that's that's, Ah, question that I can answer very there at length, and we can talk about it for hours, but just to kind of give you the quick chapters. I've been in technology for probably 23 years today, and I've done a lot of back and forth between technology start ups and much larger public companies. Examples could be eBay, Wal Mart in a bunch of others. In between. I also had a chance to do some consulting work again, Working with bigger companies and smaller ones. I had a chance to start a few different ventures, and, um, I had a chance to be successful in a few of them. In our world, we call it, you know, having an exit event or some sort of a liquidation event where someone else wants to buy your company or merge with your company. So I was part of that in my career, but I was also part of a few companies that didn't go anywhere. And, you know, they could be what some would consider the failure because we ended up shutting the company down. So I had had a lot of different experiences, and I think you know, going back to the question in terms of how did I get to where I am today? It's really a lot of trial and error. It's really a lot of focusing on stuff that I like and stuff that I'm passionate about and stuff that I understand that I also do well and really trying to navigate my way throughout my professional career around those things. So to give you an example, I'm really entrepreneurial in my background in my DNA. I really get a big kick out of starting new things out of solving problems. Um, actually, I don't really care if the problem is in a certain area or a certain vertical. I tend to fall in love with the problem, not with a solution, but with the problem. And then I become very passionate about solving it. So that also led me to new areas. Even within technology, you know, I had a chance to look at a lot of different types of areas, from deep technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning, to be commerce to advertising technologies to software as a service to mobile amps. I just had a chance to touch a lot of different areas. And again, what led me was always finding those challenges and interesting problems to stall. And even when I was in bigger companies, you know, when I was managing large teams and I was holding senior and executive roles in those companies, I always tried to kind of operate in the same way that I waas when it was a much smaller start up. I always, you know, fell in love with the problem and then figured out different ways of off solving it. Um, I'm looking at the remaining parts of the question. What incidents and experiences shaped your career path? Um, for me, I guess a lot of it is being part of startup environments. Um, I really got an opportunity to learn fast and make mistakes. And actually, I learned more from my mistakes. That I've learned from my success stories and being in a startup allows you to almost put everything in the fastly. Everything happens so fast. You know, there are people that I hired in junior capacity right out of college or right out of university in very junior roles in two years later, you know they became VP's because they did a great job and they were able to get promoted. If those people were, you know, joining a much bigger company two years later, they would have still been in a relatively junior, maybe a mid level role, without having that opportunity to grow and to explode. It sounds very romantic, and I know that these are the great stories, but they're also a lot of stories where it didn't work out. But for me, you know that opportunity to move fast, to change things and to challenge things that always drove me after After doing it for many years, I also decided to actually start giving back to the community. So on an annual basis, I tried to allocate about 10 sometimes even 20% of my time to helping others kind of follow the path that I did. So I do a lot of pro bono work with entrepreneurs, and with younger companies and younger start ups, I, um, part of different programs. One of them is you can see here on my shirt. It would Google where I end up traveling to different places all over the world and meet, you know, younger individuals. Sometimes you know folks that are just coming out of university. Sometimes it's people who are also passionate and starting their own companies, and I get a chance to mentor them and help them there in a little bit from my experience from time to time, but also investing, you know, in those companies and new businesses. And I do my best to kind of share. You know what I have learned without it.

