Sachin Lad, CTO at Zight

all right I’m excited to welcome sain lad the chief technology officer at zeit sain has a very impressive career that

spans leadership roles as VP of engineering at axamed and Bank of America manager at Citrix go to meeting

as well as a principal software engineer at Sonos he’s also a startup adviser uh

Beyond his awesome professional achievements sashan is also a family man living in Santa Barbara with his wife

kids a doggo he’s a cricket fan an amateur beach volleyball player and

occasional youth sports coach uh welcome SAA great to have you thanks Scott

thanks for having me all right well let’s just Dive Right In um I have some questions that I would

love to know kind of on the beginnings and the origins of your career so you’ve been in and around Tech professionally

for the last 15 plus years what got you started what was the young sashin doing that led you to

now yeah so you know I had a very um humble beginning I grew up in like lower

middle class family back in India and you know I’ve been always like

fascinated with like radios and telephones and television like just

seeing how you can like you know see all these different shows which are recorded somewhere else and then you are able to

see it on you know on a TV in your living room um at you know at some other

time and same with like you know telephone as well like being able to hear somebody who is you know in a

different part of the world and growing up we like my brother and and myself

even opened up few gadgets and try to understand what’s inside of that what are the inner

workings um and as we kind of grew up uh you know some of my friends they moved

to different city for their education and we kind of kept in using like emails

and IMS and you know it was so fascinating to kind of know you know the

internet and you know how you can like you know do communication with somebody who is on a

different part of the world and that was like so fascinating that you know uh exposed me to like you know Yahoo and

geosite and you know whole um you know worldwide web and it was just

fascinating to learn all these things exist and you know there’s so much happening uh with computers you know

around us um though still in like very nent phase and that kind of you know led me

to kind of pursue computer science in um my engineering um curriculum and as I came

to know more about you know computers and programming you know it was like more and more um you know intriguing to

know what else can we do using computers and uh internet um and soon I started kind of

learning about like gaming and you know all these cool things that you can play with your friends who are sitting in a

different city and you can like work together and you know U play all this

crazy games um and then yeah as you know kind of went into computer science

curriculum learning about programming and all these different languages it was

yeah crazy learning all these things as growing up and you know as as I was

doing like my bachelors uh we went into you know computer science labs and it

was so crazy to learn that even being in computer science we only had like few

hours a week that we can spend in front of computers so me and my friends would

basically handr write the computer programs on a notebook so that we can efficient ly use our time in front of

computer when we got that uh that time in the in the lab and I don’t know if

you have tried writing uh computer programs on a notebook it’s incredibly hard to do that

so yeah all sorts of um you funny experiences writing computer programs on

a on a notebook and then trying to kind of see how that works I I fortunate maybe unfortunately fortunately have not

had the experience of having to write computer code um that’s that’s super interesting so um I also know that you

know you you mentioned that in your background at least in addition to computer science um and playing you know

volleyball for fun um and I know that you love Cricket what what was it like going to see maybe like your first

American football game how did it compare to your experience with some of these other sports yeah so growing up I basically

learned Cricket which was pretty usual back in India cricket was a big thing everyone would you know play cricket all

the kids will get together in the neighborhood and they’ll you know play cricket after school and then uh that

was um you know the sport that you know I played in India and then I came to us

to pursue my masters and then got exposed to basically volleyball uh we

had a you know good volleyball group um at University of Alabama that’s where I

you know pursued my masters and obviously you know American football is a religion in Alabama so you know you

got like very cheap tickets to you know go see football games and every Friday

they would be like Caravans coming into the town they’ll be parked in the quad

and it was always about football right so whole fall was just football right um

and once you kind of go to few games you kind of start to get a feel of it and you

know there is no There Is No Escape yeah that sounds about right

especially in a in a big football Town um is there you know going back to your your point about taking apart

devices is is there like an early device that you know whenever you look back to

a young SATA and you were like man that one thing was so cool and just got me

inspired excited yeah I would say that would be uh radio

so back in those days like the big radio boxes um we open couple of them uh once

they were like you know um not working uh to understand what’s in there and I

was just surprised like you know it’s like all this you know wiring and you know the gadgets which make up a radio

and just having all this you know audio coming through it it uh you know it’s

just surprising to see you know it’s just simple uh simple box with some uh

electronic parts in there yep I I’ve done a bit of the same I’m always surprised and a little

overwhelmed by what I find especially when I don’t know uh much about the device um so you you’ve had you know as

