2478 - Helping Tech Founders Evolve from Technical Experts to Inspiring Leaders with Human Interfaces' Vladimir Baranov

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0:46Visit PodVerified.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it. With us right now, it's Vladimir Baranov. Vladimir, you are a strategic coach for tech founders and startup leaders. You are the founder of Human Interfaces. You're found on the web at humaninterfaces.co. Vladimir, thank you so much for joining us. Yes, thank you for having me, Josh. Fantastic being here. Yeah. Hey, before we get going, talking about your superpowers and the work that you do, You know, I always love, you know, talking with leaders, kind of what they do for fun when they're not at work.

1:24I understand you got a couple of young kiddos as, in fact, two and five years old and you are already taking them camping. So what is it like camping with a two and a five year old? Well, technically it was a one and a four year old the first time we took them. so it's probably a lot of parents on the call know that any way you anytime you travel away from home parenting becomes 10 times more difficult because you just don't have all the resources available so you can imagine that the car gets packed to the gills with all the different activities and all the different supporting equipment to have the kids be there now one benefit is there when you're in a nature and you're camping there are no tables for them to run into so you don't have to baby protect uh anything in the nature except for all the wild creatures that live there um and once the tent is closed it's closed because the little ones don't know how to use the zipper very well so it's kind of like uh up to you to let them out when they want to but yeah we do a bunch of camping per year like a couple of times yeah well you're in beautiful upstate new york um have there been any locations you're like you know i like this place either geographically or just anything come to mind yeah so we usually go to north of new york even though for a lot of people living in new york city like we are already way north but we're just in the middle uh in ithaca uh but going up uh north of adirondacks uh or uh like that area is uh really uh really really nice camping in the adirant that'd be wonderful that would be great uh and and um any tips for parents that uh maybe they have a one-year-old or a two-year-old and they're like we would maybe consider taking them camping but we're worried it's going to turn into a holy mess any tips like things to bring or anything like that yeah no for sure but if you have been a if you're an experienced camper yourself so you know what car enabled campgrounds are so like a lot of times they're fully supported but looking for the places that have full shower facilities really useful or have a river access that's been proven really easy for us and bring tons of snacks and ways of carrying kids around because if if you're unable to navigate the landscape with them then any sort of like backpack where you can put a kid behind or a stroller where they really huge wheels, which can traverse a difficult terrain was very useful to us.

3:55I love it. All right, Vlad, thank you so much for that. So let's talk a bit about human interfaces. Again, your website, humaninterfaces.co. So you're working with tech founders, startup leaders. You've done it yourself a few times. Share with me a little bit more about your superpowers and what you do with human interfaces. Yeah. So a lot of times it's a mindset transformation from where people are in their lives when to start doing things like becoming a leader or becoming a founder and go into the place what it feels like to be a successful or effective executives. And a lot of people already know how to do it, but because it's a new domain, as part of my work, we map some of the previous experiences they had to the new experiences that they need to do.

4:42For example, a lot of work for a founder is actually experimenting with different things that will gain traction. and a lot of founders, especially from a technical field, are very close with their heart to scientific approach. And scientific approach is all about running experiments. You set up a hypothesis, you run it, and you check the results. Exactly the same thing in marketing. It just, marketing does not feel, appeal as structured as it is in science, but it's the same concepts. And some of those things help them map out and be successful in their new roles. Yeah. So how does that end up looking then?

5:18Yeah, that's a good question. So sometimes they have some clients come to me with a one question, or if we're doing a process, one, we have to map out where they are now, right? We need to understand who you are as a person, what your experience has been, what you're good at, what you're not good at, how big is your team is. Then we map out where we want to go, right? Do we want to build a business? Do we want to grow your revenue? Do we want to get more traction? And when we compare those states, the first one and the 2.0 state, then it becomes easier to introduce different activities and frameworks and approaches that we can take in order to move from one state to another.

5:54It happens for some people, it happens over three months. Some people I know who stay with me for two years. And it doesn't mean that they're slow at it. It's just because so much more detail gets revealed about which we're talking about. So it adds to the complexity of the journey. We typically do maybe two, three times a month. We meet for 45 minutes to an hour. And that's where most of the magic happens. Yeah. And what is it about, I know you work specifically with sometimes pretty nerdy, really smart, a lot of engineers who have found themselves in a position now as a founder, as also a brand leader and a people leader, and they are a leader of a great many thing that, you know, they're just real smart at like building things or designing something or, you know, technically minded.

6:47How is that background both kind of maybe a help and perhaps a hindrance if you're very technically minded when you're now thrown into, you know, where you're expected to do all of these other executive leadership, fulfill all these executive leadership roles. Right. And it's very scary for a lot of them because they realized that, oh my God, I've never done this before. And now all the pressure is on me to do that well. And why I like working with nerdy people, one is I'm a nerd, maybe an ex-nerd, but I don't think know such a thing as an ex-nerd. So I guess I'm still one. Where most of their career, academically or professionally, they were trained to interact with computer interfaces, We're interacting with an instrument, interacting with a protocol, interacting with an algorithm.

