#TheTechHustle Podcast 🎙
...where Tech, Engineering, and The Culture intersects.
#TheTechHustle Podcast 🎙
Backstage with BobbyD featuring Peter Totah
What does it really take to navigate a successful tech career without following the traditional path? In this revealing conversation, San Francisco native and Palestinian-American Peter Toto pulls back the curtain on his remarkable journey from a $7.75/hour temporary assembler to managing multi-million dollar deals at some of Silicon Valley's most influential companies.
Starting with nothing but a two-year trade school degree and a knack for tinkering with electronics, Peter shares how he strategically positioned himself at companies like Hewlett Packard, Intel, Cisco, Twitter, and Facebook. His story illuminates the power of seizing opportunities regardless of the initial position, the critical importance of supportive managers who recognize untapped potential, and the career-defining moment when he transitioned from technical roles to the business side of technology.
The conversation offers a fascinating glimpse into life at Twitter during its pre-IPO days, where Peter and host Bobby D collaborated to build systems like SupplyBird and LeftAtTheAltarBird that managed millions in computing resources. Their candid discussion about office culture highlights how spontaneous in-person interactions sparked innovations that might never have happened in today's remote work environment.
Most compelling is Peter's perspective on evolution in tech careers. "If you stay in tech and don't evolve, you're going to be left behind," he warns, explaining how he's reinvented himself multiple times—from hardware specialist to business operations expert to his current role working with no-code solutions and AI at Airtable. For young people considering tech careers today, he offers both encouragement and pragmatic advice, acknowledging that while his non-traditional path worked, getting a degree is increasingly essential in today's competitive landscape.
Ready to future-proof your tech career? Listen now to discover the mindset and strategies that have helped Peter stay relevant through decades of technological disruption—and might just help you do the same.
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These days. I recommend kids or young people that want to get into tech. They're going to have to have a degree. It's just so hard to not get a degree. I mean, you could try the way that I did, but it took me a long time to get where I wanted to be.
Speaker 1:You know, ai people get a lot of scared. And, yeah, obviously, software engineers. It's going to do a lot of the beginning work, but it's going to change the way the jobs are and what jobs are out there. So, the way the jobs are and what jobs are out there. So, again, if you're not evolving like I have throughout my career not to say that you know that's the only way to go. But you gotta evolve, you gotta move where the technology is moving and if you stay in tech and you don't evolve, you're gonna be left behind oh man, that's a gem right there.
Speaker 3:Welcome, welcome, welcome. What up, d-hustler?
Speaker 2:What is going on?
Speaker 3:Chilling. My guy Guess where we still at, bro, when we right on Market Street. Oh, beautiful weather. I can see the Ferry Building Beautiful weather, actually. I can see what's that Treasure Island and I can see the East Bay from here. You know how we do we always do big things when we come to.
Speaker 2:San Francisco. I like it.
Speaker 3:I like it. And big shout-outs to San Francisco for hosting us for another great conversation. It's your boy, bobby D, with Backstage with Bobby D, and I got a special guest for us. Who we got? Somebody I had a chance to chill with at Twitter. You know, when I'm working at Twitter I rub shoulders with some great minds. You know, always somebody that has inspired me to do really cool things, and his journey, when y'all hear it, is going to be one for the books. For sure. Let's bring to the stage Peter Toto. What up, peter?
Speaker 2:Peter, how you guys?
Speaker 3:doing. That's pretty good. Glad to be here, peter. Come and hang out with the crew, bro. I like it, I like it.
Speaker 2:I like it Actually.
Speaker 3:Peter's hung out with the crew before. Yes, he has. Yeah, yeah, we've hung out, yeah yeah, bring up Peter's mic a little bit more. Yeah, we've hung out there, we go, there, we go. Yeah, peter's hung out with us before and obviously we've worked together for a number of years while working at Twitter. But let's get a quick introduction.
Speaker 2:Tell us where you're in tech. Yeah, um so I'm born and raised in san francisco I'm a palestinian american.
Speaker 1:Big shout outs to you, big shout outs yeah and uh. You know. Family came here, migrated here when they were young, like maybe uh 12 or 13 each. Uh, you know, on both sides of the family. My father came here and got uh drafted a vietnam war when he turned 18 that was was like his intro to America.
Speaker 1:But you know, hey, it was a time, that period of that needed to happen and he went. But my mother came here shortly after. They met here and eventually had me and my sister. We were born and raised here, so I guess it's considered first generation.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, you're first generation.
Speaker 1:So yeah. So grew up in the city, went to private school grammar school, went to private high school. You know, I had the privilege of my father owning a grocery store all our lives.
Speaker 3:He was on that hustle. Yeah, bring that over right.
Speaker 1:So it was after the war. He got into working at the airlines and then eventually made his way to own a store, and that's all they knew over there. Back home is they just knew grocery stores. That's what my grandfather owned.
Speaker 1:He owned that coming here and my father expanded that and that's how we went and my father gave me a choice. He's like you either go to school or you take over the store. And I was like you know what, I don't know, if I want to do a store, I didn't like working with my dad at that time, me and him have two different views on things.
Speaker 2:That usually happens, right.
Speaker 1:I wasn't really big on school either, so I kind of just went into a trade school.
Speaker 1:I went to Heald and that's kind of like. You know, when I was a young kid I used to like to tinker with things. I used to take apart my dad's Cadillac with the radio and just start tinkering with it. He used to get mad, but I'd play with it, take it apart, put it back together. I had a couple of pieces missing, yeah, yeah. So basically yeah. So from there I was like you know what I want to do? A little trade, maybe get into electronics.