I mentioned in your intro you’ve worked at some really great um businesses both large and small um I I would be kind of

curious like what what was your first you know Tech experience your first job

like right after you finished your Masters and and how was it and uh what ultimately did did you find exciting and

then also kind of maybe painful about some of those yeah so um after I graduated I

landed a job at Citrix um and you know my uh job was um

actually into a group which was doing reporting um so I got exposed to to you

know dealing with lot of data um and you know doing reporting you

know both for like internal as well as external customers and the most surprising thing

was you know coming out of college you always you know um write like all these

programs which are more like a you know academic and you know coming to a

company and understanding how the business work it’s like so much different writing programs there right

like you already have you know millions of lines of code uh you have you know

specific set of you know processes you have you know all these different environments through which

your code is moving um all the way to you know customers um there are all these

different Gates that you know you have uh to get your you know uh changes to move up to

production and it’s just surprising that you don’t learn about all these things when you know you are in you know

academic setting right um you write programs for fun you do all these you

know programs and you know you try out things and you

are free to like use any libraries you want you are free to use any programming

languages you want and you know it’s a very different culture when you you know come into a big Enterprise where you

know there set of processes and tuning and Frameworks that you have to like ader to right so that’s like a big shift

in you know how you think about you know writing um your code and thinking about

all the rigor that goes through uh to make it available to your customers so that was a big surprise and you know

shift in how you you do programming day in and day out um Citrix go to meeting um you know

was a business that has a lot of users right they they’ve built Big products that have scaled to millions of users um

you you probably saw some really interesting things whether it was like leadership approaches and how managers

worked on problems that may have been different from Bank America to Sonos to

uh Citrix um when you think about some of your now leadership approaches your

how how you approach leading technology teams um what are some of the things that you learned that you like loved and

than anything that you you know without naming or shaming anyone that you you kind of have decided not to

do yeah I think that’s a really good question that you know like helps me reflect on like you know um range of

different companies that I’ve worked through my career and I guess I’m

um you know really fortunate to have exposed to like you know small startups

as well as you know large Enterprises like Citrix and Bank of America so you

know working at like large companies like Bank of America and Citrix gave me like solid um you know foundation around

thinking about like processes scalability um security especially with

you know the scale at which um you know um the number of transactions that are

coming through you know um for companies like Citrix and Bank of America right um

understanding like how to minimize risk Building Products which are going to you know scale and serve millions of

users and especially for like banking industry you know um thinking about like

Regulatory compliances and you know the security is

Paramount in in environment like that on the other hand like working at Zite as

well as you know exam ad uh which is more you know uh startup focused

environment understanding that you know agility is um you know Paramount to

success there making sure we are you know innovating faster um you know adapting to you know

customer feedback and pivoting you know our approaches based on how the market

is Shifting or what our customers are needing um you know is is important so

you don’t have luxury of like spend spending months and months developing a product only to know that you know a

customer wants something different right how have you how have you thought about the kind of the

balance uh with respect to like maybe the needs of those where you you obviously are like I want to build this

incredible product that’s scalable and reliable and secure and then also you’re you’re sort of thinking about the

short-term needs like you mentioned bugs uh feature tweaks and improvements like how how do you kind of balance those it

seems like it would be pretty challenging yeah so I try to kind of blend both best

of both the worlds right so thinking about technology and architecture in the

same realm of how we think about product right so starting with you know MVP um

for the product making sure we’re building you know minimal viable product that our customers can use and then we

gain feedback and iterate on it kind of applying same principles to our techn

technology and architecture so starting with you know minimal viable architecture which you know can be

scaled for future needs as the product is growing and we are seeing usage um

applying the same um minimal viable you know um point of view to the

architecture as well so start with something simple but making sure the

architecture uh can be evolved with the need um as we build the

product um take some you know calculated risk when it you know comes to like um

using you know off the-shelf uh products or using you know third party libraries

which are open source um and then balancing um you know creativity um with

risk taking and some you know responsibility there so when you’ve been building some of these apps whether it’s