7:39Leadership is interacting with humans. So we need to work on their human interfaces in order to make them better leaders and then to make them better interacting with other people. why I think we as a society failing at automatically having those skills for science and technology minded leaders is because none of the curriculum that is given to them as we're bringing it up in society has anything to do with human relationships calculus sure engineering sure chemistry sure very detailed oriented papers for like 10 pages 20 pages absolutely how to ask somebody a question in a way that they give you the answer while experiencing all the emotional up and downs of a human experience?

8:32We don't. I'm not saying there are no experts out there. It's just by the time they reach a very credential stage and with a lot of responsibility, they're falling on their face, not because they're smart, not smart, not because they're smart, but because they have not had experience of that kind of nature. So as part of our coaching, I also tell them, like, it's not you, it's us. But as long as you accept it, we can quickly map your current skills to the skills you actually need to be better leader. Yeah, it's interesting. You know, I'm thinking about, do you find any patterns with your tech leaders who might have a very technical, scientific or engineering background?

9:18And I wonder if there's any maybe like interpersonal things or, you know, just operational things. Maybe it's revenue related. I don't know where they're like, you know, this is frustrating for me. I'm used to numbers and numbers don't lie. Right. But here we are. And there's like, whoa, there's like so much fuzzy logic going on, you know. Exactly. Yeah. I don't know if that rings a bell. No, absolutely. Absolutely. It does. what I say is that a lot of the world of science and engineering is built on first principles, where you can derive up and down things by just knowing one bit. And the world of marketing and business and human interaction is more like an ocean.

10:00Waves come up, waves come down, and they can appear anywhere. But a lot of scientists and engineers are familiar with the notion of what is called a stochastic process, where you don't have a predictability behind the process itself, but you have some patterns, which is very similar if we go back to the analogy of the waves of how we learn to surf. Now, even if you don't know how to surf, you can imagine what it's like to be on the board and trying to adjust yourself to each individual wave. One of the things that a lot of scientists and engineers do is they read about how to surf very well at infinitum.

10:35But guess what? It's really difficult to learn how to surf if you're just standing on the beach and you're reading about how to serve. You have to go out and do that. But then the question is like, oh my God, but what if somebody will see me fall? And you're right. There are a lot of circumstances where you should not be failing as a leader, but we can create sandboxes and practice environments where you can do, when you can practice those leadership skills so you can stand on that serve floor with a coach in a place which is safe. And once you actually go out more in public, then you're going to be more successful in those approaches.

11:11Excellent. All right. Vladimir, let's talk about where folks should go to connect with you and any resources that you might have for our friend that's been listening. Yeah, no, that's a great question. So my primary platform is my website. So humaninterfaces.co. and the resource that I offer is actually a discovery session, right? For a lot of folks that I work with is that they have never had a coaching session before. And part of the things that we go through is I explain what it's like to be coached. And as a follow-up, once we understand what it is, I usually offer a complimentary coaching session where people who are coming to me, potential clients, we can walk through a specific task, a specific issue on that call.

11:59So they understand what they will get as a benefit by the end of that session. I know one thing that you help out with is, you know, from burnout to breakthrough. It's tough. I mean, it can be a very emotionally taxing gig to be a founder. In fact, I would say a majority of the time it will be, in my experience. That's the norm. And so I guess if we were to kind of send off with, you know, one kind of closing thought or message to folks that might be, you know, their backgrounds in tech and all of a sudden they have all these other responsibilities and maybe they've got some frustrations. I don't know if there's a message of hope that you can share with our friend listening.

12:50Yes. I mean, to borrow from a famous title of a book, What Got You Here Will Not Get You There. is understanding your destination. Because right now you might be working really hard at something, but do you know that what you're doing and in a way that you're doing and how you're prioritizing things will actually get you where you're going? Because if you only know how to swim, but your goal is to actually be the best runner, sometimes you might default to your status quo function, which is to swim. And I know a lot of engineers, they are focused on building. A lot of scientists are focused on building their lab.

13:26when the business becomes undeveloped and very smart people avoid doing the things which are actually beneficial for the business for the fear or to be known incompetent in that function but you have to be climbing the learning curve of the things that you haven't become good at yet because that is actually what is moving your business forward you have to ditch the identity that you had before or repurpose it in order to become a new person who will be leading the company, a sort of metamorphosis that will make you into a beautiful butterfly. Yeah. Vladimir Baranov, again, you are the founder of Human Interfaces.

14:09You're found on the web at humaninterfaces.co. Thank you, Vlad. Of course. Thank you for having me.

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