Speaker 1:So, that's what I did and it was a couple of years school, it was an AS degree and basically when I went to after the AS degree it was really hard to find a job at that time. But my uncle was working at Hewlett Packard and he said that they're hiring temporary workers during the summertime. Yeah, so I was like, all right, fine. So I went in and applied for a temporary assembler. I was making $7.75 an hour. Wow this was back in the 90s, obviously right.
Speaker 3:Don't say you age too much.
Speaker 2:now I'm not saying which 90s but it was in the 90s, so anyway.
Speaker 1:so basically, I worked there as a temporary assembler and then six months later they hired me as a full-time technician. I got my first salary. I moved out to Santa Rosa and it was great. It was like working in college. Everybody was college students. There was a lot of young people there.
Speaker 3:The campus was huge, it 000 employees. So my uncle pretty much set me up. That's what's up to tech. You know, big shout out to your uncle, big shout out to your whole family, your pops, um, especially their journey, and then establishing themselves. And and you're a san franciscan native y'all, y'all not, y'all not normal out here, are you not these days? And if the ones no, and the ones that are over here, they moved away. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Unfortunately they got priced out. Yeah, I mean, because I have a community here and a family here, it's a lot easier for me. But yeah, there's a lot of people that just couldn't do it. No worries, I mean, I wouldn't be able to do it, yeah.
Speaker 3:But I will say when I, a San Francisco native, I knew he knew all the spots, I knew he knew where to go to get what you needed to get right. Yeah, we had some good time, but before we jump into Twitter. So you worked at Hewlett Packard on the assembly line and for me, like just even hearing that part of the journey, it just gives our audience some insights into how your pathway can be into tech. Right, Because we're going to talk about all the great places you've worked and all your great accomplishments. But that being a starting point, what kind of advice would you give to younger ones getting into the field right now?
Speaker 1:You know, I didn't go the route of college, I just went to a two-year degree, but I took what I could get. I mean I was getting paid $8 an hour after working swing shift. I was starting with 775. So I took a temp assembler job because you know that was going to get me in. And sometimes it doesn't matter what position it is, it's if, in the company or the type of business that you want to be in, just take the opportunity that presents you in front of you and move forward you know, and that's you know.
Speaker 1:My career went from there and I'll explain later on how it evolved, but I invented myself by pushing myself in as something that I didn't want to do, or had to do and then, eventually got there.
Speaker 3:Yeah, big big round of applause for Peter. And the other thing for those that may be your first time tuning in. Thank you first of all for pulling up, but there's going to be a nice little sound Cue that sound up. That's the sound for the gems. If you hear that sound, that means peter's dropping some gems. Rewind it a little bit and listen in if you're here for bobby you still kind of love my get the hustle come on my guy no yeah, I appreciate you I appreciate you, but I'm cool with the one.
Speaker 3:One, one, two, I'm too.
Speaker 2:I want all the smoke. I want it all.
Speaker 3:But definitely some really good advice and insights into getting started. And the cool thing is that, being out here in the Bay Area, you have that opportunity to start at really well-known companies like HP, who are Packard, and then transition to other opportunities. So tell me where that took you from HP know HP assembly line getting a full-time offer and then, obviously, where your journey took you from there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I was sitting on the microelectronics floor. We were making microelectronics that go into the guts of like network analyzers and they're used, you know, for cell phone towers and fun stuff. It was original HP. It wasn't like like computers and printers, although my parents thought I was working with computers, but it was basically microwave stuff and so I was sitting there tinkering, doing gold bonding, doing circuit testing, tweaking knobs all day, and it got to me. I was there for about six years between HP and Agilent because they merged and my hands were swollen at the end of the day.
Speaker 2:Like it was just puffed up.
Speaker 1:I was like I don't know if I want to do this long term.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But so I started looking outside of the opportunity. I wanted to get more into Silicon Valley because it's kind of slower paced in Santa Rosa. There's not too many opportunities over there and I was living in Rona Park and I'm in my 20s.
Speaker 3:I don't really want to do that he wants to be in the cities, he wants to be moving right.
Speaker 1:Well, I kind of made my way there, buddy, I found a startup company that made indium phosphide wafers and they were silicon lasers and they were started by a couple of guys from Lawrence Livermore Lab and the company was called Genoa. It didn't go anywhere, but they had a nifty idea of basically having it on the back of every computer and it was basically a, an optical amplifier, and I learned so much there and they hired me as a technician, but I was just a like, pretty much an engineer yeah we went from.
Speaker 1:You know, I was not, I was the first non-phd hired and basically, uh, there was like 19 people, I think. I was like, uh, yeah, 18 or 19, and then we got as high as 250 employees. I was running the lab for them. I was doing all the laser testing. I was building any and phosphite waste first build lasers on. I mean it was some really exciting stuff. I was always a nerd with that. I love to tinker things, but I wasn't always interested in doing it as a job. It was just there. My, I always was good at it and that's why I always got into that, you know.
Speaker 1:And eventually, after the company kind of went on, the red herring report saying that we're going to be this big top tech company, and then it just collapsed. Finisar bought us out, they laid off everybody and it was just a big mess. So I eventually had to make my way into real Silicon Valley. Well, I mean, fumarown is, but I wanted to make my way into that. And that's kind of where I broke into Cisco or Intel, and Cisco and those two companies is where, you know, intel kind of gave me my break out of, you know, working in a lab. So what happened there was. I don't want to get too much into detail, but I got hired as a technician. But that's when I moved into the business side and that was a big turning point for me. I had a great manager there. His name was Sang Up Kim, and he's an amazing guy.