So my most recent role was it. StubHub stub started when I started. Stubble was actually part of eBay. Eso I was part of eBay's long. But then, a few months later, StubHub separated from eBay into becoming an independent private company by merging with another company in the space. I recently left StubHub. Ah, lot of it is because of Covert 19 and I think it is. A lot of you guys understand many off the online events. Sorry off the live events have just been canceled, and StubHub is a company that focuses from tickets for live events. What are those? Are sporting events or other forms of entertainment, comedy and music. And a lot of, you know, upper types of events is a result of Cove it. A lot of those events got canceled in most of the management team at StubHub moved on. It was also part of the merger, so I left my role a few weeks ago. I'm actually now doing something else. I'm working on a new company in a new role, but it's very similar to what I've done previously, So I'm happy to answer the question and talk a little bit about about my work. Typically, my work is all about understanding. Interesting opportunities for the company and then trying to build business is that the company could get into really quickly. We call that framework. We call that incubation where you're trying to build something, you know, really early stages and grow it until it becomes bigger. Um, it's it's right on the intersection between strategy, work, product work, meaning the actual technology aspect of building a new product from we hadn't and go to market go to market has a lot to do with marketing and business development. So it's right at the intersection of those tree things. What always leads me and guides me is again focusing on problems and who has problems. The customers, right? So it's really about focusing with customers. A lot of my job is to understand customers understand their behavior, understand their psychology, understand how they make decisions, why they make decisions. I understand how they actually select the types of products and services that they're using and then figure out the best way to build the right product to meet their needs on then, obviously, to market about that product and to bring it out to the market. So the responsibility is that I have are always again at that intersection off off strategy, which is all about understanding who we are as a company. What are our assets? What do we bring to the table? What are the values that we care about? You know, we want to focus on continuing to optimize the existing business that we have by making it marginally better. Or maybe it's about time to start something. You Maybe it's the right time for us to get into a new area in Innovate Movie. So it starts with those aspects of strategy. Then it gets very deep into technology understanding water, the seven change that are available today, understanding what are the different types of companies that operate in our market? And then it's really about understanding the users and coming up with our own experience with our own products. And the job tends to be a combination of very kind of technical aspect, where you have to dive deep into what a tax of some shady wanna cheese and what types of ecology than working a lot and managing engineering teams in product managers and product designer. But it also has a lot of the aspect strategy and understanding what growth is all about and understanding, trying to actually predict how the market will be. Hey, how consumers will be trying to think about the right offering to Matt to to meet matched journeys. So that's kind of you know that that that that has always kind of been my job. It may. It may have ended up, you know, in different names, off titles. Sometimes that was called the general manager, and sometimes it was called a repeal product, and sometimes I was called a VP of strategy, or that record doesn't matter. But it's really about the same, the same essence in the same responsibilities. Um, it's always really about strings in terms of decisions that I make, and I end up making a lot of decisions. Some of them are very tactical in the, you know, involved people. Management in the involves specific decisions around technology and strategy and marketing. But sometimes those decisions are more in the strategic side, thinking about the bigger direction. And sometimes I'm not even the one making the decisions. I could be supporting others as they make decisions. So my responsibility is to, um, you know, to create the right materials and to do everything that I can to share information and to help people make the right decisions. And in general data is a big piece of everything that I, you know, always done. It's always better to make decisions based on data, right, And sometimes you can have really clear signals in quantitative data that allows you to make a decision and say, Okay, Option A is better than option B because it's for example, 20% better. And sometimes you don't actually have that data, and you have to rely on more soft signals or what we call qualitative signals, and in that case, you may have a general direction. But then you have to make some decisions in ambiguity or in situation where not everything is no in terms of my weekly hours, you know where I come from. It's never been in 95 back of an environment, you know, not to say that not to say that work life balance is not something that I believe in. You know, I'm a huge believer in spending time with my family and my kids, my wife. And you know, I have some hobbies that I like to that I like to engage in. But, um, you know, I think that in today's day and age, it's not about separating them. It's about knowing how to combine them and how to balance how to really balanced life and work. So, you know, if my kids have a doctor's appointment in the middle of the day, then I'm gonna leave work, and I'm going to go with them to the doctor. But a same time if I have, ah, deadline that I need to meet. And I need, you know, come up with its new presentation to show investors I'm gonna be available and up late at night and in the weekends to get it done. So that's always, you know, kind of been my work style in in terms of weekly work hours, there could be weeks where we're working very hard, and there could be weeks when we're not. I think it's really all