at you know your your larger scale or startup scale have there been any kind of tough moments or scary stories where

you know you’re behind the scenes having to kind of like save the day with your team you’ve had to stay up all night uh

fix things that shouldn’t have been you know done as they were yeah there there are so many

different stories um but yeah let me uh talk about

this story you know when I was at C so I was leading the platform team uh

specifically the team that was you know managing um the surveys which was C to

our audio infrastructure and you know one day uh

we basically started getting all these alerts um where you know none of our

audio infrastructure was working and back in that you know that time you know

um Citrix had its own data centers that it was managing this was you know pre

Cloud era so everything had to be managed by our operations team we had

three data centers in us uh we were you know managing everything um you know

from you know wiring all the way to like capacity and you know all the things that go with that um and we noticed that

uh one of our core server which manages the uh the audio infrastructure was

having dis failure so we had to dispatch a team member from operations team to go

and replace the dis um fortunately we had a spare disc on a spare server that

we could swap out um but it was like 20 minutes drive

for him to get there spend like maybe 20 30 minutes to do actual you know swapping of the

disc um and you know in and out it was like 3 hours of disruption and it was

kind of crazy seeing all this you know customer support tickets coming in you know all everyone in the organization

was kind of nervous because it’s going to be a a very longtail disruption and

customers not able to you know get on a call on an important meeting um was was

a big thing so in and all it took 3 hours everything

uh kind of went okay but the plan was for that person to kind of go back again next day and you know replace that disc

with a newer version because it was a a spale disc um so so we went in again

next day and I don’t know what the confusion was but he ended up pulling the disc from a wrong server which

resulted in another disruption and then you know another 3 four hours was spent

trying to figure out what happened there um because that person replaced the disk went back home only to recognize

something wrong happened and having to come back again so that was the the funniest story on you know how you know

things can go wrong with you know manual intervention it’s like all inadvertent

but things can happen when it comes to like managing infrastructure so I’m so

fortunate with you know how the cloud has come in you know with AWS and Azure and gcp how

easy it is to you know add more capacity when you need it scale your servers

vertically or horizontally as needed um and then being able you know able to

like replace dis or any other part of your infrastructure easily without you

know incurring um big downtime yeah the the grandkids are not

going to or maybe your kids will never really appreciate this like uh what do you mean I have to change the server

like they’ll just be working in a future environment well that that concept doesn’t exist so yeah that’s a that’s a

great story that’s awesome um I I’d love to know a little bit about um you know your experience with what’s become cool

and important and uh you know the the industry i’ I’d say overall in

technology has become more and more focused on AI and you know working with you here at Zite you know you’ve you’ve

definitely shown strong interest personally in building AI tools um I’d love to know a little bit about you know

like what excites you most about the potential of AI uh shaping the future of

technology or current applications yeah love to hear your thoughts there yeah I mean like last one year has

been so transformative in terms of like the potential of AI right it’s fundamentally

kind of reshaping how we think about like technology and business um I think there is you know so

much happening at so fast pace sometimes it’s like hard to like keep up with you know all these different models which

you know keep coming um every month with more and more you know

capabilities um but right now the way kind of I’m am thinking about is is you

know AI is helping um basically reshaping some of the things

that we do um repetitively so automating repeative task second

category is like um efficiently you know help us analyze larger data sets um as a

human if you have to like look through large you know data that’s coming in whether it’s you know lot of events from

your system lot of you know data that you have accumulated around your user

Journey um it takes time um from you know a lot of Engineers to build report

and analyze it and it has become like relatively easier to do that now with AI

and then third category is like personalization at scale right like providing product recommendations which

are specific to your use case to your persona you know is been like relatively

easier right so when I kind of think about like automating repeative task I

think about like support use case where you know customer run into you know a a

problem or if they have question you know you find some patterns over time it’s like repetitive right they want to

know what your you know pricing they want to know more about your you know Enterprise plan or they want to know

about certain features and this repetitive task can be easily automated now you know with some of the um

offering in in support um um you know realm um analyzing larger data set I

think you know recent like Google Google released their you know new search offering so I don’t know if you have

noticed but like when you search now instead of providing you know top search results and links to those uh which were

