Introduction
In the MHV Podcast, we speak with leading founders, VCs and operators on their journey in Southeast Asia. In this episode, Jeremy Au, MHV Head of Strategic Projects and host sits down with Peng T. Ong, MHV Co-founder & Managing Partner and an industry veteran with over 25 years of experience as an entrepreneur, founder, and investor in Silicon Valley and in Asia.
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Jeremy Au:
Hey, good to see you Peng.
Peng T. Ong:
Hi, good to see you.
Jeremy:
Well, we've been working together for the past year and I think this is time for us to hear a little bit more about your past. So talking about your past, what was it like growing up Peng?
Peng:
I tell people I grew up in an emerging market. Basically I remember times when I was running around barefoot in back alleys and stuff like that when I was a little kid. So it's pretty amazing to see where the world has gone in the time that I've been alive. It literally was Rick Shaw, well, not Rick Shaw, but people, you could get in a bicycle or not bicycle. What do you call it? Trishaw, where people would ride you around using human power. And you pay them for the ride, et cetera. That's the Singapore I grew up in.
Jeremy:
Yeah. That's really interesting. And what was it like growing up, or your family?
Peng:
Yeah. I was different in some ways because my aunts were teachers, and so I got to learn English pretty early. In fact, it's probably to the detriment of my Mandarin because we would speak Hokkien at home, but then pretty quickly we'll shift to English when I was growing up. And I guess they wanted to make sure I was competent in English.
I was encouraged to read. I would take things apart and that's where I guess the engineering came from. I have a toy, I'd take it apart. Sometimes it's not a toy, like a radio, and then I wouldn't know how to put it together again. Or sometimes I did.
Jeremy:
What was some memories of you taking stuff apart? Were there any things that you liked disassembling or trying to reassemble?
Peng:
Oh, all kinds of stuff. Radios. I would take radios apart. And actually very quickly I started getting into electronics because I took them apart and they didn't work again, so I was trying to figure out why they didn't work. So this was from young, when I was a little 12 year old kid, if I took it apart, maybe I couldn't put it together again. But I think by the time I was 15, 16, I knew enough about electronics to try and repair things.
Jeremy:
Was that your biggest hobby? Just like electronics, assembling?
Peng:
Yeah. Geesh, I don't remember all my hobbies now that I think about it. So the first computers, TRS-80... So I'm a pretty old guy, if you know what TRS-80 is you're probably a pretty old guy too. It's one of the first computers that came out from Radio Shack. And I was fiddling with it for the longest time. So I guess I was in high school by then, and that's where I learned programming. So there's computers... but computers, I didn't have one at home, I had to go to the shop or the school. The school had a nice computer, the high school had a huge computer, probably the same power as your average hand phone now. But so I did software, but also did electronics and audio. I remember I had an amplifier and speakers because I was in a band. So I would listen to Hi-Fi music. If you can call it Hi-Fi at that point, couldn't really afford Hi-Fi.
Jeremy:
Yeah. So you were in a band back then?
Peng:
Yeah. It was not like a rock band, it was like a marching band. I was the drummer.
Jeremy:
You were the drummer. Really?
Peng:
Yeah. Especially if you're not playing in the context of a marching band, it's actually a really good stress reliever
It's a very physical activity, playing the drum. And I think there's something really basic about rhythms that all of us have. You see any culture in the world, from Sub-Saharan Africa to somewhere in the middle of New Guinea, there's drumming. You just take two sticks and you hit them together and you start to have rhythm. I don't know why human beings are like that, but we are.
Jeremy:
I definitely remember keeping beat while also marching in national service. There you are, you're just growing up and taking part and doing your first programming. What was it like? Was it fun when you first did your first code? Or, you were struggling? How did you get started on that journey?
