AV6 | Recruiting The A-team And Making Them Earn A Seat At The Table

Before launching Aitomatic, Christopher Nguyen and his founding team worked together for nearly 10 years building new AI solutions over multiple ventures. As a seasoned Silicon Valley and Vietnam tech veteran he imparts his wisdom for pragmatic decision making, winning over A-team hires, and how they should earn a seat at the table.

Discussion Topics: Recruiting the A-team and making them earn a seat at the table

• The AITOMATIC team 
• Founding team and not just a founder 
• What should your team look like?
• Core values
• How to make your brainstorms better
• Manufacturing skills and value systems 
• Changes in hiring over time 
• Hiring tech employees as a non-tech CEO 
• How to better screen your employees
• Buddy system and presentation
• 30 second pitch about AITOMATIC

Transcript: Recruiting the A-team and making them earn a seat at the table

Hau Ly: Hi everyone, we’re your hosts Adrian and Hau and welcome back to the AVV Founders and Friends Podcast Season one. We’re sitting down with successful founders in Vietnam and beyond to get a behind the scenes look on their first hires and early teams of their companies.

Adrian Latortue: And today we are here with a special guest, Christopher Nguyen, Founder and CEO of Aitomatic. Dr. Christopher Nguyen, earned his PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University, and was an Assistant Professor at Hong Kong University of Science Technology where he co-founded the computer engineering program. He was also the first Engineering Director at Google Apps, which includes Calendar, Docs, spreadsheets, etc. We could probably spend the entire episode talking about all the amazing things that he’s done, but we want you to hear from him himself.

Hau Ly: Christopher, thanks for joining us today. So I have two questions for you. Number one, what is one thing that you want our audience to know and remember about you?

Christopher Nguyen: Well, I guess in this context it will be the same, you know, I’m quite proud to make my relevant Vietnam claim to fame is that I helped put Vietnamese into Unicode 30 years ago. It was a sort of a side effort that was completely off track for my PhD work. But it turns out to be much more impactful. Nobody remembers what I did for my PhD anymore. And the second thing is that also, I didn’t know it at the time, 1997 I first went back to Vietnam, working then with Netscape in Sun to help this then backward country with some of the technical effort, and it turned out to be the first internet connection for Vietnam out of VNPT VDC, Vietnam Data Corporation connecting to Telstra in Australia, the whole country had 128 kilobits. So imagine.

Hau Ly: These are some really cool facts about you. Thanks for sharing that. And the second question that I have about you is about Aitomatic, which is your current start-up. Can you share with our audience a little bit about what Aitomatic is working on now?

Christopher Nguyen: Sure. Aitomatic, in some sense, does something very esoteric, but in a very different sense, something that is very near and dear to your heart that you can gather, it’s very different from a Google or a Facebook or Twitter. We deal with companies; we call them industrial companies that touch your lives in a very physical way. It turns out in the last 40, 50 years, we talked about cyberspace and things like that, it was only because technology couldn’t reach out and touch you. And so we created the concept of cyberspace and sort of restricted ourselves. But as soon as we have sensors, actuators, and so on, we extend the powers of technology, in particularly AI and machine learning to the physical world. So it is a $25 trillion industry, called the industrial economy manufacturers, automotive, avionics, and so on. These are companies that deal with life critical issues. And it turns out, the application of AI machine learning in the physical world is far more challenging than in the digital world. Our short tagline is ‘We help you translate domain expertise into AI machine learning.’

Adrian Latortue: Yeah, one comment I wanted to add was, I remember, many, many years ago, when I first was coming to Vietnam, and I had to learn to use a unique key to type in Vietnamese. And also, we download spreadsheets and CSVs. And all the characters would be all over the place. And one of the things we always had to do was to make sure we’re using utf-8 unicode. So thank you for that contribution. It’s like, it’s something that everyone uses today, and we don’t even maybe realise it. So we would love to hear more about the team at Aitomatic. And how you’re building that out. As the first question, we can start with who were your first three hires at Aitomatic?