ranked before now you basically get like summary from Google which is you know answering your question so as a consumer

that saves me so much time because I don’t have to like click on a website go read and see if that’s pertinent to my

answer I you know get like short summary which across like you know top five or 10 different um you know ranked um links

and I get my answer right there right um and then personalization at scale like

you know you can see a lot of this you know at Amazon like you know as they understand you know what I buy how I buy

it you know when I need certain things ordered you know they are able to kind

of provide me some recommendation as soon as I go onto their website so it’s just you know there’s so much

possibilities as you know AI um has been like innovating uh in you know all these

different areas right yeah I I love that you know just thinking about your comment earlier about um having to

replace a server by hand and how you know that’s that’s probably not something that many of us are going to

continue to experience um when you think about Google search you and I probably

are experts at Google search you know we know how to put the right uh syntax in

to get the ni the best results and as I’ve used AI particularly with chat GPT

or Google it’s it’s basically now like here is what we think is the best answer

and so it ends up saving me all this time and again my skill set of learning

how to search and just kind of go through the muck of the internet um I’m excited to see a future where at least

the answers that we get uh help save us time and are more personalized for me so I I think you’re totally right and I

totally agree with you yeah even like GPT gives you you know all the answers

at your fingertips right all you need to learn is like you know um making sure

you are you know asking you know the questions in the right way and then you

can like get all sorts of answers um directly from chat jpd yes there is there a you know kind

of a personal favorite AI use whether it’s like I don’t know for for example like for lunch today

I I occasionally like to track my macros to make sure I’m eating the right things cuz I like have a sweet tooth and so I

took a picture of my lunch and I said hey Chachi PT like based on this image how many calories do you think I ate and

like break it into my macros and it answered and I was like whoa this is crazy um anything that you do that’s fun

or interesting or exciting for you or your family um on the personal front I

haven’t really figured out um kind of a use case which you know I would be using

using like day in and day out um obviously like use cases you mentioned like taking a picture and then

understanding what that product is um the other day like we were you know kids and I were like walking through the

neighborhood and we saw like a kid you know um using some hand device and kids

were interested in that and like we took a picture and then you know came back home and then you know used um you know

the Google Gemini search to you know figure out what that product was um but

you know I haven’t found like a repeated use of something like that in my you know day-to-day personal side but

obviously on the professional side I use you know chat GPT a lot you know whether

it’s like uh you know preparing some internal communication or even external

communication making sure it’s like professional looking so you know just like jot down my thoughts and like Chad

GPT would become like my personal assistant and give me a a good draft of how you know that email

or that documentation should look like um I’m also using that for like refining

product requirement documents or technical design documents or get some input on you know what I might be

missing um you know on those documents before I share with the team um so a lot

of lot of cool use cases there you’ve talked a little bit about um Ai and how it’s transformative for you know

customers and also so for some of the personal ways that you work um have have

you seen any interesting impacts to how you approach managing or seeing how your

engineering teams work and develop software and and like maybe what have they helped you do that might have been

different than last year yeah I mean uh you know with lot of

um kind of llm models which are now also helping with like code Generation Um it

has become so easy to like do you know Po’s where you know you have certain

ideas and you want to you know um quickly um you know create a

prototype and using you know what GitHub co-pilot has to offer even chat GPT you

can like describe in few you know terms what you’re looking for and then you

know get some um you know uh initial code that you can start with right um

you know being able to also use uh co-pilot to you know help you write

better code uh you know help you write some tests um so it’s basically helping

the whole engineering team save so much time um similarly on like product side

being able to you know um get a a product requirement document or take all

this you know um user feedback and get a good summary of you know what our users

were thinking last one week um you know using our product and getting that

summary of like what are the challenges or what are the things they loved you know it has become so easy to easy to do

that um you know like look looking at maybe like uh implementing AI with a Zite for example um we we’ve brought in

you know some thirdparty company products that have helped us leverage Ai and to your point earlier there’s new

models all the time so like keeping up with the models is really complex it’s it it can be pretty hard it’s almost like a full-time job like oh new model

dropped new model dropped new model drop and in you know depending on the company that that’s bringing those models out you got to have this sort of eye there

