The outer eye: Leading as an Advisor

Leszek Knoll

So you are an experienced advisor and a catalyst for innovators, startups and technology companies. Your root experience is in technology field but you've worked in multiple industries and roles focusing on strategy, team building, leadership and technology consulting, among other things. Super happy to have you here. With that out of the way, let's talk a bit about the types of companies you work with in terms of size, maturity, planning, entity and any other characteristics.

Peyman Pouryekta

Yeah, let's do that. Thanks for the invitation. Most of the companies are really startups. Sometimes they are also corporates when for example, a corporate acquired a startup but most of them are early stage or.

Leszek Knoll

Early stage prior to product market fit.

Peyman Pouryekta

Or they're on the edge. To that. Let's say like this. They are usually a Series A, this.

Leszek Knoll

Kind of so there's something going on.

Peyman Pouryekta

But it's not like exactly like they found maybe a spot. They're not 100% sure. It looks like it's. Right. They're looking for a bigger funding. And then usually I jump in to help them to structure the whole thing better on the tech department because they see already they will scale or they have this need of growth and scaling. And then I come in. As an expert for this field and then help them to set structures, processes, try to find the right people have a strategy at all for the department, for example, often and yeah, it's super interesting because it's a shift of how people work. Like in the beginning you are innovative, right? Like you do different things, you try to find the spot, that means you try a lot of different things and at some point you found it and that means you need to be very focused and structure this out, make this scalable and stuff like that. And most of the people don't know how to do this. Like they still stuck in the kind of work way how they did it before. Like they try to do everything at the same time which doesn't work and that's mainly the focus which I'm working.

Leszek Knoll

Getting ready to scale, introducing processes, strategies, hiring people as well.

Peyman Pouryekta

It's all connected.

Leszek Knoll

Yeah, it's all connected but you mentioned that you identify and implement fit for purpose solutions. You look at every startup in a different way.

Peyman Pouryekta

Yeah, that's mainly the case when they unsure if they have really a solution which works on the market. If they don't see enough traction from the market then I jump in and help them to figure out okay, can we tune the solution in a way or does it need to be focused in a different direction to pivot it and something like that that's a bit earlier? Usually when I do that work, how.

Leszek Knoll

Much are you dependent on data and.

Peyman Pouryekta

How much on data?

Leszek Knoll

Intuition and experience?

Peyman Pouryekta

No data is a big point, but it's a combination of both, I would say, because in this kind of early stage, you often even don't have so much data or it's very intensively. It's just a lot of work to get all the data, do the analytics around that. And if you have some people who have already experienced in a specific field or industry, then their data is in their headmate. Okay, so if you have that, that's often a benefit. But I try to do a combination in that stage because as I said, to be focused fully on data is often not possible. It would be better because I believe you can make much better decisions if you have the right data.

Leszek Knoll

Kind of focus on one or the other.

Peyman Pouryekta

Exactly, sure.

Leszek Knoll

What is the situation right now in terms of raising funding? It's fluctuating I guess over the years.

Peyman Pouryekta

I'm happy to hear your view on that. Yeah, I think it's definitely too tricky from what I see, especially with this kind of news about Silicon Valley Bank and stuff like that. So everyone is I think a bit even frustrated about the situation, especially the startups who just started because they are looking for funding and stuff like that. But on the other side I have a colleague, I'm doing some kind of pitch days, like we organize a pitch day, you can think of it a bit like a shark tank or something, but a private one. It's closed and it's not like here in Berlin or in Berlin and we try to do it from time to time in London but it's a closed session. That means we select the investors and we select the startups where we think they are a good match and they have really time to talk and discuss. It's not like the elevator pitch for five or 15 minutes they have really over an hour time to really discuss, dive deeper into topics and stuff like that. In this kind of sessions I really see like investors are still interested but they are much more focused so they have a really deeper look and they appreciate to have really much more time to better understand if they would like to invest in this company.

Leszek Knoll

Much more time and fewer startups as well.

Peyman Pouryekta

Fewer startups. It's preselected from us. We're scouting more or less. It's a bit like we're trying to figure out what is the best fit for this kind of investor, what kind of startups is he looking for, which kind of area he wants to invest and then we do a full kind of internal analysis about the startup. Like on two sides, the marketing sales, like is it structured there enough? My colleague is much more into that topic and I'm doing a kind of tech DD like tech due diligence to figure out what the situation there is. Often we help them even often we help them to give them kind of structure so that it's better prepared for the final talk with the investors.