Christopher Nguyen: Well, the entity is less than two years old, April 1st 2021. But the team for the most part, we’ve worked together for almost 10 years. And I don’t mean just two people, I mean, five, six, seven people. And so in some way we can think of what I’m doing with Aitomatic is one sort of continuous project. I started a company called a Detail 2012 with PhDs from US universities. Long story short, that company got funding, Andreessen Horowitz and so on. And then through that relationship, we met with a lot of large enterprises, so one of whom happened to be Panasonic and Panasonic, as you may know, we researched 2018 was their 100th anniversary. And so Panasonic itself was undergoing a massive strategic transition from I’m going to call it the 20th century till 21st century, some people think of it as hardware to software. And so the AI work that we did at a Detail, or they’re also known as Arimo was quite interesting to Panasonic. And we found that having the sandbox that is the global footprint of Panasonic to apply our technologies or knowledge too was quite interesting. So we got acquired by Panasonic. I ended up running global AI there. So in April 2020, we launched out again, we did a spin out, which itself is very special. So anyway, that’s a long answer to the unique trajectory that is Aitomatic, depending on how you look at it it’s a very young company, but a very established team, and we know how to work together, we know what our strengths and weakness is. And of course, we grow and we hire new team members as well.

Adrian Latortue: Thank you for sharing that, Chris. I guess I mean, teams following the manager or founder, through one or two ventures or multiple ventures isn’t uncommon. Another question here is, did you have to convince anyone to say, hey, from Arimo to Aitomatic, this is the next step, and you are definitely part of the journey or was it kind of always assumed, like, what was that thought process and conversation like?

Christopher Nguyen: Well, I would say Aitomatic, is very fortunate in having a founding team, and not a single founder. It wasn’t a matter of my having to convince people to go and follow me. We were already working together. And we sort of have to convince ourselves, Hey, is there they’re there. And we saw a huge opportunity in solving problems of companies like Panasonic in applying AI machine learning, because like I said, it’s not an easy, oh, just give me the data, I’m going to plug it into these algorithms, and magic comes out at the other end. So we all saw that magic together. Now, to be fair to me, of course, it does require, you know, sort of having a clear vision about what the problem statement is, and how are we going to solve it in a way that makes a lot of money, but also is changing the world in a way that, you know, today, we live mostly, most of us live at the top of the Maslow Pyramid, for better or for worse. And so we always are motivated by something that is greater than ourselves. So you have to articulate a vision, you have to believe in one, you have to have one and articulate to the other team members that will join you and say, why is this worth doing among all the other opportunities that we have? Just like, I’m sure you guys at Edison ventures, you are mission focused, right? You’re not there, just because this is just Oh, a nice job to do. So being did something to convince you to join him. Right?

Adrian Latortue: That’s definitely true. You said this is the founding team, and you have so many years of experience working together. Can you talk about some of the people on the team and kind of what made them great contributors to this founding team, so that you continue working with them?

Christopher Nguyen: Right. So there is this conventional wisdom, which is true, that you find people that are different from you. Now, you got to break that down different how I think it’s very important not to have differences in the value system, very important. So you got to find people that have the same value system as you. But the difference is in sort of capabilities and areas of coverage. So I am and I pride myself in being a very deep geek. I really understand technologies. And that’s a very deep statement in the sense that I’ve lived long enough, but I learned very quickly. And Nanda Kishore, who is if you look at his profile is very similar. If you look at LinkedIn, it doesn’t tell you exactly, you know, also entrepreneur, computer science masters from if I remember correctly, CMU and has built companies, has been a GM at Amazon, and so on. On the other hand, Nanda is much, much better than I am at that human interface. So he’s sort of our Chief Customer Officer. So I think Nanda is sort of my perfect partner for that. And then we have other team members who cover the creative side, and the product side and the design side, and so on. So I think that the general pattern is that these are the team members that have very complementary strengths. And that’s what makes my statement that we’ve been working together a long time, much deeper than it may seem, because we kind of we have a full coverage, and we know each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and we work together well. And also you need some person to take on the task of being the leader, and that is we already have that sort of system in place for many years. That’s how the team works together.