about understanding. The best way to balance it is you develop and evolve in your career. It's not just about balancing it for you and yourself. It's also about balancing it for the entire team. And there's some science there, right? It's It's really all about project management and understanding timelines and understanding what's reasonable. But some of it is art. Some of it is actually understanding the different people in the different skill sets and the different team members and again trying to come up with the right plan that would work for everyone. You know, realizing that one of my team member, you know, she might need a few more weeks, you know, to deal with her own family or to go to a conference that she's really excited about. And then everyone else will need to pitch in and to make sure that we can still meet the timelines. And if not, we're gonna adjust the time lines. So it's really about keeping those balances. There's ah question here about time that I've spent traveling and working from home throughout my career. I've done a lot of travel a lot. I think travel is almost like a second nature to what I do because I believe in being very close to my customers, and my customers in many cases are everywhere. I've worked on projects where my customers were, you know, spread all over the world, ranging from a bright in Africa to, you know, the United States and South America. And accordingly, I traveled a lot to meet the customers to meet with partners, you know, to go the conferences so I can, you know, I can say that I have accumulated a lot of miles, my frequent flyer account, and at the same time, I'm also, as I mentioned, I'm also part of a few international programs. Get me to travel to different places around the world on Do you know, talk to companies and start ups and entrepreneurs Now, obviously, you know, in the past 5 10 years, we've seen a lot of shifts and changes, meaning the typical work environment in it's It's not really about showing up and being in the office every day. You know, where I come from, it's really all about getting things done. And, you know, I tend to evaluate my teams based on merit and based on what they're able to accomplish, not based on, you know, homing hours. They expend if the office now, obviously you know, when we're merging that together, would the pandemic of cold It working from home is becoming much more, you know, abundant everywhere. And you could see right now, you know, I'm in my garage and home and I've been working a full day and this is becoming very typical. I'm a big believer in doing that. So even these days, you know, in my company and the project that I'm currently working on, my team members are based out of four different locations in the United States. Plus, I have two other team members outside of the U. S. Or working very closely with me on the same project. So I'm a huge believer in distributed teams. I'm a huge believer in just, you know, hiring good people and making sure that they can be comfortable. And I know that, you know, if people could be comfortable and they're patching about what they do, they're going to be doing great things for themselves and, you know, for the company. So location, I think, is becoming less and less critical these days. Obviously, you know, not for every company and not for every job and not for every individual. But I think we're thing. We're seeing a shift which is very obvious and evident in, you know, in the areas where I'm involved, which are most tech companies, and I definitely support that shift and I can see a lot of value and that there are also some adaptations and adjustments that would be required to make remote work more effective and more efficient. But I know that it's count. I know that a lot of those you know, technological changes in advantage and advances are coming, and I'm pretty sure that in a few years, working remotely is gonna become much more ubiquitous.

Klay related to people and related to work. You can see kind of like to two branches when it's around people. It's really not different than many other rules where you're a manager, then you have managerial responsibility, and it starts with hiring. It starts with making sure that you can hire the best people for the job. And to me, it's really not about hiring the people that I think would just do the best job at the best. Price companies are always trying to be cost efficient and, well, it's actually about the candidates just as much as it's about us and the company. If you give people the right opportunity to grow and spread their wings and you don't give them the right career path, they're not gonna go anywhere. You know, Only a couple of weeks ago I interviewed someone who was actually, you know, really impressive candidate, but it was clear that the job that we could offer that candidate was not going to enable him to grow and expand, and we just agreed. It's not gonna work out, not because I didn't feel I could do the job because I felt we couldn't be good enough for him in this career path at the moment again from what we were looking for. So I think you know the first challenge starts with recruiting, and then you want to make sure that you bring people in and to do that, you need to have a A that there's environment. You don't want to hire people who are like you because then you don't evolve and you don't learn. So a lot of it is about hiring. People who are actually different will bring a different perspective, and they come from a different background and then you want to set them up for success. But you also want to set yourself up for success, meaning you want to give them the opportunity to work on stuff that they know, but always keep pushing them forward and give them some stuff that they don't necessarily know. And I'm gonna give me an example in in a minute in disdain goes for for us as a company, it's always about getting exactly what we hire that person for to do that exact job. But a lot of it is also about that's person teaching us new things enough involving is a result of that. I'm a huge believer in death. Um, then I think the next challenge, which has to do with people in people management is really about building teams, you know, understanding that not everyone of the team has to be an absolute amazing star. It's really about how people work together, and I've