Leszek Knoll

Okay. And you said you focus on process the part that you focus the most are its technology process or product and technology. Yes, product process.

Peyman Pouryekta

Yeah. It's about how to develop.

Leszek Knoll

How to develop, okay, what are the top three things?

Peyman Pouryekta

Yeah. So, first of all, I take a look. Do they have anything in place at all, or do they have too much in place that's not good? And then I have a look at the team and how they want to work, because not every team wants to work with Scrum or Kanban, and it's not good for them sometimes. So I try to find with the team together the best kind of way how they want to work. Most of the time, it's some kind of Kanman solution. Scrum Kanman solution, some kind of regular meetings. But the tricky part is really to not make it too strict, like working in a corporate. So there's still some kind of flexibility, but still have the right conversations in place, like the right recurring conversations, like product meetings, so that product and tech are regularly in conversation and you don't create the silos.

Leszek Knoll

For example, do you often observe over engineering in the startups you work with or it's rarely.

Peyman Pouryekta

No, I mean, I see it sometimes, but I would not say often. Maybe in some kind of specific fields. But usually it's more the case that they have to be fast and they just prototype things, and then they have too less time to really create a good solution. And think of it a bit through over engineering happens usually if you have this kind of separation between product and technology, because then the technology people are really just focused on the technology, and then they dive deeper into what else can be in place, and then it becomes over engineering.

Leszek Knoll

Okay, you have a general philosophy about the test automation. In an environment where you have to pivot really fast or innovate really fast. There are different approaches.

Peyman Pouryekta

I mean, I can tell you how I did it. I worked in a company that was the one where I became a director at some point. So it was the biggest growth in my career. And I was responsible for developing an AI engine, like a natural language processing with a research team together. So my focus was more on the scaling than on the AI. But it was a pretty central system. So in the beginning, it was very necessary to be fast and set this up. So I didn't have, in terms of.

Leszek Knoll

Performance or delivery, delivering both.

Peyman Pouryekta

I mean, the first step was delivery, but then the performance, because it was clear that the system needs to scale. I needed to set it up in a way so that it can scale without limit. It has to process a lot of PDF files and read and understand the text. Really, in the beginning, I didn't use any kind of test, maybe some kind of small unit test. And then I realized, okay, at some point. So it was not test driven development. I didn't wrote the test before and then wrote the code. I wrote the code, I wrote everything what was necessary to happen in the system. And then I realized I'm so much busy with does that function, does it have an effect on this kind of module and things like that and especially in the night you try to sleep after work and then you're like shit, all this stuff is coming up into your head. And then I started okay, let's write unit tests really as much as I can. Integration Test I did this, I had drawn about 80, 85% coverage and then it was fine because I think 100% is never necessary.

Peyman Pouryekta

But even when you have the core functionalities covered, maybe there are some kinds of kind of smaller bugs around it but these you can quickly easily fix usually the thing is like often people just write just random tests to get these kind of code coverage. The tricky part is really to write the good tests and write tests which make really sense. So that for example somebody from outside who is looking at the test can fully understand what the code is about so you don't need any description. So the testing part is not only just writing tests, it's really try to write the right test. So it helps you really to get a higher quality. I see a lot of people sometimes just randomly even writing an empty body like the test without anything inside of it mainly just to have the code coverage which doesn't make sense to do.

Leszek Knoll

Absolutely. For me it's a difficult trade off especially prior to current market fit situation is that you want some reliability, you want to deliver fast, you want to have short lead time, automated pipelines, et cetera. But the scope is so uncertain. I mean the future scope, but also the solution itself. You have to validate it and continuously iterate on it. And what I'm trying to get at is establish some sort of minimum or the baseline of the test or automation that enables you to deliver fast. But you're not over engineering the automation part.

Peyman Pouryekta

You're talking mainly about one of the first solutions, right? Like version the alpha better version, version one or something. That's true. I see it like this because I think everyone in the startup scene is also saying this from time to time. Like the first version which you bring out on the market, you should be a bit ashamed of it. It doesn't need to be perfect because you need to be fast and you need to test it more or less on the market to figure out is that something what people are interested in or not?