Adrian Latortue: You mentioned that you look for these differences in complementary skill sets, but you want to be aligned on values. What are some of the values that you’ve always aligned with your founding team members with? And then how have you kind of carried those throughout the company as you continue to hire and build the team?

Christopher Nguyen: Well, we actually have 10 core values. And we acronym it as core value like C O R E. But I’ll give some examples and then I’ll talk about the concept of how I think about core values, because otherwise it’s very wishy washy. So one core value, for example, is we value ideas, that extends to sitting at the table. And let’s say, you bring up or even I bring up an idea, that hey, what if we do this? And then it’s okay for someone to say, that’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard. And then immediately after that, we go have a beer. And that’s okay. Not just okay, it’s encouraged, but far too often, people waste time covering for each other’s emotions. Oh, you know, I’m going to sugarcoat what I’m about to say. And then I spend 20 minutes sugarcoating it. And then I get to the point, and by the time I get to the point, there’s no point anymore. So for us, that is actually a way to move really fast, to say, it doesn’t matter what, once you have an idea you put on the table, it’s not you anymore. It’s your credit, your idea, but it is not you. So I can dissect it, I can build on top of it and I can take it out. These things when I describe these, you can easily say yeah, that makes sense. But it’s very hard to practise. And the fact that it’s hard to practise and if you believe it, you make a core value. Because if you have 27 core values, that sounds nice, then that is not a core value. The core value is something that is non-negotiable. Like if you don’t agree with that, you’re a great person, but you’re not going to thrive here. So that’s how we think about core values. There’s a system from Jim Collins. He’s a management consultant, he wrote some books, like from good to great, and so on. And then many years ago, I read that, and you know, there’s a different vision framework, you just have to adopt one and I adopted his, and his has three components. The first one is the company’s purpose. The second is a set of missions, and I’m using these words, people have different meanings for mission. Word is what is meant what I use it to mean. So the purpose is very different from missions. And then you also need to set a core value that I can walk through each of those components. But we have a very strong definition of this, what our company purpose is, what our mission for FY 23 is, and what are our shared non-negotiable core values are.

Adrian Latortue: That’s amazing. Going back to what you said about value ideas separate and conceptually, like, easy to understand, agree, really hard to practise. But because of that, it’s really powerful, right? Maybe you could share with the audience, one way in which you actually practise that. So what is one way you practise that on like a daily or weekly basis, such that it is instilled with everyone as one of the core values?

Christopher Nguyen: So the idea is that in order to do something like this, you have to create an environment where people feel very safe. Psychological safety is very, very important. Psychological safety is a precursor to productivity. If you don’t feel safe, half of your brain is trying to figure out how do I get safe, encourage people to say what do you think about this. And then go ahead and sort of do the template of critiquing something. But then again, this is some of this effect to reinforce, immediately reward that person for advancing the discussion even though the idea was bad.  So things like that, but we also have systems, okay, these things are not just nice to them. I really believe in systems, just like your question, okay, that sounds good. How do you do it? So we have, for example, a decision making template, we call it divergent convergent DC, and there’s a creative phase. And there’s a decision making phase. So during the creative phase, it’s a spreadsheet. And you just throw a bunch of ideas up there. And you discuss first and then you say, Well, it sounds like we have 27 ideas here. So you just put them on 27 rows, and then on the right hand columns, you have each column is one team member in the discussion. And then each person would assess each of those ideas on a scale of one to five, the column is not named. And then you sort of do the average of that. And then we rank that, and by the time you rank it, people realise there’s no identity associated with the ideas anymore. The identity is completely stripped from that table. And of course, then we looked at the top five, we did a sanity check, should that really be at the bottom instead and the idea at the bottom should be up. So there’s a whole system for making these decisions and prioritising them. But you notice there’s this not so subtle, sort of stripping of identity whose idea is it from the decision making.