Peng:
No. It's like anything you get into, any hobby you get into, when you're able to get into a state of flow, you don't realize four hours has passed and you're just standing in front of this machine and trying to make it bounce a dot on the screen to the other place and back again. That's what hobbies are. You don't think about it as hard or easy, you just think about it as something that's very interesting to do. I think that's what we need to give ourselves more room to play with. If you know me and you know my wife, you realize that I still am into all kinds of crazy hobbies. Just spending time, just putzing around with stuff. The fact of the matter is when we get into the state of flow, when we're just so engrossed in what we're doing, we don't notice the passing of time.
I think that's when at some level the human animal is the most happy, I guess. I don't know what the right term is. But you're in one of the states where you're most in touch with what you want to do, what engages you. I don't know again, why we have these states that allow us to be so focused on something for so long. But we do, and big, monumental results have happened because of that ability for human beings to focus.
Jeremy:
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And that reminds me a lot of some of our conversations around sci-fi and I think your deep passion for sci-fi books as well.
Peng:
Oh yeah. I forgot to mention reading sci-fi.
Jeremy:
Is that when you started, around that time as well?
Peng:
Yeah, around high school. Yeah, Asimov. Dune was a bit later, I think it was in college that I did Dune, but that's my favorite one. The sci-fi writers of that time, Asimov, Heinlein, they were very G or PG kind of sci-fi writers. So as a kid, you could get away with just reading a bunch of those. These days it's not always clear what rating is on which book.
Jeremy:
Yeah, definitely. I got to ask, what's your favorite sci-fi book? Was it Dune?
Peng:
Yeah, Dune.
Jeremy:
Why is it your favorite?
Peng:
It's epic. And it's a speculation of how humans will behave with more and more technology. I'm not sure if it's right or not, but it's the exploration of politics and human behaviors and heroes, and antiheroes. It's all the stuff that good storytelling is about, but it's also all the stuff that good metaphysics is about. And all the stuff that good sociology is about and political science is about. I think that's why it took me to college days to really get into it.
Jeremy:
There you are, you're loving sci-fi, you're doing some programming in high school and then you go to college. That's interesting because this is also where you decided to major in engineering. So what was that decision like?
Peng:
It wasn't hard at all. Because in Singapore we have these streams. You go into business or are you go into liberal arts, or you go into science, or you go into technology. And I was in technology in my first high school, and then my junior and senior years, I was in science. And I wasn't there because someone told me to be there, I was there because I wanted to be there. I want to build things, tear things apart, et cetera. And so engineering was the normal direction for me to go. If I had stayed in Singapore though, I might have done physics instead of engineering, because physics is the other domain that I really find mind-blowing. I'm probably one of the few people you know that binge watches quantum physics and string theory on YouTube.
If you catch up on some of this stuff, your mind will be blown. Reality is not what we think it is.
The other reason for doing physics is I was very conscious about time. Because all of us spent a couple of years in the army and we were behind most of our friends elsewhere. So physics was three years in Singapore. So if I stayed in Singapore, I've done physics instead of engineering, which is four years. But I got into a US school, University of Texas in electrical engineering. So I went there and I got out in two years. So I saved time. And then I went to grad school.
Jeremy:
Right. Yeah. So what was it like moving to the US back then? Because at that time going to the US for studies was relatively rare, I think.
Peng:
It was starting to be popular. I was going there in a time where the folks here were shifting from the UK to the US. There was a whole bunch of people that went during my time, I guess. So it wasn't that unusual. When I was in Texas, there were something like a few hundred Singaporeans in Texas. So it was a huge community.
Well, at that point also, they had double or triple tuition, and I had a scholarship. But I didn't want to risk it, so I tried to get as much as possible done so I can move on.
Jeremy:
Yeah. And what is it that you learned there?
Peng:
How to work really hard.
Jeremy:
What was it like? So now you're just disassembling radios or learning programming, now you're actually starting to master a lot more of it. So what was that like?
Peng:
Actually the first two years in the US was what Singapore prepared me to do, but at the next level. It's basically clear as many exams as possible, clear as many courses. I was doing almost the max load every semester, including summers. And then I had a proctoring job to do, to just lower my fees and all that. So I have a lot of people I know from Texas, but not a lot of really close friends because I didn't spend that much time socially. So it was just a lot of hard work, getting through courses. Sure, I found things very interesting, for example, software. All my software courses I had a lot of fun, but it's in context of clearing the courses.