seen teams where you had. You know, everyone on the team on paper were just amazing superstars, but they did just didn't work well together. They kept competing with each other, and they could go in and pushing and pulling in different directions. And I just didn't work out. So I think again, there's some science behind it, but a lot of it is on. It's about understanding how to build teams, how to engage teams out of motivates teams, how to connect the teams with other parts of the company, or with other partners outside of the company to make them, you know, execute on, be efficient, effective. And I think all of those air kind of under the first bucket off, you know, people management. The second bucket is real professional challenges, you know, in my line of business, the challenges are always around, you know, have we both direct thing for the customers? Are we a group to move fast enough? You know, Teoh, meet the demand or to changes in the landscape and in the market. I'll give me an example. You know, Just imagine. We all take a company like uber for granted today, right? It's almost like part of our behavior. We know that we can go anywhere, and we just need to tap our phone and click two buttons and there's gonna be a car waiting there. But a few years ago, that wasn't the case, right? I still remember, you know, having meetings in New York City and leaving the our offices and standing in the rain for 20 minutes. Trying to get a camp right just shows you how technology keeps advancing and how we keep changes. Everything that we do and how today from the week take for granted, you know, only a few years ago or farfetched. So my point is, in my job, you always have to be one step ahead. You always have to understand, you know, what are the changes in the market and in the landscape and the technologies that you're using, and you always got to make sure that you go with your customers because customers change and tastes change and consumer behavior evolves, right? So those are really the challenges that you know, I end up being with in terms of my approach is and what was more effective in what was less effective. I think, you know, you probably spent 20 hours just talking about those those cases. But what I had found with um, people management is that the best approach is to be direct. It's to be direct. You know, it's not about telling people what they want to hear. It's not about making people comfortable. Um, it's about understanding where they are, which is point A and where they wanna be, which is Point B. Once you and your team member have a clear understanding of death, which is not simple, by the way. It sounds very simple, but it's not right. Point a, for example, could be, you know, I'm an engineer and I can write code, but my level of writing code at the moment is seven out of 10 and I wouldn't and I want to get to be nine out of 10 or 10 of them, just establishing with your team member that she might be a seven out of 10. Working might be a seven out of, um, it's not trivial it all. But once you've established your point A and everyone agrees on what the point B is now it's all about helping them get there now. It's really about communicating freely and openly and talking about stuff that is good, whatever it happens, but also talking about stuff that is not good and not thinking that you know everything you know, being ready to be positively or even negatively surprised and not thinking that you have all of the answers right. As long as your team members see you as a human being and they know that you know you also have your weaknesses and strengths, you can communicate with them at the same level. So I think I think that is always works for me, being honest with people, being candid and clear and trying to always have a system so that my teams would understand where they are apt and where they're going and what's required to get there and how they get, you know, evaluated. I know that that's also the way that I like to be managed and typically tried to apply the same logic with my feet. When it comes to the other more your professional challenges they have to do with, you know, technology and strategy and marketing. Oh, it's really about being humble. It's really about, you know, knowing that you don't know everything. And, yeah, you may have been doing it for 20 plus years, but at the same time, uh, everything changes and things are always dynamics. So you gotta be humble. You gotta always continuously learn and update yourself an upgrade yourself in your skill sense. And honestly, a lot of it is about re 91 others. It's realizing that you may not know everything, and you need to have enough proxies and signals, um, that you can collect and learn from others in order to in order to be to be successful. I think so. Again, I can talk about those topics for hours, but just in a nutshell, These are things that I found that it had worked and, you know, in terms of examples again, I have many, many, many examples. But I can tell you that, you know, if you want, if you want to give an example about team members and managing team members or hiring, I can tell you that, for example, in where I come from, when we can't even talk about product management, you know, I like to say that there, seven different areas of responsibility for technology product managers and I've never hired someone who was like a 10 out of 10 in all seven different areas just doesn't exist. A lot of times when I interview candidates, they're expecting you know it when I asked them So, you know, tell me a little bit about you know, the stuff that you do really well and the stuff that you don't do really well. I think they're always expecting me to think that they need to be amazing and everything, and they don't. In fact, it's really about, you know, being really good at one or two things and then having the potential and the capacity to learn and evolve in two or tree other areas. And the key when you're building a team is to take, you know, people who are really good at two areas and match with people who are really grated to other areas so they can cross, pollinate and learn from each other and complement each other. So these they're just kind of example for my daily life that I did with on a weekly basis. And again, you know, we have many other examples, but you don't have enough.