Being a founding engineer at an AI startup

21:57But I just knew that I needed to be somewhere a lot smaller.

22:01Michelle Lim:Did you negotiate your compensation, especially with startups when you're joining early on in a Silicon Valley startup or at honestly most startups that either have venture funding or plan venture funding? Part of compensation is equity, which is always a bit tricky subject for most software engineers. How did you research equity? How did you learn about it? Did you negotiate it or just kind of took whatever was on the offer? Because I feel this is a topic that not many people talk about, but it does get pretty important, right? It is so important to negotiate for equity. I really negotiated hard for as much equity as possible.

22:40And what I was willing to trade off was cash.

22:44Michelle Lim:How was your offer presented? Yeah, I was presented a spreadsheet that had three options. with increasing salary and decreasing equity. It was a really good spreadsheet, and I actually use this today. Also, at your startup, if someone gets an offer, they're going to get a spreadsheet like this? Yes, at Flint, my company, you will get this spreadsheet that helps you calculate what the equity actually means in terms of the compensation value. We also calculate tax as well as dilution at every stage. And then we also have this calculator that helps you calculate the expected value of your stock based on different outcomes and the likelihoods of each outcome.

23:27And all credit is to Zach from Warp who let me use this spreadsheet. But anyway, there are three options. And I argued very hard for the one with the most equity. And I was willing to go extremely low on cash. and in terms of what leverage I had, this is probably a bad negotiation strategy. But the way that I negotiated that was saying, hey, Zach, I actually really, really want to work with you. I will work with you. I will sign this offer. This is, I really want to build this thing. Let's go do it. I would really appreciate if we could do this offer, this number instead of this number. Some might say that that's a really bad negotiation strategy because you are losing all the cards by saying that you don't have any other options.

24:16And, you know, some might say the best way to increase your offer is by having competition. But I think that early stage companies where you're joining as just like one or two people, it really means a lot to the founder that you are bought in, ready to go, excited to help them. And they want you to be happy and they want to make sure that you have a good deal.

24:39Michelle Lim:I will say like, you know, the general advice of negotiation that you read online. First of all, a lot of it is written when you're negotiating against faceless corporations where the person giving the offer, let's say an engineering manager or HR, they don't own this thing. They're given numbers and they have a job to do, which is close people, and they don't have too much emotion. And a lot of that advice will work, you know, like that they do. But as you say, in a startup, it's people. It's a very small team. The founders do care. and I will say this like a lot of a lot of good founders will actually just not make offer to peoples who they don't think believe in what they do because it's so early so I feel like what you did like of course the you know like it probably goes against all the advice out there because the advice is not for this like I feel being authentic like being excited I cannot talk for all founders but I know some founders and I do think this means and honestly like in the end following your gut which is a pretty good strategy a lot of times.

25:39A funny thing about GUT is that actually the day before the offer, I was making the decision. I had the 10 million ARR company that was doubling and I had Warp. I'm in Denver at the time. And my stomach was actually acting up the night before because I think it was feeling that it was the dissonance between what I was going to do versus what I really wanted to do.

26:02Michelle Lim:Now, one thing I've heard that is also atypical and no one will suggest, but you still did it, is, you know, when a company makes you an offer, they often ask for references for you to talk with other people or before they make an offer. I heard you did that with Zach, Warped CEO. How did that happen? Yeah, I actually pulled up the email before this and I saw that I said like, hey, Zach, really excited about this. Happy to send you my ref checks. I would also like to learn more about how you are as a manager can you send me references for people that you have managed before especially when they were junior engineer I'll see I mean I would recommend everyone to do this actually they say like you don't leave companies you leave managers and at a startup you can't pick your manager you can't leave a team That's there.

27:01Yeah, like my friends working at Google could be having a bad time with one team and then they could switch to another team. At a startup, you are married to that manager. So you need to learn as much as possible about what it would be like working with them. And you have, like, reference checks are, by the way, the most important part of any interview process. Like, that is sometimes even more important than the on-site itself.