The thing about having done the army is you get a lot more focused. You got a couple of more years to mature a little bit and you get a lot more focused. So when I went to Texas, I knew what I was trying to... I was trying to get through this university degree without running out of money. So I did that. And then I went to grad school and that was much more of a breather. I slowed down and got more intellectual, I thought more. We'd spend a lot of time right up to three, 4:00 AM talking about, what is consciousness? Things like that.
Jeremy:
So tell us more about grad school. So there you are, you're starting to shift gears into more of an exploration phase. What was it that you were exploring in grad school?
Peng:
So the thing that is a push between computers and science fiction is, I started thinking more and more about AI. So I decided to do my graduate degree in artificial intelligence, in computer science. At that point, this was pre what they call the nuclear Holocaust for AI. So there's AI, and then nuclear Holocaust for about... AI was dead for about five, seven years, and then boom, it took off again. So I knew I was going to do that. But what I didn't understand is when you take a systems approach to trying to figure out AI, you bump into a lot of the metaphysical questions. So and I was fortunate enough to end up in an apartment where there were four of us, and they were all AI people. Actually three first and then four in my second year.
So we end up talking to all kinds of hours about all these fundamental metaphysical issues. Like, "How do you know you're conscious? What is consciousness? What is innovation? How are we creative, and can AI be creative?" And you start to realize that limits of what you know. Because if you want to build something you need to understand what it is you're trying to cause to happen. And till today, a lot of my thinking and my reasoning comes from that time where systems computing and metaphysics sort of met.
Jeremy:
That sounds like a fun conversation.
Peng:
It was fun. We spent way too much time talking about all this stuff. And in the end, I realized, it'll be a long time before AI became even close to what I was hoping it would do. And so I actually dropped out of my PhD and went to work. I'm an engineer more fundamentally than I am a scientist. So what engineers want to do is build things that the world can use. And I figured out, spending a couple more years to get my PhD won't help me get there. So I went to work at a startup.
One of the reasons I went to the US was because of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. You look at them and you go, "Wow. These geeks can actually build significant companies." Nothing like the scale we see today, but they were still significant companies. Technology could make a difference. And so I went, "Okay, let me do that." And one of the other reasons I was in a hurry to get out of school is so I can do that. And I stumbled into grad school, which was fun. But then in the end, I go, "Okay, this is going to take a while for the tech to come up to speed, so let me go into building companies." And I was very clear I was going to do a startup going to the US, as opposed to go join a big company.
Jeremy:
And what was that startup?
Peng:
It's a company called Jensen. I'm not sure what the status is right now, I think it got acquired by some other company, which is still around.
Jeremy:
What was that like, your first job after the army?
Peng:
Yeah, my first job. The army, I did some programming because I screwed up my knee and spent some time programming. But Jensen was a pretty fun company. I was the second non-founding engineer they had like five or six founding engineers. And then my manager was hired and I was the next one. So it's a small company about 30, 40 people. And no, actually I was... Yep. 30, 40 by the time I left, I was number 20, 21, two of us joined the same day. And it's a bunch of people from the AI labs at MIT or AI lab I guess, singular. And they were building a real-time expert system for controlling processes, manufacturing processes mainly, and it's real time. So you got to build the system to have a certain response time. So I was down in the core of building all that stuff.
Jeremy:
What was that like? Any good memories?
Peng:
It was fine. Again, I would spend hours, forget time and be in the office all the time to make sure things work.
Yeah. I learned a lot about building companies. One of the services people taught me really what it meant to have good customer services. And we'll be driving to the airport to deliver a parcel to be air flown to an operating site, just so they can get the latest feature, at like 3:00 AM in the morning. Things like that, they stay in your mind about what customer service is about. So it's not just engineering I learned, it's about how you build companies.
Jeremy:
Right. Were there any good mentors or bosses around at that time?