Leszek Knoll

Hide the ego inside a pocket.

Peyman Pouryekta

If you think of some kind of solutions, I don't know, chat, GPT or what was the clubhouse, this audio app in the beginning, a lot of bugs, but still people. If you have the spot, if you have the market fit, people will use it, and you will fix the functionality on the way.

Leszek Knoll

Sure. I want to take a step back and talk about your observations of the leaders or founders that you work with. Can you list what qualities or traits of those people set apart? The startups that go on to achieve long term success from the ones that struggle?

Peyman Pouryekta

I think the one which are really successful on the management level. They have kind of separation between their roles like who is more focused for example on product, technology, sales, marketing. It's really good separated and they have really good communication on the management level. And additionally, they trust also the management which they hire or also external people like me, for example. Right, like they bring people in where they know okay, I'm not an expert in that field, I need someone who can help me to get better in that field and the people who struggle are usually the ones who have this kind of management style. Maybe it's a classical management style to be able to know everything and decide about everything which doesn't work at a specific time or in a specific pace of the shop. Maybe in the beginning it works, but at some point it doesn't work anymore and to give away this responsibility and have this trust to other people is, I think, very hard. It's also often an ego issue for people but I think these are the biggest issue.

Leszek Knoll

Were there any startups that you turn down?

Peyman Pouryekta

Usually these are the startups where I have the feeling that I can't help them. It's not necessarily based on that topic, it's more about what exactly they want to try to achieve. Especially for example, if it's a very early stage startup then often I don't do it because I have the feeling that first of all it's expensive for them to pay me. So I'm advising them more or less like try to find, first of all, the market fit instead of having deeper view on how the strategy and technology processes and stuff like this is working. Before you take some money and hire someone like me to help you with that because scaling is not a topic for them yet so they need to really find a way and find the market. Yeah and there are also sometimes other kind of industries which I don't want to work with like military area for example, something that's just not interesting to me. Yeah on the management level it's usually not like that because I can help them and train them also to better understand what I explained just before that you need to give things away, especially when you're growing, you need to separate on the management level you need to.

Leszek Knoll

Give away your control. Yeah is it particularly important in terms of scaling?

Peyman Pouryekta

I suppose, yeah, definitely because you're the bottleneck, otherwise you're like the single point of failure. You can never go on vacation because everyone needs always some kind of decisions and you need to answer some questions. And if you have a good separated responsibilities on the management level, it's clear who to ask, first of all, for everyone in the team. And you can be focused really on organizing the management board as a CEO, for example, like your responsibility is not to doing sales. Maybe sometimes it's also doing sales, marketing subjects. But often the main focus should be around how do I manage this kind of small management board, management team, so that everything else belongs and in their departments works. And it's not so much about taking decisions and telling them what to do. It's more about what do I need to give them so that they can execute fully, that they can freely decide how to organize the technology team. Because I, as a CEO, for example, maybe not so doesn't have like maybe I don't have so much deep knowledge about technology. That's often the case. Right. By the way, that's another issue I see often management boards where they don't have a CTO.

Peyman Pouryekta

Like it's mainly just sales, marketing operations, business driven. So it's very business driven. And I mean, it can work if it's not a technology product, but most of the companies I'm working with, it's a software solution.

Leszek Knoll

Every company is a technology company.

Peyman Pouryekta

Yes. The question is always how much focus on technology they have. Right. Sometimes technology is like a service and sometimes technology is the core business. And I think if it's the core business and you don't have anyone on the management level who can really fully understand what's happening there, then it's tricky. Especially when you look at all the bigger corporates. All the founders of the CEOs are originally engineers, like Microsoft, Google. In Google, it's originally the Chrome engineer, like develop Chrome, for example. And I think it is important to have some kind of basic understanding of technology if you want to lead a technology.

Leszek Knoll

Sure. So you mentioned separation, you mentioned trust in the management, trusting and giving away control. Is there anything else?

Peyman Pouryekta

The ego is very important. The ego is the most secure.

Leszek Knoll

Let's think about that. Let's philosophical a bit, but what's the balance here? So that it's productive but not destructive.