27:28Michelle Lim:So at your current startup, you're also doing reference checks? Always. Always? Always. And what do you look in a reference check? Now just kind of, you know, thinking a little bit from a founder, you've been on the other side. Because I feel they are coming back, but I don't hear it that frequently. I don't think a lot of people know how to do it well. If I, as a founder, am evaluating a candidate, the most important question I ask is, would you want to work with this person again? And the answer I'm looking for is not yes. the answer I'm looking for is hell yes I don't even know like why you've been asking me this question like you're so lucky to have this person like I don't know what's happening in the waters of your company but like how are you able to pull someone like this that is what I'm looking for if I'm hearing like a oh like yeah I think that they could be great or like yeah they're very strong that to me is like a bad reference check that does not pass my my test one day of a work trial is a very good approximator, but it's just not the same as working long-term with someone.

28:31So this is very important. I actually think that engineers have a lot of power and leverage, because the good ones, a lot more people want them. But at the same time, it's very hard for you to assess what is it going to be like working at this AI startup, because it doesn't have that much reference points from the outside. So it's very important to assess how they are as a manager. As a more junior person entering a company, I think one of the ways that you could have a bad time is if you join a company where they don't promote and mentor and grow younger people. I've seen this happen at my friends' companies where they would be the first 10 people who built the company.

29:24And then as soon as the company does well, they're replaced by executives. And then they're never promoted beyond the entry level that they were in, even though they built the company and they spent a lot of their time and effort and youth and energy working on the company. So it was really important in my reference check to check how much opportunity did someone young and junior get? What were career conversations like? How did promotions work? What was it like during the tough times? And Zach passed, exceeded all of the tests in that I talked to two engineers that were new grads slash interns working for Zach and then very quickly became director of engineering at Google Sheets.

30:09So he was clearly someone who would bet on young talent and then help to promote them. And I saw that again and again at at Warp where a lot of younger new grads were given positions of tech lead or being able to run the most critical project streams at Warp because Zach always bets on the young talent.

30:30Michelle Lim:I think in general, this probably sounds like a great strategy of trying to get or asking for references from your future manager and asking them about what you care. You know, this might be in your case, it was like, yeah, can I have a career trajectory? If you're looking for, let's say stability, maybe look for that. but I think it's just like such an underrated thing. I haven't heard anyone else do this. So congrats on doing and sharing it with us. Yeah. The last thing I'll add there is that even if it's not for evaluation, it could be for advice. Like how would you be able to work with this manager best?

31:02Like maybe it's like insisting on the weekly one-on-ones. Maybe it's about like proactively asking for advice in this specific way. So it doesn't hurt you to do it. And you can always frame it as that you're getting advice on how to work closer with them.

31:16Michelle Lim:I love how Michelle shared the story of how Warp was founded and how she joined as a founding engineer. Talking about the founding of a startup touches nicely on the origin of our season sponsor, Linear. The idea for Linear came about when their founders were going through hyper growth phases at Airbnb, Coinbase, and Uber. As you'd expect with real scale, these companies started to slow down. What used to take days started taking weeks, sometimes even months. Not because people worked less harder, but because there were a lot more moving parts that needed to be coordinated. As an example, in the early days of Uber, it took a single engineer about five days to integrate, test, and ship a new payment method to the app Google Wallet.

31:53Michelle Lim:But years later, it took around two months for three engineers on my team to build and release Google Pay because there was so much more planning, coordination with stakeholders, working with other stakeholder teams, and the vendor themselves. As teams grow in size, product development gets hit particularly hard. Every team involved in the process uses a different set of tools and workflows. This fragmentation means there's no scalable way to answer what has been committed, what's at risk, who's actually accountable, who are we building this feature for. It's often a total mess. The conventional approach is to compensate for tooling gaps with more headcount or with more status meetings.