Peng:
Yeah. Matthew was that services manager. And learned a lot from him about... He was not one of these very... He is smart, but he focuses more on how to make sure the business happens, as opposed to how the tech works.
Jeremy:
Yeah. And what did you learn about that for him?
Peng:
Just the attitude of customer service. You jump through hoops to make sure the customer is okay.
Jeremy:
Yeah. And so there you are at your first company and you're learning, so what happened there?
Peng:
What I realized was, AI was still going to take a long time. So this is an expert systems company. It's interesting how they don't look at expert systems kernels as AI now. Because it works so... The joke is once it works, the industry is no longer AI.
Jeremy:
That's actually a good line actually.
Peng:
So I was just talking to someone doing machine learning and they are replacing all these rule-based systems, and they say it's rule-based systems versus AI. Okay. That's how it works now. But, so what I realized is this stuff is going to take a long time and I wanted to be more in mainstream software. And so I started looking and found a small company at that time called Sybase. It's a data server, they build data. So Microsoft SQL server uses that Sybase core. And so, this was pre IPO, I went there and got into databases and I spent the next three, four years doing databases. And that was a real education on life mission critical software systems.
You crash, every minute you're down, it's $100,00 cost to the customer. And wall street what's running on Sybase, so all your trading systems, nine out of 10 were Sybase at that time. And so we were in the guts of building all the systems out. They're pretty much like operating systems, but running on top of them. But then I realized I didn't go to the US just to work for other people, so pretty soon I started companies.
Jeremy:
Yeah. So that was an interesting transition. Because there you are, you're an early employee at two different startups in technology. And there you've always been a contributor, making things happen. And then was it around then that you started thinking to yourself, "I want to found something, I want to start something?" What was that like?
Peng:
Actually, I always knew I was going to start something
So I took two, actually three companies, so about four, five years before I started my own company after school.
Jeremy:
Yeah. Tell us about that first company.
Peng:
The first company is a company called Electric Classifieds. And we were there when the browser was starting to get popular. We were there when, about eight or 10, nine out of 10 people on the internet were men. And so we actually decided to do something like Craigslist but verticalize, and the first vertical was Match.com. And you know the history of Match.com, it's a public company now. At that time we had a different set of problems, like I said eight, nine out of 10 people on the internet were men. So how do you build a dating website? And it took a while, but it got off the ground and then the rest is... It took a long time because IAC finally acquired it. And then, there ran it profitably for a decade or so before they took it public.
Jeremy:
So zooming in a little bit here, so there you are, and how did you become a founder first the time? How did you meet your co-founders?
Peng:
Yeah. Okay. How do I meet my co-founder? So there's this thing called the Software Entrepreneurs Forum in the valley. Oh, I didn't tell you. I moved to the valley to go work for Sybase, I just assumed you know. Sybase was in New Berkeley. The forums were set up by people who were... just like any forum here for startups. You want to start a company, you want to... Birds of a feather, talk to people. So I went to these software entrepreneurs forum, and I met with a guy by the name of Gary Kremen. He's from Illinois too, that's where I did my grad work. Well, he was Northwestern but he grew up in Chicago. Got to know him well. And he had a company that was doing backup for Unix systems.
So it's kind of a tiny market, and he wanted to do something more. So we spent maybe six months brainstorming on what to do. I'll go to his place, he'll come to my place and we'll just brainstorm. And we came up with the idea of a [classifieds 00:29:17], but driven by computers. So it doesn't make sense... the crazy state of the world as I'll call it now, or then, is it doesn't make sense for a human being to look through hundreds of classified ads to find what they need to do. You should just tell the computer this is what I want, and the computer should look for it. So we decided to do that. And he's a MBA from Stanford also, Gary is. So he did the analysis and he realized most of the revenues from classifieds came from personals.
Peng:
So not necessarily the big newspapers, but the smaller ones. So we decided to do Match.com as the first site. And we never did anything else, we just did Match.com. And we grew it. The go-to-market strategies were very, very different then as you can imagine, there's no Google, there's no Facebook, and they're mostly men. So what kind of marketing strategies would you create to create enough of a momentum within a city so that when you go online, you could actually find interesting dates? So that was a problem we were cracking. And I think we cracked it to some extent.