Adrian Latortue: Sounds like a very powerful system. Probably takes a few rounds to kind of get used to, and start to perfect. But yeah, a very powerful system. And thank you for sharing that. Moving forward, you know, at VCs, we’re always talking about hiring people that are better than yourself. In your case you brought in this entire founding team, but obviously, you are continuing to hire people. So given your depth of experience and skills, do you believe that you’re actually able to hire people that are better than those who have skill sets that surpass your own?

Christopher Nguyen: Yeah, that’s a great question. I would choose to understand it like this, which is, there are lots of people better than me in various dimensions, maybe in all dimensions simultaneously, as well. The question is, why would they come and work for me? It’s not whether I can accept it. Absolutely, I love that. But what do I have to do to convince them? I come back to this idea of the Maslow’s pyramid, right. So yes, maybe you can do a Maslow’s pyramid of company building. So yeah, the company’s got to have a strong product vision, got to have a strong product, got to have customers, revenues, and all that. But it must also have that extra oomph, that thing that motivates people, and I’m not sure if I sort of communicated that when I was talking about Aitomatic, but our team members know our work impacts people’s lives. One project we do, for example, is affecting fisheries off the coast of Japan. It’s very damaging to the environment. And so the Japanese are advancing this thing called Fix Net, where the nets are just fixed in the ocean. And fish sort of swim through that. That’s both helping the lives of the fishermen and also transforming, you know, protecting the ecosystem. This is one example among many. So in some ways, I’m so gratified that I’m working on this problem and not on how to convince you to stay watching the videos and clicking on an ad. For a number of years, Silicon Valley was all about maximising engagement. Like there’s literally a company that has started focusing on how do I maximise the endorphins. I think you can apply technology to anything, but let’s apply it to things that matter to people’s lives.

Adrian Latortue: Yeah, I guess it brings up a question when you’re hiring people, and you’re looking at skill sets, and but you’re also looking at the impact that you’re creating, with the technology that you have, are you looking for people who are motivated by that mission and that impact? Or are you also prioritising the skill sets first, and then they’re attaching to the mission?

Christopher Nguyen: I think, just like we are the whole package to them, but they are also the whole package to us. The skill sets matter a lot. Electrical engineering, physics, mechanical engineering, those are coming back. As we move, kind of apply our technology to the physical world, it turns out that the skill set is harder to learn on the job than the machine learning and the programming that is needed. With manufacturing and the making of things coming back to the US, you’re going to see the demand for this sort of skill that is coming up again. So intelligence, of course, you hire for intelligence, not just the direct skills and so on, but people who are going to roll along with the problems of the company. Energy is a little bit misleading. It’s a nice word. It doesn’t mean like, you know, jumping up and down energy, you know, the guy comes in really enthusiastic and so on. Energy, in this sense means getting stuff done. There are lots of smart people who don’t get things done. And of course, people who get things done but aren’t smart are at least more valuable, but hopefully they’re getting the right things done. But the last component, integrity, is really important. That’s why Warren Buffett says, jokingly, if you get only two the missing one will kill you. I’m also a big believer in behavioural question. And never an aspirational question. And people don’t have to lie. We always aspire to be better than we are. You asked me, what would you like next year, I will always say good things about myself. But if you ask me about that situation, Christopher, what did you do? And then you learn, okay, well, that’s how he makes decisions. And so that’s sort of how you test for or try to detect whether the person’s value system is aligned with yours is aligned with what you aspire your team members. And interestingly, there are many close conversations we have, where things fall apart at the compensation negotiation stage. Unintentionally but that turns out to be where you see people who are otherwise very good but so they start to play games with you.