32:29Michelle Lim:But in my experience, it doesn't help much. This is why Linear exists, to give high growth teams the clarity and coordination they need without the overhead. Linear's founders built a tool they wish they had during those chaotic hyper growth scaling phases. You can try it yourself at linear.app slash pragmatic and see why teams like Ramp and Clay also switched over. And now let's get back to Michelle and her time as a founding engineer at Warp. When you joined Warp, what kind of technologies did you work on and how do you find your so-called kind of stack or place? Because you later talked about how, you know, in startups or in tech companies, there's kind of like more product and more infrastructure, more front and more back end.

33:07Michelle Lim:Where did you end up in this sense? So the stack at Warp actually first started out with JavaScript. And then we didn't... Not even TypeScript. Oh, it was TypeScript. TypeScript, okay. And then two to three months in, we decided to scrap that repository and rewrite every... Just like rebuild everything in Rust. I have to ask why, although I suspect why. Yeah, so it was for performance reasons. And it was also speed of development. So while it was really fast to push out JavaScript code, We then needed to spend a lot of cycles testing, stress testing it against a lot of performance constraints.

33:44So one thing I did with our JavaScript app was that I drew a thousand rectangles. And then I started scrolling the terminal and the scrolling was breaking. And it's extremely important for us to be able to draw a lot of rectangles because, yeah, like terminals output a lot of logs and everything needs to be really fast. there was also a very strong sentiment amongst developers that they would only use high-performance terminals that were built at low level. So even if there were two applications that were completely identical, but one was built in Rust, it would just be distributed a lot better.

34:23People would love it. You had this, back then, the Rust community was small, but growing very fast and extremely passionate. And so it was also very important for marketing that we built it in Rust. It was very, really funny when we decided to build Rust and then Zach sent the O 'Reilly Rust book to everybody. So me, the other founding engineer, Alok, and he and then we would just read every day. And then every time we learned something new, we're like, oh, let's rewrite what we wrote previously. There are way too many unwraps. So let's go fix that. We also had the privilege of working with Nathan Sobo, who was the inventor of the Atom editor, and then eventually started ZAD.

35:11And he had a lot of Rust experience, and every day he would pair program with me, and I just learned all of the Rust idioms that work really well.

35:20Michelle Lim:I guess pair programming does work. Oh, yeah. I really enjoyed pair programming with Nathan because I learned a lot of small ergonomical things that makes a big difference in using the IDE. You asked a question earlier about product engineering versus infrastructure engineering. And I wrote a piece many years ago before the word product engineer even became in everyone's lexicon. Product engineering and product-first coding are people who are more motivated by user problems and excited about solving user impact. And then they see technology as a means to an end of user impact. And then there's the code-first people who tend to more map onto infrastructure engineering, where they're really excited about the best performance, the best libraries, elegance.

36:08I found through my Robinhood internship that I very much am a product engineer at heart. and I find that this division of product versus infrastructure engineering is a way better split to think about engineering than front-end and back-end because of the mental models of like people tend to segment into like roughly speaking two camps. So the product-first people who care about user impact, they've gone into computer science because of the things that computer science can do for people. And then the second camp, which is code-first people who are really excited about the code itself and really excited about pushing the limits of code.

36:45And they tend to map to more infrastructure problems. When you split people up in front-end and back-end, it's like it does a mismatch in the mental models of people. Like this is my experience. I was a front-end engineer at one of my internships and all I was given are monks to implement. And so I wasn't able to solve problems for users. So then I felt like, oh, I want to go to back-end engineering. and then in my other internship I was placed into infrastructure so I spent two weeks migrating from Amazon Athena to Presto and all I did was write SQL and migrate database roles and I was finally working on something that was closer to the metal but also I wasn't really seeing how I was solving any user problems and so it made me feel like oh wow like maybe I don't really want to do software engineering.