Yeah, it was like brainstorming basically, in what are interesting things to do? Meaning prior to that, and even after Match, all the stuff I did was build huge engines for businesses, software engines for businesses. And this is the first time I was thinking about, how do you get the normal person who's on the internet to use this socially? So it was a very different kind of approach. And frankly, I wish I'd stayed more in that space, but my comfort is less to do with trying to figure out the human mind, but trying to figure out systems that work for well specified processes. So we spent a lot of time talking about the nature of businesses we could build.
And, I think I was interested in learning from Gary the business side of the business. Technology I could deal with, but I didn't understand, for example, how you raise money. You got to remember this is like in the 1990s, so there was not a lot of VC fundraising stuff that was going on. There was some, but not like what we have today. So I think because, to this day Gary and I are good friends. And that's because I think one of the reasons is, we were looking at very different things when we started Match.com. And at some point I figured out, "Okay, I learned enough." Then I went off and started my next company.
Jeremy:
Before we move one to the next one, what was it about Gary that you liked? Because I remember, every founder is always thinking to them themselves like, "How do I find or know if this is the right co-founder?" So what was it like, how did you first meet him and how did you know that you want to keep building with him? Because those are two different decisions.
Peng:
Yeah. I wasn't that deeper a thinker at that point. I said, "Okay, this guy wants to build a company, he's an engineer, he understands what I'm talking about. He's also got his business background, he's also done another company so, okay. Let's go do it." There's no deep psychological profiling and all that stuff that we do these days, it was much more simple. And my view is, it's like the same question you ask about your startup founder, you could ask your spouse. Is this the right person for me for the next 50 years? So a founder, maybe 10 years. But still, at some level it's a leap of faith. You can think it through all you like but in the end, it's two things. So, leap of faith and it's a commitment. And if you have someone that can accept that and can reciprocate, then you're in good shape.
Jeremy:
Right. And so there you are, making a decision and you start building up Match. What were some things you discovered or had to build from scratch? Because today, the dating industry is very much like, there's a ton of literature out there about it, it's very normal. In fact, I think a quarter—
Peng:
Two thirds of—
Jeremy:
Two thirds? Mine was about half of my friends recently.
Peng:
Oh, your friends. Yeah.
Jeremy:
My friends. It's not a statistical analysis, I would say. But I'd say about half of my recent friends who got engaged through online dating. So I think today it's very much a cultural norm. And I remember 10 years ago, obviously looking at a time at OkCupid and Match.com and feeling very awkward about using it. So even before then right, so...
Peng:
We were the first one, literally the first internet dating company.
Jeremy:
Yeah. And what was that like? Because I'm sure obviously there was technical challenges as you were building, but also there was a lot of cultural challenges, I'm sure there was, about getting people to do something, the same thing, but online.
Peng:
The good news is at that time, everyone online was a techie.
It changed very quickly. But, so there's less of this... what do you call it? Less of a factor of this kind of awkwardness. Because that's what tech is there for, to make your life more efficient. So dating, yeah. We'll make it more efficient. And the users went, "Okay. Yeah." I'm sure there's a bunch of people very quickly that started to think, "oh, this is awkward." But initially, people thought of it as a productivity tool.
Jeremy:
This is a more efficient way to date. That's a nice way to think about it.
Peng:
Yeah. If you think about how random personalities are, if going to a party of a hundred people, how do you meet your future mate, it's just total randomness. So this thing helps you be efficient.
Jeremy:
I got to ask. So both of you were dating or single at the time of Match.com?
Peng:
So Gary was single and I was sort of catching up with my current wife at that time, so I didn't use the services. I'm sure Gary did.
Jeremy:
Yeah, exactly. Okay. So there you are. You put in quite a chunk of time, energy, as you went along. When did you start feeling like, "Oh, this is starting to make sense, or take off or, be more certain?" Because the initial phases you're just finding product-market fit.