Hau Ly: Absolutely. Christopher, there are two questions that we wanted to ask you. Number one is obviously again, you’ve had a lot of experience building teams and products across different kinds of organisations and at different times. And so, for you have your hiring principles changed between now versus 10, 20 years ago, or did it evolve in any ways and what stayed the same?

Christopher Nguyen: Certainly, over time, I would like to believe that I’ve become more experienced. So definitely, there have been changes. So if you go back to the first company that I ever built, that was 1995. I didn’t have that system. So clearly, that has evolved over time as I learned more, but I think there’s sort of some core value that is either implicit, but I’ve made explicit, that hasn’t changed. Maybe in the past, I was not as systematic. And the things that I just talked to you about, are things that you learn painfully to watch out for, you can’t just go by whether you like someone or not, it may have been a signal for integrity, and so on. So I think that data driven aspect is something that has also evolved over time. And it’s also sort of concordance with the times, like, you will see this trend, you know, once you see it, you can’t unsee it. But certainly in the past, we focused mostly on people who can code and algorithms, you know, superiority and so on. For our purpose anyway, and I really believe for the world over the next 10, 20 years, you see things like ChatGPT saying Okay, well, I’ll just write that code for you. It turns out that the skill set, which is so much in demand, was a temporary phenomenon. But you still need to go back to fundamentals right Computer science studies is not coding, that’s programming. But understanding the physical world. But I think that skill set is something that we’re looking for that has also evolved, because of the company, the nature of our company, the industry we work in, but also the nature of the work.

Hau Ly: That’s actually a really good segue into our second follow up question. You touched on some of these things already. But is there anything else that you think CEOs, especially non-technical CEOs should know when it comes to hiring their first engineers? Because from our experience working with a lot of these founders and CEOs, they struggle a lot. They think that oh, I’m not coming from a technical background so I actually don’t know what to hire for. So any tips, any advice there?

Christopher Nguyen: I would say, make it be a customer driven process. Make it a PMF, Product Market Fit process like, don’t think of it as you’re hiring the CTO for the next 10 years. Nothing ever works out that way. And I assume there’s not a co-founder thing, it is sort of the first technical group of people. So try to focus on people that will help you deliver that next three months, that next six months to prove that out, maximise that. It may be short term; it may be long term. But the funny thing about startups is that if there’s no tomorrow, then there’s no next year. So in other words, don’t worry too much too far out about the implication of the scalability of this person. In fact, I would say sometimes that’s a counter indicator, that the more scalable, the more senior a person is, maybe the more disastrous they might be for your next three months. Get a really energetic kid that would just throw things at the board so that you can take that and sort of test it out with your potential customers. So maybe we sum it up as think short term. But that sounds like a bad advice. But in the context of what I’m saying, I think enough people don’t do that.

Adrian Latortue: Yeah, I really like that idea of thinking short term and thinking about the next three months, so it’s like counterintuitive, but I think it’s really salient advice. And so I think you put it beautifully in really helping people think about where these skill sets fit in. And just because someone has a skill set doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to be able to solve the problems that you’re solving in the business or within the team. So yeah, just want to go back to that.

Christopher Nguyen: Yeah, definitely bet on fundamentals plus skill set, because a person with the fundamentals can pick up the skill set, but not the other way around.

Hau Ly: So usually what happens after hiring, so you found this great person that is intelligent, has really good energy, and a very high level of integrity. So the work doesn’t stop there, right? You want to make sure that person can develop within your team, can make a lot of impact and will stay for the long term. So I think a lot of the times when we talk to founders about hiring, they think hiring is done when the offer is accepted.