um what have you seen so far around maybe like some I think larger companies maybe big Enterprises they’re sort of

thinking about implementing AI what what do you feel like are some of the misconceptions about implementing it

that you know maybe would surprise them if you said actually you know it’s it’s not that hard it’s not that complic

compated and here are some of the reasons why yeah so I think like um really you

know training the AI to a specific um you know vertical or use cases it relies

on like you know good data right so data quality and having that larger data set

is essential um you know to have um you

know good AI models right um and having that kind of like high quality data and

you know structured data that you need is something a lot of you know um bigger

organizations can do easily because they have access to that kind of data um but

lot of companies can underestimate time it takes to you know create such data set right like you know look at all the

data you have you know clean them up you know structure in certain way that it

makes it effective for the AI model to consume and learn from it um if it’s not

like properties structured or if it’s not relevant then it results in like lot

of unreliable or biased results sometimes also leading to like you know

what we call hallucination on AI right where you ask a question and then you

get like totally unrelated response you know from from the uh AI right um the

other thing is just like being cautious about like the the ethical and

compliance concerns as well right like we are still in this phase of you know I

would say like early AI usage where we are starting to think about like you

know ethical and you know impact to our users but we haven’t like really thought

about like all the safeguards that we need to build um around that right yeah

you know uh we have seen already uh you know misuses where somebody is taking

you know picture of some celebrity and using it for you know political reasons

or you know somebody is like dubbing somebody else’s voice and sharing it

without their consent and you know that has been like challenge with AI and it has become so incredibly easily to do

all this thing that not having those safeguards in place would become really

challenging um as we see more and more advanced AI models come through yeah

sort sort of feels like uh I don’t know if if you’ve seen this but I love going to national parks and for a while you

saw nearly infinite selfie sticks and drones everywhere and it was a cool new

you know specifically especially with like the drones they can go everywhere they can capture Everything But when

there’s like 10 or 20 of them in the sky it’s horrible and it and it causes you know you know decrease or quality

decrease for your customer for for the folks who are using the product so yeah I mean I I think also just uh on a

personal level I see more and more people worrying about their parents you know getting scammed and uh families

needing to have code words to make sure that like Mom doesn’t wire some some scammer uh $110,000 so there’s there’s

definitely some challenges and and like you said there’s lots of opportunities yeah voice cloning yeah I

mean we have already SE people you know this exploited in the wild where somebody is you know asking

them to wire leaving a voicemail as their relative and then you know abusing

AI for use cases like that so yeah absolutely um well I have I have two

more questions for you sajin um my my kind of final two questions are just around leadership and some of your Team

Dynamics that you’ve built over the years um so I think like one of them would be more a reflection on your

career kind of looking back so so you know youve you started off as a you know

early on with Citrix and Sonos you were an individual contributor you um

eventually became a manager VP CTO now um when you look back and you you kind

of think about what would have made this easier or what should I have been

thinking about doing the entire time like what advice would you give to those early young aspiring folks who want to

be you now yeah um I think the

first and foremost thing I think as a CTO you know you definitely want to make

sure you mastered the fundamentals of you know software

development understanding uh you know technology software architecture

scalability you know is Paramount to being in this role um because that will

help you make good strategic decision you know as you grow in your career and

also being able to influence um you know decision making uh when it comes to like

technology side of house right uh I would say the second biggest thing which

um you know as engineer you don’t really spend time uh is understanding the

business right so making sure you understand the business you know what is

important for the users what is important for the business Where We Are

generating Revenue where are you know uh what are the areas where customers are

requesting something more and

um you know helping bridge that Gap when it comes to you know Finding Technology

Solutions and then pairing that with like you know the business needs right

um and then obviously being um just like not CTO but being a leader um

you know you need to be able to have strong communication scho skills whether it’s like you know verbal or written and being able to

effectively communicate to both like you know uh technical stakeholders as well

as non-technical St stakeholders is important um and you would be doing that day in and day out you know as you kind

of grow in your career ladder right and lastly I would say like uh you know

making sure you build uh um you know you know good strong teams Empower your

teams to you know take you know um good decisions try to push um you know as

much you you can with your team because they are the you know the work grows on the ground they understand what’s