Speaker 2:Big shout-outs to him.
Speaker 1:And another guy, tom Youngin, and he was hiring an operations program manager role. But I was a technician and I had no business sense whatsoever. So Sang was like you know what, maybe I could help you out and I could push you and recommend you, because an operations program manager role you need to know the technical side and you need to know the business side. So because I was lacking the business, tom took a chance on me and that's where my role just skyrocketed. Because if you're not in engineering, when you're in engineering, and you don't have a master's degree, or if you don't have an advanced degree, you're really not going to grow much.
Speaker 2:You're not going to do the good stuff.
Speaker 1:You're going to be sitting in a lab for a long time, so getting in on the business side was huge for me. As soon as I got the operations program manager role, I learned supply planning, demand planning, I learned production. I learned how to build in a manufacturing floor. We were building hundreds of thousands of optical transceivers for Intel at the time when they were in optics, and so it was still the field that I was in, learning from the startup and coming through. But now I'm learning the business side, the business side of it.
Speaker 1:And that set me up to Cisco. Cisco gave me a great opportunity. I grew very far at Cisco. I went from just a normal supply planner that was my first real business job and then I became a supply planner manager. So I started managing the team that I was on and then I became like a sales and operations planning manager, which was like I learned that you don't have to have a team of people to be a high level contributor yeah, yeah and that's the first time that they gave me a role that I didn't have people report to me, but I was had the influence.
Speaker 1:I was owning, like the operating plan. I was uh talking to the gm about their pnl statements. I was. It was a really high level plan and guys, there's only like three GMs at Cisco and they hold billions of dollars worth of business.
Speaker 2:Correct, correct.
Speaker 1:It was a great opportunity and they actually liked it so much that they moved me to Norway.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, I do remember this part of your story. Yeah, so that's when I lived there. How long did you live there?
Speaker 1:It was supposed to be a couple years years, um, I only stayed there for a little less than a year, mainly because there was some personal uh issues that happened. Yeah, um, you know, with my family and I ended up having to come back, but they, um over there. I basically they moved me out there, um, they set me up. I basically they did a. They did an acquisition, tanberg, so it was on the collaboration space and we basically did video presence. So that's what they were doing at that time and it was.
Speaker 1:It was unheard of back then, for sure that's when webex wasn't existing exactly right like zooms, right yeah and uh, so that was their niche, to get into it and it was a collaboration space. So I basically moved out there and helped cisco eyes them into it and then, you know, eventually I had to come back and leave cisco, but it was unfortunate. But I ended up taking like a year off and uh, that's when I started getting into like you know what, what's big right now? Social media, you know, and I want to reinvent myself again. So I first got into tech and then I got into the business side and I was like you know what I want to get into? Social media and I went after social media companies and that's when I found Twitter.
Speaker 1:Facebook, you know, and so that's when we started working together at Twitter and it was just out of a whim I applied online. They liked the fact that I had the supply planning background, Even though everybody in that team was sourcing. They wanted a planner to help plan that. So my first niche into there was the planning role. For sure, for sure.
Speaker 3:And let me encourage you all to definitely tune in to what Peter's talking about in terms of his iteration to get to Twitter and also the transitions from being an electronic engineer soldering boards to eventually developing a skill set on the business side. But one thing that really caught my attention when you were giving us that insight is that it was definitely the support of others that opened up the door to see your skill sets and say, hey, you have the skill sets and opportunity, let me give you a chance to go to bat. And then obviously, it's to the races. Peter's a tinker. Once you put two and two together, you're running with it, right? So it's definitely for those that are thinking about getting into tech or transitioning into tech, just understand that. Getting to these companies like Twitter, which we'll talk about, even more companies that he's talked about, going through Intel, going through Cisco, utilizing broader skills than just tech skills to get opportunities as such, to be in the field of engineering and technology.
Speaker 3:So big shout outs to you, peter, and I know your family is very proud of your journey and all and all that you've done, and even me, right.
Speaker 3:I remember when the first time you and I met, they were like, hey, we're going to be bringing a new person that's going to manage, you know, supply Right or the operations and all that stuff around supply. And just to give you some you all, some more context, twitter, a lot of people didn't know that we actually build our own data centers. We build our own servers. We obviously had OEM and products that we ordered from other companies, but there is a specific team in our organization that managed all of that. Because we're at scale, we're hypervisor or hyperscale, sorry meaning that we're ordering hundreds of thousands of one set of servers or a few of these buildings a multimillion dollar building and peter sat at those tables helping making those decisions right. Um, one of the cool things about our journey at at uh, at twitter also is that was before ipo, was when we joined right I joined a little bit after a little bit after, okay, okay, I think you joined before me.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay, I thought.
Speaker 3:I thought you was at the party. I was remembering. I thought I seen peter there jumping around at the party too. I thought everybody was happy like the. I was remembering, I thought.
Speaker 1:I seen Peter there jumping around at the party too. I thought everybody was happy like the month I started. I was like I wonder why yeah you?
Speaker 3:wonder why everybody's happy. Right, I was happy, but it was a great opportunity to work at a company like that and also to run into somebody like me. Hopefully I did, you see. You see who's at the switchboard D-Hustle.
Speaker 2:He told me to hit it.