Christopher Nguyen: That is so important. So my job, as a CEO, now, I still do every final interview. And the final interview is not just a sanity check. What’s the point if my team is quite capable of deciding whether a person is good or not. My role in that final interview is to answer questions people have. I usually start by saying, you know, you have any question about where the company’s going, vision, where our finances our equity structure, you know, how we treat people? I’m the guy to answer those questions. And then also I want to talk to you about how to set you up for success. And by the way on that our system also involves calling references. Yes, when we call references, not at the end, because people treat references as a checkbox. When was the last reference, you call that actually made you change your mind about a candidate? So it’s really perfunctory. So, what’s the point? That’s a waste of time. Like, they would have to say that person is a criminal for you not to go ahead. So, 99.9% of the time people do references, a total waste of time and resources. A good use of reference calls is to use that as one person on the hiring panel, that’s a data point. Use that data to make a decision whether to hire in the first place. So we do that early on. And when we do that one call, we have a script, a template, and it’s, if you’re in the industry long enough you have to see each other scripts, in what situation do they work well? Do they work well, for somebody who manages a lot of detail? Or are they more big picture? And you can get a lot of valuable advice from their previous colleagues and managers, like they know this person much better than I do.

Hau Ly: Great, great. Would you mind sharing one or two things that you and your team do for a new hire to help set them up for success?

Christopher Nguyen: So by the time that happens, we already have all this information. We correlate the data, and we said, okay, they probably work much better when generally left alone, or they work much better when well directed or something like that. So we have all this information. And then we also make sure there’s a buddy, and the buddy is not the manager, buddy cannot be the manager. And the buddy takes care of all things from you know, where do you go for slack, and where the Google Drive folders and things like that. Sort of any question that inevitably comes up, go to your buddy. And then the onboarding, checkboxes, and so on. So all the process stuff. And then we always set them up with a startup project. We set the expectations, say, in 30 days or 60 days, we’re not that strict on the number of days, but certainly within the first 60 days, you will do a presentation. And the presentation will be on the impact that you’ve made on your startup project. And usually people say wow, I’m kind of nervous. But guess why we do this presentation to start the project? Because it turns out, no matter what, how junior or senior you are, this is one thing I’ve learned myself included you always have to earn your seat at the table, the human emotion, people will follow people they trust. Trust and confidence are two different things. Confidence is about capability. Trust is about intentions. You earned your place at the table on both of those dimensions.

Hau Ly: I really love this idea of giving them project, you know, a goal to work towards. I think that’s really, really important.

Adrian Latortue: All right. So Chris, if you had to pitch Hau and myself on leaving AVV and joining Aitomatic, how would you do it? What’s your thirty second pitch?

Christopher Nguyen: I would actually sit down and say, what motivates you, what would get you out of bed every morning? And really have a sincere conversation, might this be the thing that makes you excited enough to jump out of bed every morning. Because it’s certainly true for me. And believe me, I’ve had periods in life where I don’t want to get out of bed to run to that thing. And so is there anything that you see about this opportunity. For example, like I say, our team members certainly see the opportunity to help make the world truly, truly a better place.

Adrian Latortue: Thank you for sharing that, Chris. I love the candid conversation, tapping into the motivations. So many gems in the conversation today. Thank you so much, Christopher. Really appreciate your time today and everything that you’ve shared. I’m looking forward to the next conversation.

Christopher Nguyen: Awesome. Appreciate it.

Hau Ly: Thank you.

Our Guests: Christopher Nguyen

Christopher Nguyen is a serial entrepreneur who is currently developing “AITOMATIC“, the Knowledge-First App Engine for Industrial AI, which helps businesses translate domain expertise, combine it with machine learning, and automate everything on a single SaaS platform.He has previously built companies such as Arimo (acquired by Panasonic), ACTGent (acquired by ICBC), and Agenda-Asia (acquired by WPP). He was also the first Engineering Director of Google Apps, and he co-founded the Computer Engineering program at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology as a professor. In his 35+ years of experience, he has worked for leading technology companies such as Intel, Xerox, and Intel.

He earned his bachelor’s degree at UC Berkeley and his master’s and doctorate degrees at Stanford University. He also serves on the board of directors of Fulbright University Vietnam.