37:39And it was only after I got that opportunity and I advocated for joining the NewsTab team, the Robinhood News team, that I finally saw like, whoa, like, I actually really love solving user impact problems and user problems. And then while solving the user problems, I got to use tools like backend and frontend. And it didn't matter to me which one I was using, as long as I was solving the problem of like the user, which is what news do I see and

38:07Michelle Lim:how does it look and it's like i i really sense that product engineer it's also a kind of a word or a phrase that that is now spreading across startups so many startups are now hiring specifically product engineers so it is happening as a founder yourself i assume at some point you will hire product engineers if you're not already hiring but what would you look for like outside of the like this person can code and you know has the basics but what what what are the things that will tell you if like okay this person would be good at product engineering versus maybe not as much one key signal is whether or not they have worked for a company that was product first in nature like if they had worked on more like a user-facing type SaaS tool like Figma, Notion or Slack you know that those companies are very focused on product first thinking and they pick people who are product first.

39:02Then in an interview, you can also kind of tell based on how the candidate answers questions. So when you ask them what they were doing at their previous roles, some people will focus a lot on the very cool technology, and then others will focus on the business problem of like, oh, we were leaking$700 ,000 a year to Amazon, and so it was very important that we migrated over to our own open source hosted presto and then we did this and then this is what happened to the business as opposed to like oh like you know it was very important for us to do this thing and it was very difficult because of xyz reasons and then we used this library but then this library didn't work you know you could really tell the difference and it was very important also for our interview process to involve a product round where we asked people like, you know, what would they change about the terminal?

39:58What would they change about a favorite app that they're already using? And then the best people who are thinking in terms of product would know how, well, first of all, would have an opinion about how to improve a product. And then second of all, would know how to talk about it from the user's perspective. And last of all, are able to create milestones in that product based on user visible milestones. so you would want if you have like a hundred things to do how do you group it and sequence the the things to do in a way where every milestone the user could see a difference as opposed to like maybe spending like 60 percent of your time improving performance or latency that would not be seen by the user until this front end was added for example yeah so i'm hearing

40:43Michelle Lim:that like understanding the business caring about the product like having a lot of things that we might have associated purely in the past with just product managers having some of that is increasingly important and you know for engineers we'll have none of it that's also fine but it feels like increasingly they might be a better fit for infrastructure work or places where you don't need to think about product there's like someone or a company where there is a product manager and they they take care of all of that and it's just implementation which sounds a little bit less fun but these places exist and some people there are engineers who appreciate this there's so many i I mean, and they're all extremely important.

41:20When you're at a company with a lot of scale, like really like performance memory, like the infrastructure you use is so important. But then when you're talking about startups, you're just starting out. And so you need someone who is able to plug in all the holes in the company. And the scale at the very beginning doesn't tend to be something that requires like that million billions of roles to handle or like requests per second to handle.

41:48Michelle Lim:Yeah, so you've been a founding engineer. You're now a founder. Clearly, you're also hiring founding engineers. And at Warp, you also hire product engineers. How do you think a product engineer versus a founding engineer differs? Or do they? Is it just the timing? Or is it also a little bit of different personality or different kind of challenges? Yeah, that's a very good question. So I would say like founding engineer versus product engineer, they're like different axes. So you could be a founding product engineer, you could be a founding infrastructure engineer, or you could be like a later stage product engineer, later stage infrastructure engineer, later stage software engineer, AI engineer.

42:30I think that folks might differ on the definition, but I think founding engineer counts if you are in the first five or so that joins within the first few months of the company starting. A product engineer, in my definition, is someone who is excited about solving user problems, and they are full stack in being able to do that. So they could go in and build a front-end feature, a back-end feature, or something that's end-to-end. They could also go into AI. They could go into infrastructure. They would use whatever tools in the tool belt of programming to solve the problem for the user. I think these days, the way that startups are putting these job descriptions out, I think that they are actually more looking for purely front-end engineers.

43:20No one uses the term front-end engineers anymore. I think when someone is reading a job description, one should read it closely because I think that a lot of startups here are using the word product engineer more as a kind of like a synonym for front-end only engineering.

