker 4: 37:47

Two is communication and collaboration. Are people effective at conveying what they're trying to convey, telling the story, helping people understand, bringing people along? We work in large, complex organizations. How well do they work with others? Can they work as a team effectively? Then, third is exactly as Avi was saying, is people that are curious, want to learn and have a degree of humility. These are often experienced, talented people, but this industry is changing a lot. Customer behaviors change in a lot. Want to find people that are not, you'll be holding to. Well, this is the way we've always done things that are interested in creating and building and looking at, ultimately, the right way to do it for the business and customers, going forward, building on what they've learned and building on what they've done, but being open minded to do that different going forward.

Speaker 4: 38:43

So I think those are as you say, dan, I think those soft skills or intangibles are probably more important even than the, you know, some of the fundamental heart skills.

Speaker 2: 38:58

Dan, it's great to hear people's skills. Well, I appreciate your guys time today. If anybody wants to get ahold of you, what's the best way they can reach out to you directly? Well, I'm on LinkedIn and, yeah, I think LinkedIn Reach LinkedIn. Okay, so if anybody can't find either of you guys on LinkedIn, just reach out to me or email me, dan, at danraybercom, I'll be happy to make an introduction. Tyler Avi, thank you very much for your time today. Appreciate it. If anyone has any follow up questions, please reach out to me. We appreciate everyone listening. I'll have another executive interview podcast coming up in the next two weeks. So until we talk to you again, thanks very much for listening. We'll be back on next week.

Speaker 1: 39:38

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