Peng:
Yeah. Match, I never quite got there. One of the reasons why I moved on to Interwoven was, I had a hard time trying to see how Match was going to take off, not from a business point of view, but I think we had like five CEOs in the first six years. So after a while you go, "That doesn't make sense." So I learned a lot from Match in a negative way too, and in the end we sold the company. So at some point I told Gary, "Hey, look, your engineering team is set up, let me just go do other things." And I did.
Jeremy:
Yeah. And that was Interwoven. So what was that like? So now you're taking something that you learned from your childhood, your college years, and your master's program to Match. And now you're going to Interwoven and you want to build this. So how was that search process for the idea, the core of it?
Peng:
So in my closet I have a stack of, Moleskine didn't exist then, but note books with all the writings and journaling. It takes me on the average for the three companies about six months to a year and a half to go from, "I want to start a company," to incorporating and having the first payroll paid out. So it's a lot of hard work, you throw out a lot of ideas. I'm not one of these where I have the ideas first, I want to build this and then figure out how to do the business. I'm the other way around. I go, "I want to build software business. So what do I do?" And I just brainstorm a whole bunch of stuff.
Jeremy:
Yeah. And so why did you brainstorm at the time Interwoven? What was that origin idea?
Peng:
At that point, some guy wrote a draft book and I managed to get a copy of that draft book. It never got published, called Market Validation. And they had really good ideas about how you validate a market before you start the company, before you do too much coding. And this is why enterprise software. So you mock up a product brochure, pricing, everything, and you go meet companies and go, "If I have this, we're building this, will you buy it?" So Russell Nakano, Russell was my first engineer hire and my co-founder at Interwoven. He and I, went all over the place in the Valley, Seattle went to all these internet companies and went, "We're building this, would you buy this?"
And almost 100% of the people said yes. Because they were building big websites and there was no way to coordinate all the stuff that was coming in, and the people were breaking the website all the time. So our system was a content management system to phase in content, in such a way that you don't break the whole thing. So at the peak, before our IPO, we had this thing running on Cisco's website, which was three terabytes. At that point, three terabytes filled the room with hard drives. And the whole business was running on this thing. So we figured that that was a product market fit. And I think very importantly, we didn't realize how importantly, we went deep into technology to make sure that the workforce of the day for building websites in our storage system was hand-in-hand.
You could actually drag and drop a file into a drive, and that is sucked into Interwoven's repository. So you're actually dealing with file systems, which everybody knows how to deal with. And it seems so simple because it's a file system, but the deep tech gets sucked in and we version everything. So if you go, "Oh, I made a mistake. I can get to some older version." Now, even today, you don't have open source file systems that do this. And I guess you have Google drive and all these things that do some level of that, but still, it's not quite there. And this was like 20 years before Google.
Jeremy:
Right. There you go. And this time you were building the company differently, because you learned from obviously the previous two companies and then being a founder in a third one. So how were you building this company differently?
Peng:
So I was the CEO to the point where the biggest things that needed to be done were no longer the product engineering issues. And so the culture was mine to define, and the hiring was mine, so we made sure we hired all the right people. And even the VCs, we were careful about it, how to bring in the right VCs. And in the end it turned out to be right. In some ways Interwoven spoiled me because I assume positive things on a lot of this stuff. And I learned okay, I got lucky somewhat at Interwoven because most of the people I found were great people. And in fact, if you talk to a lot of folks from Interwoven during that period of time, they'll tell you, it was one of the highlights in their career because of just the strong group of people we got together. We were solving a real problem, and we had a group of people that had a lot of fun doing it.
Jeremy:
There you are having fun and you said something interesting, because that time you're also bringing in the right VCs and capital, what was that like on your side? Because you're the CEO, fundraising, building the company?
Peng:
I don't remember, this is a long time ago. I don't remember all the details, but I did remember being a bit careful about, "Okay, I'll take your money instead of your money." And being careful about the valuations. And this is why I know what a first time entrepreneur goes through when they're trying to optimize valuation. After you do this a few times, you realize the valuation optimization should be there, it should be somewhere downstream when you're building the company. I think I was just... I applied the same principles as I did to hiring people. Just, "Do I want to work with this person the next five to 10 years?" And yeah, that's how I ended up with some of the investors that came in.