happening um you know at the codebase level at the technology level and you

know EMP empowering them to like being able to make those decisions is important

yes I I 100% agree those are great thoughts um you mentioned you know

thinking about the building a great team and ensuring that the folks who are doing a lot of the work you know I I

think both in leadership and when you’re an individual contributor um you know you kind of look up and look down at

each other and sort of like you wonder what each other does sometimes um and I think in a remote engineering culture

like we have here at Zite um sometimes it can be hard to communicate or understand or see what is important you

know like you mentioned the business logic behind some of the feature requests or bugs that we fix or improve

how how have you found um building a engineering culture whether it’s in

person or remote what are some of like the main principles that you think about yeah um I think fostering oper

communication is important um especially in remote setting because you know you don’t have somebody sitting next to you

where you can just like talk and uh you know easily um you know

connect and bounce ideas um thankfully you know we have tools like Zite and

slack and and you know Confluence which make easy for you to do in synchronous

communication and you know I seldomly you know you’ll hear from my team

members I seldomly tell them like hey don’t come to me ask this question on a team setting because

if I communicate something to you which might be also important for others to learn then you know this communication

would be lost because it’s just between me and you so I promote you know asking

questions in a team setting sometimes you know it’s kind of daunting you know for somebody like Junior engineer to do

that when there are like 20 people um on a slack Channel but um I think it

becomes easy as they kind of you know try to do that more and more often but you know those are kind of the ways

we can increase um you know communication across the team build that

you know Community knowledge um throughout the whole team uh and then

focusing on the outcomes and not trying to kind of micromanage the team um you

know making sure I communicate about you know what are goals for this quarter

making sure everyone in the engineering is aware what we are trying to do

and you know if there are timelines making sure we’re working toward same timeline you know across the board um

and then as I said like EMP empowering the team to make certain decisions so that we can you know move along um

through our uh product road map um as needed and uh celebrating the wins

making sure um and I you know when I came into Zite I already saw there like

all these channels already in place where we celebrate you know across maybe

too many channels too many channels I think that’s a good problem to have in a way um but yeah celebrating you know

even smaller wins whether it’s on support engineering sales making sure we

do some high fives um and celebrate those those wi um as an

organization and I think the most important being remote is to be over

communicating right um especially you know all the remote teams with different

time zones across the globe um everyone working their own time zones it really

becomes difficult to make sure everyone is on same page so you know using Z to

record videos sharing the updates frequently and you know making sure you

know I do frequent one-on ones and keep it trating you know our goals messaging

timelines and making sure everyone is on the same page I love it I I think uh you know if

you were chat GPT and and you heard what you just said I think it would be like seven ways to say make sure you

communicate and document and and celebrate um I I can think about you

know a number of times where I’ve had messages from my team members who are new and I’ve said hey you ask me as many

questions as you want I have no problems with it I want you to not feel any embarrassment or discouragement about

asking the stupidest question possible and they’ll message me and they’ll message me and they’ll message me and I

love what you said there which was sort of bringing the questions out into the group um because it helps them get more

comfortable asking other team members it helps them feel more comfortable with communicating more broadly and I I think

uh s Sergey Brin the you know former president of alphabet Google he talked about over the last few years

specifically with their Google a Google AI products where he felt like Google needed to get back to feeling

uncomfortable and embarrassed more often um and they have been embarrassed they have been uncomfortable and they’ve had

to compete again and so I I think uh a lot of when you’re working with a remote team you have to be okay with the

communication the overcommunication that embarrassment or that discomfort obviously you and I need to make sure

they’re not feeling too embarrassed but anyway those are those are really some some really great thoughts yeah and I

also want to make sure I get challenged too because you know I probably am not the smartest person in the company so

it’s good to like always hear something where you know I get challenged or have

somebody come in with a different different opinion and being able to like take a step back it’s like oh yeah that

makes sense that might be a good way to go forward as well right so trying to bring this into a group setting kind of

Fosters all that seeing that you know a CTO is getting challenged which is you

know a good thing and then you know taking that positively so and and sain does get challenged and

he handles it excellently and I think that’s one of the things that I’ve liked working with him so much about um well

sain thanks again for joining us today really appreciate having you here thank you so much Scot this was a really good

episode and you know thanks for having me again all right man talk to you later