43:37Michelle Lim:So not all of them mean the product engineering that we were talking about. Yeah. What do you think today at your startup, for example, now that we have all these AI tools, do you think it's going to push us away from even pair programming, even if people are in the same space? Or do you think, you know, the people who still do it are actually going to benefit a lot from it? I think almost like with the rise of AI, everyone now is pair programming with an AI. And having someone to talk to or some bot to talk to allows everyone to have a rubber duck every day and that helps everyone get better.

44:16I think that with the rise of the return to office there's also a lot more opportunities for sitting next to each other and just learning how people use their tools that we didn't get during the remote time because Warp was remote first and during the first two years I don't think I ever saw Zach in person

44:38Michelle Lim:Oh wow, yeah Yeah, during 2020 Of course, it was that time At your current startup, how much are you at Flint? How much are you using AI? Oh, all the time. It's almost a requirement at this point to use AI to code because then you can be more productive. What are your favorite tools or commonly the tools that you reach for? Always Cloud Code. Do you still use the IDE or not as much or to review stuff? So we use Cloud Code inside the IDE. Inside VS Code or I'm not sure if you can do Cursor or one of them. It's cursor and then we have an engineer who only codes on BIM. So he uses Cloud Code on BIM.

45:19Oh, but then Cloud Code runs there as well.

45:21Michelle Lim:That's pretty cool. It's crazy how quickly we've changed from like ID only, most engineers, to actually just like warming up to this. Yeah, technology gets better. One interesting topic that you mentioned earlier is some cautionary tales about how when you're joining an early stage startup, especially an AI startup, Some engineers can feel a little bit like screwed by founders. And, you know, I think, you know, we talked about how you managed to like, you know, get a great offer at an AI company with a founder who like checked all the boxes. But I think it's important to talk about some negative patterns you might have seen or heard and how to avoid it.

46:04Michelle Lim:Because, again, there's an explosion of startups, of AI startups, of founders who want to recruit engineers. And sometimes, I guess, things can be too good to be true. Yeah, yeah. I'm sensing a lot amongst my friends as well that people feel like specifically the founder might be acquihired away by a bigger company and then be the only one in the company that received any monetary benefit from the acquisition. That we've seen in the news. Yeah, that is. Some of the founders being hired away and then the team is left hanging. That is the specific scenario that people are really scared of. And I had a friend who told me that because of all these equity hires of the founders that's happening, like she's just going to join OpenAI instead because it's safe.

46:55I think it's all about really understanding the character of the founder. One great way to find out about the founder is to do reference checks. Is this someone who actually has a good character, who is generous with their people, who care about their team? The other good approximator is to see if the founder themselves were founding engineers to begin with. Because there's just that lived experience and empathy that you just cannot get unless you went through the ritual of having been a founding engineer, where you're in there, you know, the day that there wasn't even any code to the day that there was code.

47:34And then the day we had our first user, the days where we didn't have the first user, like all that like pain and struggles to now have like all this empathy that, hey, like these folks are entrusting me with their career and they are taking a lot of risk. I cannot see a world in which I wouldn't offer secondaries and tender offers. and opportunities to them. It's a big sacrifice.

48:03Michelle Lim:And maybe it's even worth asking on the interview specifically these questions that if the company was to have some, has a kind of raise a new round and the founders would take secondaries, would it be offered to other employees? If there was an acquisition to happen, would you bring the team with you? I guess, you know, it's not binding, but I feel there's a difference between when people don't ask and everyone just assumes versus it doesn't hurt too much to ask potentially, especially if it's a startup that seems to have just a rocket ship trajectory. Oh yeah, absolutely. You definitely have the leverage to ask that in this time.