Speaker 3:No, he did that's funny Jumping into our time at Twitter. One of the cool things that I enjoyed was number one your experience out here in the Bay. You're a San Francisco native but also have worked at Cisco, intel, hp and have had that experience. You also brought into our conversations a different perspective of how we should build and develop systems. So one of the ones that came to mind and I was putting these notes together, I was like man, I hope Peter remembers Supply Bird. Do you remember Supply Bird?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, I remember doing it. I don't remember the artifacts of it.
Speaker 3:So tell us a little bit more about Supply Bird remember the, the artifacts of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I remember so. So tell us a little bit more about supply bird. Yeah, so, um, so we were using spreadsheets, um, and it was very confusing and I I suggested to yogi, who's another great manager. By the way, big shout out to yogi yeah, so he was a great guy and he, um, oh, he still is. So he, uh, you know, I said you know we want to buy a tool, let's buy a tool, and and twitter wasn't big on buying tools- they wanted to build everything.
Speaker 1:Inside they had a bunch of software engineers like why do you need a tool right? So ERP systems and things like that, they're not very easy to make. But we wanted to do like a supply inventory of our. We went by fleet. The fleet management team was part of our team. That was my team.
Speaker 3:What up fleet management? We still out here.
Speaker 1:We're still out here and it was basically an inventory of all the uh the, the types of servers that are out there. Um, twitter was big on a lot of different uh skews yeah a whole lot of different skews and just different parts and like high mem, extra high mem, you know, uh, high you know storage and all that stuff, and this was before. Like data centers were really much more defined now than they were back then and so there was a lot out there.
Speaker 1:So we had to really kind of understand the inventory levels of such, and then we want to rework them to be other if the services shift over to this or shift over to that. So we needed some kind of automated way of doing that stuff, and the first step was to learn kind of really what our supply is. And so they actually tasked me to work with a program manager and a software engineer to literally work on building a supply inventory through a tool.
Speaker 1:And we called it Supply Bird. And that's kind of how it adopted and that's what you guys use for your fleet management.
Speaker 2:For sure.
Speaker 1:To see what services need to shift over and so forth. So it was exciting because I didn't really build anything before. I'm not a product engineer, but I had the background of exactly what supply looks like.
Speaker 3:Correct.
Speaker 1:The software engineer had a look of what software looks like and we kind of intertwined and made it happen.
Speaker 3:Yeah, big shout-outs to you, Give him a round of applause, because this is the part that I think sometimes, peter, you don't give yourself enough credit for, because your insights into how to do it were so valuable for what the product results were going to be right. Because, like you said, we're software engineers just thinking about the code, not actually understanding the flow or, more specifically, what the real flow is, because we piece things together. But then when you came, he was like yo, why you have this here, why you have that there? And I'm like, oh, I didn't even think about that and that was from your perspective.
Speaker 3:So that tool itself, uh, was one of the first tools that I had an opportunity to integrate with, because my tool that I worked on was called autobird and autobirds and this just for those that are listening in and go check out some of our old podcasts.
Speaker 3:Uh, you know I've been dropping gems about aut. Autobird became our automated provisioning system, right where we talked to SupplyBird and AutoBird and basically all of the things that Peter knew, and knowledge became programs and all the things that I knew and knowledge became a program and we had those programs talking to each other and basically what we did was streamline the process so that after Peter's done all of the supply stuff making sure parts were the right ones, ordered, making sure that they're landing in our data center at this day that they're going to get plugged in Shout out to all of the data center engineering data center technicians that did all the heavy lifting. They used to put them in the spot, plug them in, turn the systems on and then walk away. Because AutoBird kicked in right and it made that system for me one of the first times that I could really align how automation could really take you from automating yourself out of a job.
Speaker 2:Literally right, that was uh, that was the point of it, yeah right, it was supposed to be the point of it, yeah right it never happened but, yeah I mean it might have happened, but we definitely got there.
Speaker 3:Bro, you stayed longer than I did, but yeah, but that that was like the, the, the big, bigger picture, and actually one of the reasons why I joined twitter at the time was we was working on solving those really hard problems, right, um, and then, when you came on, it was more or less helping us figure out another piece that we were missing, which was the supply side of the house. Uh, but there was this other tool that you and I worked on, uh, and it was just like a side conversation. We named it left at the altar bird. Do you remember that tool?
Speaker 1:I. I remember we did something, but yeah, no worries, I got you, I got you player so we called it, uh, ladder bird l-a-t-a.
Speaker 3:Bird right, but it was left at the altar board bird. And and the reason why we created it was we. We lost track of machines that were in the fleet right. There was like so many computers that uh, either got lost between the cracks or whatever. And the reason why we created it was we lost track of machines that were in the fleet right. There was like so many computers that either got lost between the cracks or whatever, and it ended up being millions of dollars of computing resources that we were able to pick up.
Speaker 3:And the reason why I bring this up is that for me and you, it was just the conversation like this Like Peter was, like yo, I got this problem, like every time I'm finding these machines and I'm like all right, tell me a little bit more about it. I'm there listening intensively, right, and then you're able to take the uh like from the seat of the users, the workflow and product, and feed me, the engineer, and then the results for ladder bird yeah, I mean this is that was the pro of working, uh, in the office.
Speaker 1:I mean I know people hate it, like people love to do work from home now there's much more flexibility. But you can't have those conversations working over Zoom. And you know it was a while ago. We went to lunch and we were talking and you know we chit-chat and we said what's really bugging you in your business, what's bugging ours? And we talked about, you know, underutilized servers.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And that popped up. So you know, just being there in the office together really, really helped out in that. Yeah, Plus we got to have lunch together At the time we had the best cafeteria Facts in the whole city. Right it was.
