Sustaining Your Own Career Development with Satyen Sangani

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. Each day we welcome transformational executives to share their real- world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, co- founder and CEO of Bolster, and I'm here today with Satyen Sangani. Satyen is the founder and CEO of Alation, which is a late- stage data infrastructure company, hopefully I got that right, in the Bay Area. Welcome to The Daily Bolster, Satyen.

Satyen Sangani: It's great to be here, Matt. Good to see you as always.

Matt Blumberg: So my topic for you as a founder who has scaled with a company to north of a hundred million in ARR is basically how have you done it? How have you scaled yourself up that far? I know that I always used to say at Return Path that I had the same business card for 20 years, but every year or two it felt like I had a totally different job. What are your top tips for sustaining your own career development?

Satyen Sangani: When we started the business, I would constantly go back to my wife and I would say to her, " Jigna, if soon as we do this thing," and at first, it was the Series A, and then it was the Series B, and then it was$ 10 million of revenue, and then it was hiring a certain executive, and I'd say, " As soon as we do this thing, it's going to get better. And I think she looks at me now and she just sort of says to me, " There's always going to be another thing. You're always going to be working on something." And I think the reality of high- tech growth is that it's fundamentally, it's a very high- stakes game and you're constantly having to up your game and your skills to get better. And so I think one part of the realization is just realizing that there's always something else to work on. And for me, the way I've always recognized how to work and what to work on is mostly by getting feedback from my team and often by getting feedback from my customers and investors. The team will generally, if you do a structured 360, you'll get a whole bunch of feedback that people, particularly as founder and CEO, may not necessarily want to give you face- to- face. And so those are opportunities to be able to get feedback. I remember the first time I did it, it was really eye- opening because it was right after our Series B and I hadn't been brave enough to do it prior to that. And people were like, " Look, you micromanage too much. You don't give us enough agency. There's no structure or organization. We don't know what's important." And that was a pretty rough go for me, but it made me really think about how to build an operating system and how to get people focused and aligned and how to let them have their space. But that's changed in multiple points in the journey, and I think the feedback is really the best way to sort of constantly react. So you're never done, get feedback.

Matt Blumberg: Any steady diet of feedback is absolutely critical.

Satyen Sangani: Yeah.

Matt Blumberg: Because it changes. The inputs are going to change that.

Satyen Sangani: And they always will if you're trying to do something hard and try to do something new.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. All right. So feedback is one piece. What's another piece?

Satyen Sangani: I think the other is managing your own energy. These roads are long, and obviously if you're successful, they're long. And I think even in some ways, if you're unsuccessful, they're even longer because they just become super stressful. And so being able to, and look, I'm not the best at this, but just working on yourself, working on your health, working on your mind, making sure that you're emotionally centered and balanced, all of those things matter because you're constantly changing. Because there's constant change, you have to be centered in order to be able to react to that change, to listen to the feedback. And sometimes that's hard to do if you're not centered or if you're really anchored to a particular way of thinking. And that centering can really help you do your best. And so it's really hard to do, particularly when there's constant moments of stress and constant moments of new information that you're dealing with. Sometimes you feel like you're running from fire to fire, but that can be really helpful. And I feel like even though I give that advice, I'm still constantly working on it. And I don't know, you could always get better.

Matt Blumberg: You can always get better. That's right. So look, your first suggestion creates awareness. Your second one is work on the things that you hear in feedback. Do you have a third part?

Satyen Sangani: Yeah, and it probably is also a constraint to the other two, which is that you get feedback and often there'll be 20 different things that you'll have to work on. And one of the things that I've come to realize is it's fair to say, " Hey, I agree with this feedback. I'm actually not going to work on it," or, " I disagree with this feedback. I'm just going to completely ignore it." Because often I'll have gotten a 360 and there'll be somebody who says, " Oh, you need to give us way more direction and way more specificity and tell us exactly what to do." And other people in the same 360 will say, " Oh, but you've got to actually give us more space." And so there's sometimes conflict. And that's an example, although there are many others. I find that you have to pick one or two or three things and make those the themes of your work as you're trying to improve. And you'll get to the end of the year and there'll be a new three things. It won't always be the same. But trying to really focus on how you're going to improve yourself as opposed to taking on the world can be really helpful both to your own sanity, but also to just being able to make some progress.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, for sure. One of the ways that I always dealt with a conflicting feedback problem is we sort of migrated our 360 process over the years from form- based to interview- based to live moderated session, and then ultimately to live moderated session where I was present in a listening and questioning mode. And obviously, you have to have a culture that can handle that. But at a minimum, the second one down, that sort of live moderated session where there was a coach or a facilitator present was perfect because someone would say, " A," and someone else would say, " Not A," and then the coach would say, " All right, time out. Let's talk about this." And invariably, you get a more helpful response by doing that. But I think you're totally right. There are times where the feedback is relevant and top of mind for you and you know it's the right thing to do. And there are times where maybe it's something you have to do down the road.

Satyen Sangani: Yeah. And it's hard. I mean, ultimately, and sometimes the best feedback often is the stuff that you're most likely to disagree with initially. It kind of stings when you hear it the first time around. But that can be really powerful. And I think the more you do it, the better you get at it, or at least I feel like the more I've done it, the first couple of times it really stung and then it's like, " Okay, this is just the work."

Matt Blumberg: It's like anything, practice makes perfect.

Satyen Sangani: Just doing the work.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. All right. Satyen, thank you so much for being with me today.

Satyen Sangani: Always. Thank you, Matt.