48:40Michelle Lim:I mean, it's an innocent end of question, right? The worst thing is that they don't answer it or they refuse to answer it or they can say something, right? And then you have some data point. Yeah, the other thing is also to not listen too hard on what their answer is and to listen to whether or not they had thought about it before. When I was asking Zach about how he thought about early employees, it was very clear that he had been thinking about it for years. And so the answer that came out was very well thought out. And it was a really obvious thing for him to be thinking about. Whereas a less thoughtful manager might give you a good answer, but it's very clear they just came up with it on the spot.

49:20Michelle Lim:So now that you have a startup and you've now moved from, again, working at companies to being a founding engineer, you're now founding your own company. And congratulations on coming out from stealth. Thank you. With Flint. How do you find, what does it take to hire world-class engineers in an environment like Silicon Valley or with other founders you're talking to and also from your own experience? I think it's about showing that you care a lot about the team and that you value people on your team and that there's high trust between you and them, that you will do every measure it takes to make sure that they are going to have a good time.

50:05And then it's also about having really big vision about how this company is going to change the world and it's going to be huge. And that this is a chance to change the world.

50:17Michelle Lim:Speaking of which, your startup, Flint, can we talk about how you came up with the idea around websites and also how, you know, both what you're building, but also how you're thinking these AI agents will change the world, the web? So the website itself has become agentic. They build themselves. That means that if you wake up in the morning to a competitor having launched overnight, your website would have already generated you a comparison page that compares you with the competitor. And then it's already optimizing for conversions. And it's also keeping track of the differences in your product and them every day and then updating it.

50:57So something that would have taken five agencies, three months to do, suddenly gets done overnight when you were sleeping. And we're thinking of also automating all of the other marketing workflows around that. Like we can hook into your sales calls and your gong calls and then find out ways of selling your product or solution pages that you might be missing.

51:19Michelle Lim:Oh, wow. Yeah. This is proper next level. Oh, yeah. Like marketers really love this. I mean, I'm not just talking obviously from the marketing angle, but just from a software engineering and how you have like all these like different input channels to capture feedback and then to eventually generate. This sounds really cool. Yeah, it is bringing autonomy to the web. We're really building a new kind of internet here where the website is now not only generated by AI and for AI, but it's also becoming AI itself to be more dynamic and proactive. My co-founder actually ran Teams at Neuro, which is an autonomous vehicle company.

52:03And we talk a lot about how autonomous websites are similar to autonomous vehicles in that they take in data through a perception system. Then there's a decision-making system about, okay, based on this competitor, based on these sales calls, what should we do? And then it would then have a control system that then actually implements the pages. And then it would then start off that loop again, where based on how the page is doing in the environment, which is the market, what should we then do? So by putting all of that perception, that decision making and control systems into the same entity, we finally closed the feedback loop.

52:44That is the reason why it requires five agencies talking to each other to build a page. We had to have the five agencies because there were separate tools and different specialties to be busing information between. And now if you put all of the tools in the same entity, you start having a closed loop where the website continuously optimizes itself for your business. It's very exciting. So the first phase is that, which is let's respond to your market based on real-time data streams. And then the next phase would be real-time morphing and shape-shifting of the page based on who is visiting. It could be a healthcare executive that comes and then we morph the page to highlight healthcare case studies or compliance-related requirements from healthcare.

53:31and then we could even generate a sales demo that's specifically for that healthcare executive. Instead of needing to click contact sales and then wait a week for a Zoom call where someone is extremely bored talking to you, just have the website generator demo close to you on the spot. And then if it's an AI agent that's visiting, we can also speak different. The website could also speak differently. The agent doesn't want to speak in HTML. They want to speak in MCP. They want to speak in tool calls, APIs, Markdown, JSON. there is a new agent-to-agent protocol that we're building here to redefine the way that agents interact with the web.

54:09We also create the concept of an agentic web where instead of going to Google to find links, you could have the agents talk with each other to tell which agents are more credible than others and be able to communicate very quickly to help to sell a customer on a deal.