Speaker 3:People used to come far and wide to come into our kitchen. Even D-Hustle pulled up at the office.
Speaker 2:Yes, I did?
Speaker 3:You got to see the sky view and then definitely the good food.
Speaker 2:The meatballs.
Speaker 1:The meatballs.
Speaker 2:Swedish meatballs definitely the good food, the meatballs the sweetest meatballs, oh man.
Speaker 3:But the that type of experience that we had um of working together, let me just tell you I really enjoyed it, my guy because it was definitely like an opportunity for me to get um in terms of developing more skills, because I was moving away from systems engineering but more into the software engineering to automate ourselves out of a job. But it also became the foundation because after you left I took those same skills to another team and basically automated everything over there.
Speaker 2:You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 3:So I never had a chance to tell you this, but our time together really did influence my growth and development at Twitter. So I want to say thank you so much my guy.
Speaker 1:I appreciate that man. I you know you impacted me as well. I remember when I was making the decision to leave Twitter. It was a short period of time, I mean. I had everything at Twitter. I had a great manager, I had a great team. I loved working with our team.
Speaker 3:And I was there. I was there and I started throwing it out there, Like you know, Facebook opportunity came about and I started throwing it out there.
Speaker 1:like you know, uh, facebook, uh, opportunity came about and I was like, am I really contemplating this? And Bobby was like you know, put it out there, and if it's something that is going to make it happen, it's going to happen.
Speaker 1:And I put it out there and it did happen. And it was up to you know, really, bobby. Now it wasn't ended up being the the, the right move. Probably. You know, I don't know, I mean, you know everything. I should I have stayed at Twitter, so that's kind of where my career things. I started to move a little bit more often than I wanted to. And I have absolutely no regrets in life.
Speaker 2:Listen.
Speaker 1:I, I took a journey, I took a chance and I took an opportunity and I became aggressive in my, in my um, in my, in my job, in my career. Yeah, I wanted to really fight for that next role and that next opportunity and and it just seemed like you know, social media was really big at that time and you know I did make that move to Facebook and and, uh, you know, things fell in place that I ended up having to leave and then going to another company and another company and just you know, unfortunately, the last several years I did hop around a little bit, but again, I have absolutely no regrets because every single company I went to has taught me and learned me a whole new skill set that I could apply to the next one.
Speaker 1:I mean at Facebook. You know what we built. We built an inventory system in our tools. That was mocking Supply Bird.
Speaker 2:Same concept.
Speaker 1:We did it for network equipment. I worked on the network side of the business and we wanted somewhere where they do the PO. They placed a PO Again. Facebook didn't want to do their own. They didn't want to buy tools, Correct, correct they wanted to build their own tools. So that's what we did and I'm not sure if they're still using it until today. Maybe they have progressed over there, because now they have a whole different department. But back then, you know, we to my current status. I'm at Airtable now and Airtable is great.
Speaker 1:I never used Airtable before. We actually had it at a previous company and we didn't use it the way that we should have been using it. I kind of used it as a Excel sheet, unfortunately, and I didn't even know the capabilities. Now, working at Airtable, I'm starting to help build things and I'm a software engineer the whole point of air table is low code, no code right, yeah, yeah and it's basically allowing me to build dashboards or build automation or things that you know that assist my job and help my my business stakeholders yeah
Speaker 1:to get their job done and it's a great way of doing that and running your business. So you build these apps up and I'm learning so much. My my manager's manager. She knows a lot about air table. She's been there forever and it's a great way of doing that and running your business. So you build these apps up and I'm learning so much. My um, my manager's manager. She knows a lot about air table. She's been there forever and and she's teaching me a lot and I'm, you know, I'm learning from the source and it's another resource that I have. Now that's coming in and and that's what the great opportunity for me is.
Speaker 1:That's why every company presented a new opportunity for me.
Speaker 3:Yeah, amazing, oh, big shout out to you, peter. And the cool thing that I think and I hope the audience heard this is that, uh, going from one company to the next, you're going to be taking the skill that you learned from the other company to the new company.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I mean, uh, you know, when you go to college you're going to learn the basics. You're going to learn the foundation You're going to. It's going to get you in the door these days. I recommend kids or young people that want to get into tech. They're going to have to have a degree. It's just so hard to not get a degree. I mean, you could try the way that I did, but it took me a long time to get where I wanted to be you know, and it took some pushing and some you know and some hustle.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I mean some grit. You know I had to take a step back to move forward. I had to you, yeah, yeah, again, absolutely no regrets. I learned a lot and every position or every place that I've gone I've learned to help me scale in the new role, and that's all what it's about. And so I mean, if you want to, you should get a degree. I tell my niece and nephew all the time you have to go out and get a degree nowadays because it's so competitive and it's so hard. It's not even going to get you in the door. If I was, I was to try to get my position at cisco, the sales and operations planning manager. That I was doing.
Speaker 1:I needed a master's degree for that I wouldn't have been able to get my own job yeah if it wasn't for me building myself up yeah, in the ranks yeah so you know, that's kind of where it's at sometimes, and and at least if you get that foundation, you don't have to build yourself up to the ranks.
Speaker 3:It'll get you at least somewhere, somewhere and then you could go from there higher up, you know, yeah, but but I also, uh, uh, definitely feel like, uh, it just requires a different type of person to to take the scenic route right. Um, because I know for you, like you, you had to be on the grind. You had to be eye open and definitely willing to make transition, to make moves like how, how much value was that for you during your journey I mean it, it was huge, right.