You're always worried if you're going to get from the investor you like. There was one case where the investor made me an offer, A VC made me an offer, and reached out to shake my hand and say, "Will you take this?" And I hesitated because I didn't have time to think about the deal and all that. And I took it back to the board, the board said, "Okay." And then by the time I called back, he said, "No."
So I learned something about what that investor was looking for. He was looking for a decisive CEO. "Okay. It's good enough, let's go." And I didn't do that, because I was being my engineering, analytical self. And so I learned a lesson there. I think it worked out for the best, but I learned a lesson there.
Jeremy:
Well interrupting things up here, when you think about your time at Interwoven, what did you think are some tough moments that you had there?
Peng:
Moments? Yeah. So the folks listening to it will still remember this. There's a point where there was a disagreement, my lead engineer and a few... we were like five, six people, and a couple of other engineers disagreed with the direction of where the product should go. And I basically had to make a decision that would fire half the engineering team.
Jeremy:
Wow. It came to that? Because people who are passionate about it or?
Peng:
Yeah. People were very passionate, they just disagreed with the direction, et cetera. And I made the call. So those two guys are still friends. Those two guys that had to walk out, they're still friends. They knew they had given me a tough decision. And hopefully in retrospect, they can see that's fine, we built a big company, took it public, et cetera. So I trust they understand, and they do because I've spoken to them since then. One of them became a teacher, the other one is at Google.
Jeremy:
Yeah. As long as you're happy with what they're doing. And why is it so tough? Because as a CEO, and then in charge of the whole business, as well as you being an engineering and technical leader about that process, what would you say was the difference in the set of decisions you had to make between those different roles? Because this feels like it was both decisions.
Peng:
Yeah. Because as a CEO, I needed an insight into whether these two guys were correct in their assessment. And if I wasn't an engineer it would have been really tough decision. But I knew what the team was trying to do, and I appreciate they're passion about doing things really, really, really right. But I think they had a lot less commercial software systems building experience than I did at that point. And I've seen Sybase, I've seen source code that stand up the wall effectively, and it's messy. If you look at the innards of a car, it's messy, but the car runs. So I think they were a bit more purists than is practical, and probably the rest of the engineers could have been more artistic or aesthetically on point when all this was happening.
But as a CEO, I had to make a call. It was no longer at a point where, can we all get along? And I had been off doing sales and all that stuff, so I didn't know this was all building up. And so when it did, I realized I had to make a call and so I did. So that could have killed the company because it was half of the engineers that could have said bye-bye. And it didn't, so.
Jeremy:
Yeah. Now that you've added more experiences than, and if you could go back in time, you may not necessarily have done a different decision, but would you have done anything differently?
Peng:
No. So the lessons you learn is how to get away from these situations where it's do or die. As opposed to, what to do when it's do or die.
Jeremy:
Like prevention is better than cure.
Peng:
So one-on-ones, culture, communications, stuff like that.
Jeremy:
So the reflection is more like, you didn't need to come to that kind of situation, and if you had done more proactive one-on-ones, team building.
Peng:
Yeah. Team building. Disagreement resolution and things like that. So I think Interwoven became a better company because of that. Because you realize you can't have disagreements just kept under the hood, you got to talk about disagreements. And you see this now, where some of the more painful things we put right on the table. It's like building a family that's just open with the problems in the family, you don't hide it away in a corner.
Jeremy:
Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming on and sharing. The three big themes was firstly of course, what was it like to grow up, disassembling and attempting to reassemble radio sets, and how that kickstarted your joy of engineering. The second thing was the transitions. Transitions to the United States, transitions to becoming an engineer, the transition into startups and across the different companies. Those choices were really interesting. The third thing of course is sharing the real insider history of not just Match.com and Interwoven, but also how you were thinking about it going in, being part of it and hitting it out of the park.
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