54:28Michelle Lim:This is so interesting because I feel like we're so focused right now, or at least I'm so focused on how LLMs can help developer tools, like just, you know, change how we do things that we kind of forget that there's a whole world out there where these tools can really just, you know, like change a bunch of stuff like how we think of websites and how dynamic they are and how like ultra dynamic or ultra personalized they can be. This is really cool. Yeah, everything we know about the internet is about to change. And Flynn is building that. even today, one really interesting problem that we're solving, it's almost a research level problem.

55:03It's in terms of creating on-brand landing pages. So it might seem very simple from the outside because like, oh, like, can't we just like choose the background color and the typography of a page and then churn out a page? Turns out that like, especially today, brand is very important. You wouldn't put a if you're a SaaS company, you wouldn't put a cursor-generated page in front of a Fortune 500 client you're trying to close. You want to make sure that your page really matches your brand down to the very pixel. And we have developed a capability in Flint to create a page that looks almost as if the customer themselves built it.

55:44So we work with cognition on the events pages as well as the comparison pages between in Windsor and Cursor, for example, and that's being cited by LOMs.

55:54Michelle Lim:So it feels to me, you know, you've gotten exposed, like one part of how you got here, maybe you've gotten otherwise, but it feels you really got here because you were at a founding engineer at a startup, you've seen so many things. So what would your advice be to software engineers who would love to join as a founding engineer, maybe an AI startup or a fast-world startup these days? A lot of them are AI, not all of them. If it's someone who, you know, has some experience in the field, what tactics you think might work for them? It's about showing that you've built in AI before because that skill is very much high in demand and it's very new.

56:36Very few people, relatively speaking, have ever built an AI product before. So just spending like some time over weekends knowing how to build an AI product already helps you stand out above many people.

56:49Michelle Lim:And by an AI product, we mean something that is using LLMs underneath the hood to do whatever it might be. I don't know. May that be just a search engine based on LLMs or anything that scratches your itch. Yeah, really anything that scratches your itch that uses any of the models, the completion APIs. In terms of excelling in that role, it starts off with picking the right founder. but then once you do join it's all about volunteering to do the things that no one wants to do but it's the most important thing for the business so I did what most engineers would consider to be the worst job ever which is to be the face of the company on Hacker News at Warp so I wrote the blog posts I published them on Hacker News and I answered all the questions on Hacker News I went out there and I created our company Twitter and I was writing tweets for the company.

57:43Then starting a YouTube channel for the company before any developer tool companies really thought about doing YouTube. Starting a Discord channel, like filing every feedback, starting the GitHub, like things that like very different, like outside of engineering, but the business really needed.

57:59Michelle Lim:And then you were still doing your engineering job. You were still like, you know, like fixing bugs and et cetera. But on the top of it, you're figuring out how to help the company, right? Yeah, yeah. You still have to make sure that you're doing your number one job, which is software engineering. So that needs to still stay the main focus and you should only volunteer for other stuff if you are already doing well in your main job. The benefit of doing a lot of these things and learning how to do a lot of these things is that then you get to learn what businesses need. You can come up with ideas that are not just developer tool companies, for example.

58:37And at one point, because I was doing all these things and then hiring all the people, I remember like it was after one of the board meetings, my founder reached out to me and said that, hey, like Michelle, like you hired all these people in growth. I want you to be head of growth. You're going to be starting and managing this team from now on. And I don't know, I was like 22 at the time. And suddenly an executive suddenly reporting to the board every quarter on like wild numbers and revenue. You wouldn't get that unless you volunteer to do random things. And then make sure that every time you do this, you do them exceedingly well.

59:17Because it's not necessarily just about doing well in that domain. It's about the founder knowing that whenever they pass you a job to be done, it will be done excellently. And then this way you get more and more responsibilities. Eventually, I ended up leading enterprise sales for Warp.