Speaker 1:I mean, along the way, like I could have progressed and stayed. You know, if I stayed with the same company continue moving up. It would have been a slow progression, but it would have got me at a higher role, but I've learned that, you know, it's not always about being a director or being a VP. Um, there's so many roles that are high impact roles and, uh, even high paid roles that, um, that have as much responsibility or even more responsibility without building it with a team, because you're trying to influence others to do what you need to get done.
Speaker 1:And it's harder sometimes. And that's what I love. You know. It's not about like I want to have a director of, you know, 50 people reporting to me. I mean, yeah, sure, I mean would I like to have that opportunity eventually, Maybe. Yeah, I've managed people, I've done that. But I've taken a step back and said you know what I think I'm better at, you know, really driving initiatives and projects that are really more impactful. And that's sometimes. You know, sometimes middle managers are. It's a hard role and, you know, sometimes they're the first to go, you know, unfortunately, and so you've got to show value and that's what I'm trying to do here at Airtable.
Speaker 1:I didn't go in for a fancy job. We're a very small procurement organization. I followed my manager over, which is another great manager. I've had some really great managers along the way and yeah, I mean shout out to him, and so basically, I followed him over and we're working on some good stuff. We're building procurement. We're, you know, we're pretty much starting it from scratch and building it out and growing the company and supporting the company. So, you know, and we're using Airtable to do it without the software engineer.
Speaker 2:We don't build our own data centers over there, right yeah?
Speaker 1:You know it's. So we got to evolve and move around to what it is and it's SaaS products and it's a lot of SaaS tools and marketing and to go to market and being able to procure tools for those teams are a whole different new ballpark for us. Facts. You know, I was always a hardware guy.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I knew hardware very well. Software took a long time for me to learn, like knowing what Databricks does or what AWS does, and you know all these things, like you know what the cloud is and everything I mean. Obviously we're at. You know data center companies, but the services that AWS provides, they have names for them. Correct, different than what we're doing internally, right, so it's knowing about the service and you know how to negotiate a you know a complex cloud deal.
Speaker 3:Multi-million dollar deals. Multi-million, multi-year cloud deals.
Speaker 1:Those are huge and those are high impactful. I mean they go right to the CEO right. So it's not, like you know, paper dollars, it's real dollars that's making impact on it. So when you save it, you save it.
Speaker 3:Man. The thing that that I'm taking away from this is is is one gym that I'm definitely hit. The gym mark for. This is Peter has had great managers. That has basically given him the opportunity to continue to ascend right, and we talked about the value of networking and maintaining those relationships. But also, when you have great managers like our previous guest, patrick Newman Big shout out to Patrick Newman what's up player. And definitely the advice that he given about being a mentor and a leader in the organization is being those resources for people that want to climb Right. But then also, as you're climbing, you're giving back too and you can see the value behind it. So I really do appreciate you shouting that out. And then the other thing that I think sometimes you don't stand on enough Peter is Peter is like multimillion dollar, like when he looks at spreadsheets it's not thousands of dollars, it's hundreds of not even hundreds of thousands millions of dollars of assets and decisions that he's helped support making. And then, obviously, this is data that you give into your executive team.
Speaker 3:So, it's like when, when you're on your journey in tech, it could be broad right. You're on the business side of tech and you are financially supporting the decisions that are making based on the data that you're able to present, and now that you're doing no coding stuff, I'm so excited about this, right yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean it's evolving. I mean things are evolving. Now the big thing is AI. You know I'm not trying to jump on the AI bandwagon here, but Airtable right now is is huge on ai. We use ai in our tools. We just launched a big ai initiative and and uh, I mean if you look it up on air table and it uses all the major uh, um, you know uh, open iis, chat, gbt, uh, anthropics, cloud and you know the different. You could choose which type of uh ai you want to use in the tool itself.
Speaker 1:Yeah, which is amazing. So it's integrating it. It's integrating it, it's evolving and, like you said, you could tell it what to do and it'll figure it out for you and kind of hit the baseline, and then that's how you get going, Instead of you trying to do the automation and the building. You just type in a few clicks. You just got to have the good. What do they call it? The prompt, the prompt yes, so you've got to have a good prompt. I heard that's a new job now.
Speaker 3:Yeah, prompt engineering, right, Can you believe that I was like, oh my God, look at that.
Speaker 2:I would have never thought of that a few years ago, right, right.
Speaker 1:So you know it's amazing and you just tell it what to do and the better you get at telling it what to do.
Speaker 2:I took my first coding class a long time ago.
Speaker 1:What year. I'm not even going to say what language it was, but the fact that I sat down in the class and the teacher said write down how many steps it will take to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. When I was done in like five minutes and I put five sentences down and everybody else was like drilling it down, I realized I'm just not into coding.
Speaker 3:Because you've got to get down deep like that, right, you've got to get into that level, right.
Speaker 1:I mean, with these prompts now you don't have to get into too much level, but enough to describe it, to get it to do what you want and then you evolve it. So it's kind of like high-level coding kind of, but it's so much easier to use and it's and it's you know it's.
Speaker 1:It's not about replacing jobs. I mean, I, you know AI people get a lot of scared and yeah, obviously, software engineers. It's going to do a lot of the beginning work, but it's going to change the way the jobs are and what jobs are out there. So, again, if you're not evolving like I have throughout my career not to say that you know that's the only way to go, but you've got to evolve, you've got to move where the technology is moving and if you stay in tech and you don't evolve, you're going to be left behind.