Peyman Pouryekta

Yeah, like to put your ego down means in the end exactly. Like to give other people a responsibility to say, okay, I'm not the expert anymore in this field, there's someone who's better than me. Like to accept that it's often very hard and to say, okay, there's someone better than me and I want him to take these decisions that's for a lot of people tricky, because from what I see, most of the people, they hire people to tell them what to do. A bit like Lemmings, please execute that. But that is not how it should be from my perspective, especially in this kind of early stage, it's better really to hire the people so that they can really execute and fully go and fulfill themselves in their role. If you're really a high motivated person for technology, for product or something like that, and you give them really responsibility to execute and give them a budget and all of that stuff so that they can do everything, then you see also how they are blooming, they're growing, they're really developing themselves even further. And usually it's not that one person is growing like you grow with the company, the company grows, you grow.

Peyman Pouryekta

It's a combination of all of these things.

Leszek Knoll

Sure. What about either separation, trust, EO? What about hiring and letting people go? What's your approach to those things?

Peyman Pouryekta

In a sort of yeah, hiring is pretty key. Like you need the right people because they are building this solution for umbi and I tried always, especially in the beginning, to not hire so many junior people to have at least some kind of experience. Because for junior people or people who are coming directly from the university, you need to take them a bit by the hand.

Leszek Knoll

That's for later stages.

Peyman Pouryekta

Exactly. If you have your market fit, for example, like you're doing a serious a round, then there's no issue to hire. But especially in the first in the beginning, like you're three, four, five people or something like this and you need to set up something from scratch, then you need to be fast. And it's better to from my experience at least, it's better to work with people who can fully execute by themselves. Don't need someone to take you by the hand and explain to you in which direction you should go. So this is something what I often do and as soon as you have a specific size in the company and you have enough senior people or people who have enough experience, then it's easy to hire some kind of junior people because junior people have also one kind of huge benefit they have a different perspective. They come in and they have fresh.

Leszek Knoll

Eyes, a bit unbiased, a bit more unbiased, exactly.

Peyman Pouryekta

And they don't care much they don't care much about how you did things in the past. And that's important because they bring always some kind of new fresh ideas also in which, for example, a lot of senior people sometimes don't bring in because they have already their kind of frame about how they worked in the past. So it's interesting for me to have this kind of combination. First of all, cross functional, like different kind of functionalities bring them together, but also different kind of ages, cultures and stuff like this. So the diversity topic and hiring aspect is pretty important for me also.

Leszek Knoll

Okay. Do you look for different mindsets or personality traits when hiring for startups, scale up or corporate?

Peyman Pouryekta

Yeah, in general, yes. For me it's important that they have the or that they share the same kind of vision, like they want to go into the same direction, achieve something together. But it's good if they have different perspectives on that. I mean, you have that anyways, when you have, for example, a salesperson and a technology person looking at the same topic. But it's also good to have people from a total different kind of culture, for example, different kind of age, who see things, like in a different way.

Leszek Knoll

How do you know when it's time to let a person go? And what factors do you consider before making the decision?

Peyman Pouryekta

Yeah, it's very individual, but most of the time it's when I have the feeling this person stuck development, development. They stuck with themselves somehow. They have the feeling they don't have a spot anymore in the company. Then it's always important for me to talk to them and try to figure out what would be the best solution for them. And often it's not just to let them go. Often it's also just like they need an additional thing. Maybe they need to have some space to develop them further. Maybe they need to have some space to identify what kind of next version of themselves do they want to be in the next year. Because a lot of people also me, for example, we always climbing the ladder up. Like, you become a junior, senior, engineer, team lead, maybe a director, VP, CTO and then it goes always up. It's this classical way. But often it's also interesting to have a look on not only technology and have a look on, okay, what is product doing? Because I'm working very close with product that's in the end what I did and became more or less an all rounder and catalyst.

Peyman Pouryekta

So to have a bigger, wider understanding of the whole company and the product, instead of being an expert in one field and just going for that, it's not for everyone interesting. For me, it was interesting to go more wider. But for a lot of people, it's also good to be an expert in one field. And they go deeply into AI technology, for example, bi or whatever, like infrastructure. There are so many topics which are super interesting. But I think you need to have some space and time during your development to understand that and identify that for yourself. What do you want, really? And I try to give them that space so that they can decide together.