59:35Michelle Lim:Oh, wow. Because we had this problem where we started getting a lot of security questionnaires from companies that were using Warp. And I saw that problem and I was like, oh, this is not a security problem. This is an enterprise sales opportunity. This is the start of a conversation in which if we have an enterprise deal, we could fill your questionnaires and we could have SOC2 reports. And we could have all these nice compliance controls and admin panel if you paid us this amount of money. Yeah, it's things like this that really help you do well in a company. It's doing the things that are very unsexy, that nobody wants to do.

1:00:12Because before you know it, you might be running enterprise sales because no one wanted to work on security questionnaires. It was a hot potato that was passed around multiple quarters until it went to me.

1:00:23Michelle Lim:And I guess it's probably needless to say, but if you are working as a founding engineer or even as a software engineer, you're picking up all these things and you're balancing all these things. And from the outside, it's like, how are you doing all these things? I guess as a founder, it's kind of preparing you to be a founder because as a founder, you'll definitely have to balance all these hot potatoes at the same time. Oh yeah. As a job of a founder and a manager is always about taking the things that no one wants to do So that everyone else can be in their zone of genius. They can spend all their time working on this engineering problem.

1:00:58And yes, I will deal with Econuse.

1:01:00Michelle Lim:As closing, let's just do some rapid questions. I'm going to ask a question and then you tell me what comes to mind. Sounds good? Yeah, that sounds great. What's your favorite programming language and why? Oh, Rust. I feel like I get a lot of satisfaction every time I pass the borrow checker because it's very difficult to write code that compiles. And at Flint, you use Rust as well? Flint, we are a TypeScript shop. We are building autonomous websites and we're building websites that build themselves. So it's helpful to be writing in a language that builds the website. I'm sure Rust will find his way in there sooner or later.

1:01:39All right, we'll see.

1:01:40Michelle Lim:What are one or two movies that you would recommend that you enjoyed? Yeah, I really enjoyed Weapons. It looks like a horror movie on the outside, but it is very enjoyable. There are many comedic moments in it. And I also really enjoyed the nonlinear narrative where it's a story about sometime in the early 2000s, there were children who started running out of their houses at 2 a.m. and then they all disappeared for a month. and then the movie, it's just a real life story and then the movie creates a narrative for like what could have happened. And then every chapter in the movie was showing a different character's perspective and every perspective added a different way of viewing the story altogether and almost changed the genre each time.

1:02:32And as a horror movie fan, I also saw that every chapter was a different character in a horror movie trope, which I also found that it was really smart. so highly recommend it.

1:02:43Michelle Lim:I am not a horror movie fan I watched this movie not knowing what I got myself and I will say it's memorable it still gives me the shivers and it still makes me think so great recommendation thank you. Yes, highly recommend it. So Michelle thanks for being on the podcast this was just really interesting to see you know like how how much you can learn being as a founding engineer how you can do that and how it can lead to starting your own company doing super exciting things with Flint so good luck good luck with Flint and thanks for being here. Thank you so much. I always find it interesting to hear how someone became a founder, and Michelle's story felt pretty approachable to me.

1:03:16Michelle Lim:What really got my attention was how Michelle was volunteering to do the unattractive work, in this case working with a marketing agency to build marketing websites at Warped, and this got her the idea and expertise to start her current startup, which is about creating marketing and launch websites with AI. Michelle's story is a great reminder that to be a great founder, you probably need more than just software engineering. it's also helpful if you understand different parts of the business and you get your hands dirty with non-tech work as well. One other thing I found interesting is how Michelle thinks that GEO, generative engine optimization, basically LLMs recommending websites, will soon become perhaps even more important than search engine optimization.

1:03:56Michelle Lim:They search in new fast in the web thanks to AI, and perhaps webpages will become a lot more responsive and fluid thanks to AI and in response to LLMs. For more details on how to be a solid founding engineer, see the Pragmatic Engineer Deep Dives linked in the show notes below, including an article on lessons from the trenches of being a founding engineer. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please do subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and on YouTube. A special thank you if you also leave a rating on the show. Thanks, and see you in the next one.