Speaker 3:Oh man, that's a gem right there. Thank you so much for that, peter, and I think you hit that thing a few times. You dropped like three, four gems in one comment. That's why you why do you all think I hung out with Peter all the time? Because he's dropping in them. I'm right there picking them up, right next to him, me and Bobby, we both love the tech, we love the hustle we love it a lot I mean, like I said, I don't have any regrets in life.
Speaker 1:Could I have gone a different road on a different crossroad? Yeah, but I mean I got where I am from the grit and the grind and learning and evolving and building relationships and just getting it done, and it's not just getting the right manager. I mean when I interview and when I find people, I interview them too right.
Speaker 1:And that's another thing that young people don't realize is that it's not only an interview for them to be interested in you, it's an interview for you to be interested in them, and I've done a lot of interviews, trust me, and so I mean it's really, you know, an opportunity for you to know whether that's the right place to go to.
Speaker 3:Roger that, roger that. That's some really good insights there, and I think that the thing that I'm really taking away from this is number one skill set wise is that you always got to keep learning, you always got to keep iterating the old days and the old programming languages. They're not even here, no more right you got to be moving forward.
Speaker 3:Number two is not being afraid of this tool, this new tool called ai, which, you are right, language is becoming a new programming language. Um, but the the cool thing that I think, um, uh, especially for us old heads, is that we have so much experience that we can describe things with more details that a younger engineer or someone new don't have or know, right, um, and then for me, like the, the third thing in general is like that grit, that hustle, that mindset that you have to have and not have any regrets, just know that it's a part of the path for you to get to where you got to go, embrace it and keep moving forward.
Speaker 2:That's what's up, Peter.
Speaker 3:Peter's, my guy bro, and this is how we used to chill every day, go to lunch. Obviously we used to have fun at the office, some good times, but definitely these type of conversations are those that were really foundational for me as I continue to iterate, so in terms of like Airtable, which I like the product, I really do.
Speaker 3:It's like one of my preferred database services that I like to use when I'm recommending because, it just has a very easier interface and not too much barrier for you to kind of understand what's going on. And you were saying that you're doing some no coding stuff. So are you building like applications similar to like Supply Bird type things, or are you doing more simpler, smaller pieces?
Speaker 1:It pertains more to the procurement process. You know, like you could have it read contracts. You could basically have it feed in the contract, point out certain things in the contract using AI and say you know where's the payment terms? How much is the? What is the start and end dates of these terms? Are there renewal clauses in these terms? You know there's specifics in terms of contracts that we want to look at to make sure that they're in the benefit of the company, right? And so, instead of me searching through 100 pages, you can use AI and Airtable to basically pull that information in, summarize it for you and then do what you want. And so, instead of me building a software to do it, I build an app in Airtable and use the AI capabilities to help build that. I mean, there's so many things that I think it just opens the door up for that, and I'm learning more about the tool for me to learn more how I can make it more efficient with a business that I'm in.
Speaker 3:Man, you're going to be air table spokesperson soon Sponsored by. It's a great tool.
Speaker 1:I mean I think the people that use it and learn how to use it and know how it works, they love it. Use it and learn how to use it and know how it works, they love it. So it's yeah, I mean I stand behind the companies that I worked at. I mean I've worked at some really good high-tech companies and you know they produce really good products. There's really smart engineers there that work there. And like you, Bobby, I mean, oh, look at that.
Speaker 2:I mean I'm not snubbing noses or anything I mean you know your team.
Speaker 1:We did a lot at Twitter. I mean in the short period I was there, but you were there for a lot longer than I was. I mean, you guys handled it. That's a nightmare to manage all those SKUs. I mean when I left and I was like wow, this is not normal what we did over there, right, yeah, so I mean, but we had to evolve the business.
Speaker 1:You know Twitter was seasonality right. Yep, the World Cup, these big events that are happening worldwide. You know I remember saying like New Year's Eve was really big in.
Speaker 3:Japan. Yeah, that was the biggest outages we usually had was New Year's Eve, so you know the big whale that came up and the issues with the site coming down.
Speaker 1:I think who broke the site Ella DeGeneres Yep coming down.
Speaker 2:I think who broke the site?
Speaker 1:Ella DeGeneres when she spoke and we weren't ready for it, I mean. So we had to really do some good things out there back then to make sure that it gets done, to not have that happen again. You know, it just stands for the engineers that were there. I mean, everybody was learning at that time.
Speaker 3:I mean I'm not going to take all the credit, all of the credit.
Speaker 1:but thank you, peter thank you, peter, thank you the the fans out there listening, and I have not paid peter to see any of this stuff. This is coming from inside. It was a whole thing, yeah fias audi carter.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, robert, robert, pulley, robert is traveling the world right now, uh, uh, nikhil, nikhil.
Speaker 3:Uh uh, nakil ended up going to uber. Uh, faez went to uber, audie's gone to from credit karma. Uh, robert pulley, he's traveling the world now he's taking some time off, um, and we were the squad though we was holding it down and then we had great partners to work with, which was really cool, because, uh, normally we we don't really and like sit next to the people that are ordering the supplies, or the next uh, table that was there were the people that are ordering the supplies, or the next table that was there with the people that were designing the software, right, like that's how close it was. And then we had a really chill, you know, director at the time too, right, so it definitely allowed us to, you know, build a better relationship so that we could really create some really cool stuff. And those were like real, like world level type challenges that I didn't even know exist until I worked at a place like Twitter.