Leszek Knoll

Sure.

Peyman Pouryekta

And often, to be honest, if someone really feels like, this is not the spot for me, and I can't find a place in this company, then they look for something else and it's not necessary to really fire them or something. You find a solution for them, you give a good recommendation for their future, and then you go different ways. And often it's the case that you see each other again.

Leszek Knoll

Seems like you put a lot of empathy towards that situation.

Peyman Pouryekta

Yeah, I think it's pretty important. I had some kind of good and also bad experiences in my past. And I think it's important for the development because if you have really a lot of negative experience in that kind of situation, then it can create a lot of damage also to this person and also to their development. And you don't want to be busy with that. You want to go on. And as I said, you see usually not just once in life, right? You see the people again.

Leszek Knoll

What are the most common delusions, misconceptions, or biases that you see among the startup founders?

Peyman Pouryekta

That's a good question. It's hard to say because it's very different. I would say the best misconceptions. Is there a specific field for you where this question is focused about no.

Leszek Knoll

Let me give you an example. When I was starting a company, I thought you can run everything without a process. And it's like it's about people having great people on board and everything will turn out great. It was a misconception, I think, for me. I learned that it's not scalable or you get mad eventually insane at some point.

Peyman Pouryekta

Yeah, I don't think it's like the thing which I have in mind is maybe something which people are not cautious about. Like they don't exactly know that they have this kind of misconception. But in the beginning, it's the same topic. What I was saying before, like, in the beginning of a startup, you try to do different things, right? Like, you're a bit like a lab. Like you try to make experiences in different kind of fields to really find the market. And then imagine you open a restaurant, right? You don't know what in this kind of location works. Can I sell pizza? Can I say sushi? Can I say hamburgers? So you try all of these things out and you offer everything. Have you ever eaten in a restaurant which offers sushi, hamburger and Indian food? It's like that, right? Like, nothing of that really tastes very well if you offer everything. But if you found that okay, in that region, everybody is crazy about sushi and you just go for sushi and you let go the hamburger and you let go the pizza. Then you can be very focused and develop something which is really quality wise on a high level and good food.

Peyman Pouryekta

And I think this is something, this kind of step, a lot of people don't really do. Like, they try to still add the next Indian Indian recipe or I don't know, they think they have okay, they found one thing, they found their sushi, the perfect recipe for that. And instead of scaling that and making this big and they go after everything else. Exactly. I think it's important to create one vertical. And as soon as you have really deep knowledge about this vertical, you scale it and it functions and works and you're known for that, then you can think of a second vertical or the third vertical, which is often around that field. When you think of Google, they didn't start with Gmail in the beginning, right? They start with a search and then they added additional things step by step. And I think for most of the successful companies also in the startup scene in Berlin, you see that they do it step by step. And I think this is a good approach. And a lot of founders don't see that. They try to really do everything they're.

Leszek Knoll

Super tempted to do.

Peyman Pouryekta

The reason is because they're often very sales focused. They talk to different kind of customers. And every customer is telling you something else. The one is saying I want that. The other thing is saying I want that. And to really to boil that down and put it into one product is also the task of a really good CPO. So yeah, I think that's often, very often the case too.

Leszek Knoll

Do you think it might be related to fear of missing out on some opportunities or loss aversion because you have to put something else on the hook?

Peyman Pouryekta

Yeah, it's on the one side that because you're struggling, right? Like, you always have to especially in the early stage, you need to have income, you need to have recurring income. You need to come have new projects, new customers, new clients to cover all the costs and not be too much dependent on investors, for example. And I can understand that. And then often it goes also into the direction of customizations for companies, for your clients, that you set up specific kind of solutions just for them. But it's short term thinking, like long term, it will create so much more issues for you because you need to manage that solution. And then you realize, okay, I have five different products, but I want to just build one. And then you need, I don't know, five different people to maintain the solution. And then again, it's not scalable. You have to get rid of that at some point. It's maybe good to do this. If you see, okay, I need to do this right now because it's necessary for the business, I need the money. But you need to be aware, okay, after one or two years, you need to tell this customer, we can't go on with this kind of solution.