Speaker 1:I mean, every time I heard something that they wanted us to figure out, we're like, oh my God, I don't know if that's possible. I mean you know that's what tech does. I mean it evolves fast, it moves fast.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:If anybody wants to break into tech, be ready to move fast. I've I've seen people come from other companies. They come from fintech or they come from uh, you know, uh like a, like a health company, or or uh pharmaceutical company. They don't move as quick as we do pharmaceutical. It takes 10 years to to evolve a product. It's a production and you know we're iterating as we go we're deploying every hour almost literally shout out to peter and that crew out there doing big things.
Speaker 3:Yes, yes, sir. And then big shout out to Yogi. You mentioned Yogi. I haven't seen Yogi in a minute.
Speaker 2:Yogi's great I still keep in touch with him on.
Speaker 1:LinkedIn.
Speaker 2:I just chat with him, is he?
Speaker 3:at.
Speaker 1:NVIDIA. I think he's at Pure Storage now.
Speaker 3:Oh no, yeah, there was somebody else that went to N. I mean, we got friends maybe at every single big tech company you know, at least one person, and that's the other thing about being out here.
Speaker 3:So tell us about you know I know, being a native. There's a lot of people coming into the city and the reason why we come over here is to experience the tech experience, and this is my always recommendation to my mentees is like, if you're in tech and the opportunity presents itself, come to San Francisco to experience what it is to be here, but you've been here since day one, from like how has that been? Like seeing the evolution of tech from when you, when you, were growing up, to where we are now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean I didn't have to move anywhere to see it. I mean it was in my back door, it was in my backyard and yeah, I'd say, you know, we have a great community here of friends and family that I did growing up. I know a lot of people from high school days, from grammar school days, that I still see, that are still in the Bay Area, and then I have my foundation on my family, a lot of my family's here. My family is huge, right, and not my direct family, they're just my cousins and uncles and everything yeah your community.
Speaker 1:So the community is really big and so we have a lot of contacts. You know, my dad owned grocery stores, so he knows a lot of police officers, he knows a lot of firemen, he knows a lot of people that worked in the Mission District and the Potrero Hill District, and I built the foundation of building relationships early on in life.
Speaker 1:You know, working at a grocery store helping my dad out, that's how you become accustomed to talking to people and I had that privilege to be able to do that and that's what helped me later on in life and to build relationships, because all you did was talk at a grocery store and you talk to customers and you listen to their problems, they listen to your problems sometimes and growing up in that environment you also learn the grit, the hustle, the grind. I had to fill those refrigerators, make sure the stock, make sure the papers were out. I had to wake up at six o'clock in the morning.
Speaker 1:My dad said, that's the reason why I didn't do it. So I love my dad and everything, but you know me and him working. It was just we. We saw different views. Uh, yeah I was younger and I'm kind of glad because it helped me pursue something else for sure and it got me where I wanted to be today.
Speaker 3:So yeah, to be today. So, yeah, big shout outs to that, peter, big shout outs to that. That's what's up. Well, we are coming close to the end of our conversation. My guy, I think we've been really running at it, for it looks like 40, 40 minutes, 40 plus minutes on the clock. I told you it was going to be a great conversation, but this is an opportunity for you to give some last words of advice, and you've been giving gems and advice from the beginning of the conversation. So if there is anything that you wanted to reiterate but also just leave something impactful, this is your opportunity, peter.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'd say you know people who want to break into tech or even just any anything in life. You know it's all about building relationships. You know you have to go after what you want and you said it to me at Twitter put it out there, get it out there. I remember specifically sitting down on lunch telling me you know, peter, put it out in the world and let it find you, and if it's the right thing to do, then just go after it. And that just resonated with me a lot.
Speaker 1:I mean, I appreciate that and I've followed that through and I say you know, this is what I want. You know, and this is my next step and this is what I'm going to do and I get there. I try to get there as much as I can and I don't stop until I do. And so I built relationships, I built foundations, I've met people, I've learned. I'm on LinkedIn and really I try to show off what I'm doing but also help people learn. I'm in different groups on there showing people how to hail no procurement, uh, addressing questions and and really trying to evolve.
Speaker 1:And you know these aren't out in the open they're in internal groups that people don't know about so um, you know, and you're building relationships when you do that. So when there's a position open for something, or there's an opportunity or something, you you're people are aware.
Speaker 1:Oh my god, that guy knew his stuff so if you know something and you have a good skill set, try to get there on those groups, on LinkedIn or other means, and then build your network from there and that's going to help you find something later on. I honestly believe that. I mean, you've got to make it happen. It's not going to come to you.
Speaker 3:Facts, facts, wow, cue up the music D. I don not going to come to you. Facts, facts. Wow, cue up the music d. I don't know if y'all been listening, but there's a button that says rewind. Press the rewind button to go back. We got triggers and signs. What's the sound? Beat d, all right. There we go. Whenever you heard that, that means my guy, peter total, was dropping some gems, I want to say, first of all, thank you so much, peter, for pulling up with backstage with bobby d. It wasn't that bad, was it? I told you it's gonna be chill. My guy, he was worried when he first came in and he seen the setup he was like, oh snap, they're doing big things. But as always, peter, I like to make sure that the setting, the mood, the environment is exactly what we need. Um, and definitely want to say I appreciate you pulling up, um and definitely for your audience, thank y'all so much for tuning in to Backstage with Bobby D. We on our next stop to New York City.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we're pulling up back to NYC. We're going to have another set of guests that pull up and, as always, thank you all so much for tuning in my guy D Hustle. What's going on? Last words player. Enjoy the rest of your day, roger, that I'll let you boy it.