Peyman Pouryekta

You have to adapt to the main product, which we have. And I always recommend to not do it, to be honest, because I have the feeling then that's also not your customer. This is a customer for someone else.

Leszek Knoll

Not ideal.

Peyman Pouryekta

Exactly. That's not the right customer for you.

Leszek Knoll

I've got more personal question for you, which is how your approach to leadership evolved throughout the years. How different is it from ten years before?

Peyman Pouryekta

Like me personally? Oh, it's very different. Like, ten years before, I mean, ten years before I came to Berlin and I was a senior software engineer. And I was very much focused on technology. I mean, I studied management before and stuff like this. For me it was always clear somehow that I have also interested in other fields. But I did a lot of experiences in how to became a CTO or how to became someone to lead other teams, for example, bigger teams and it was very helpful because I understood at some point you can't do really both at the same time like I tried and it was so stressful. I had 14 people who directly reporting to me. And you realize at some point you're the whole time in meetings, like during the whole week, you are mainly in meetings and one on one to have the conversations and the communication with the people. Because it's pretty important to be close to the engineers and understand if they have everything what they need and help them to be successful. But if you have so many people, it's nearly impossible to take care of anything else.

Peyman Pouryekta

So I couldn't be at some point anymore so much responsible for developing software myself and in that kind of step I understood also okay, I need to do one thing right now. I need to be focused, I need to give the responsibilities away. Something for architecture. Sometimes I still have a look on that, but if I have a senior architect in the team, I'm happy to leave it for him. Also infrastructure in the beginning, for example, I often did always the infrastructure topics and let the engineers develop the code because as you might know, it was pretty and it still finds good DevOps people, cyber, reliability engineers is pretty difficult still. And then I was always on that topic to have the control of that and it's also again related somehow to be the bottleneck or my ego to say okay, I need to have the main root password for everything and stuff like that. Instead of organizing this whole kind of issue like to give responsibility away still have your kind of control over it, that's definitely necessary. But to let them execute them by themselves. At some point I realized, okay, the only thing what they need me for is now to log in and make something available or give them the password or give them some rights and stuff like that.

Peyman Pouryekta

And if they have that and they can do things by themselves, then that's usually the best solution for them. Also, they don't even need to but me and tell me like, hang on, can you please give me this and that? And I don't want to be in this situation. And I want to mainly work with people on eye level so that they can really go for it. And I can be really focused on other things like strategy, the communication to the management, the overall topics, which is also more interesting to me. And at that point in my career, I understood, okay, I need to do the switch. Yeah. And I created different kind of structures. So in the end I had only four direct reports. Like one for consolidated. Exactly. It was like a group of people, like five people with me together. We were meeting every week, just once. And there were different kind of people from the technology fields like AI, infrastructure engineer, managers. And that was mainly we had also other kind of conversations with product, but that was separated.

Leszek Knoll

I got a final question for you, which is could you recommend any books, podcasts, obviously, besides this one, other materials that had been helpful to you, advisor or leader?

Peyman Pouryekta

I mean, there are a lot of books about lean development and stuff like this. Yeah, the book which I have in mind is not so much startup related, it's more a management book, to be honest. It's a German book, but I think they have translations in English. It's like all the books from Reinach Bangor. He was a management consultant for all the big ducks companies in Germany. And he has a lot of things which helped me to better understand how this kind of organization on the management level works. And he compares it, for example, with foot or other kind of fields in your life which you can maybe relate to because it's easier to understand this. You see something works, for example, in the organization of how to be a trainer for a football team and you can adapt things in a way for your team. So that was really helpful for me. And besides that, I read and listen to a lot of different kind of podcasts. But it's not like there's a specific podcast which I follow or something. There's a specific book or author which I follow from time to time.

Leszek Knoll

Just diversify your sources.

Peyman Pouryekta

Yeah, there's from time to time popping up different things. And I try if it's interesting to me, I have a look at it and often it's just some small articles also. And I think it's related to this kind of fast world. Like you have a lot of posts, you have a lot of articles. Sometimes I'm like, okay, maybe I should start to read a full book again. Yeah, but for now it works like that and it gives me a good overview always of different kind of topics.

Leszek Knoll

That was great. Thank you very much.

Peyman Pouryekta

Thank you. It was really nice to speak to you. Thanks for the question.

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