‍Rachel Chalmers:

Today, I am happy to welcome Tiffany To. Tiffany is the Head of Product, Agile and DevOps Solutions at Atlassian and the former COO, CRO and member of the Board of Directors at NEA Security Startup for All Secure. She's a prolific investor and advisor to startups, and a veteran of Silicon Valley storage startups, Cohesity and Nutanix. Tiffany has a computer systems engineering degree from Stanford, and an MBA from Berkeley's Haas School of Business, and she and I go back to the old days at VMware. Tiffany, thank you so much for being on the show.

Tiffany To:

 I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Rachel Chalmers:

It's a pleasure. So your current role is amazing. Agile and DevOps are so central to engineering innovation at so many companies, from startups to huge multinationals. Can you tell us a little bit more about what your role entails?

Tiffany To:

Sure. Maybe before I explain my role at Atlassian, I can rewind a bit on my path to getting here because I think it'll explain what brought me to this role. So throughout my career, I've worked on so many different technologies:  supercomputing, wireless networking, virtualization (where we crossed paths) and I'm glad to see how big companies operate ones like Intel. I got to see how startups scale into huge companies like VMware, and then I spent a lot of time at startups in cloud infrastructure and security. But I think what I was somewhat consciously, somewhat maybe subconsciously, doing was kind of moving up the technical stack throughout my career. So I started with really technical products that solve specific technology problems. But I think the common thread for me was I kept seeing how digital technologies disrupted so many companies, so many different industries over the last couple of decades. And it got me much more interested in how innovation works or doesn't work in different sized companies and different industries. And I think I realize there's a lot of times it's much less about the specific technology and much more about how teams are able to work together to respond to the customers and market. And I think that's really what brought me to Atlassian. And so my role here is to manage our portfolio of products that are used for Agile and DevOps practices. So that includes JIRA Software and Bitbucket, among others. And Atlassian has two hundred thousand customers, so you can imagine a huge range of size and types of customers that use our products to build their own products and services for their own customers.

What's been exciting is that JIRA has been around for a long time, but part of what our teams have been working on lately is helping customers not just implement the Agile and DevOps practices with our tools, but try to do them well. And that's really hard. We've been spending a lot of time researching where customers get stuck as they roll out these practices in their organizations, and how we can try to improve our products to help them speed up their learning loops. For example, recently we released a set of features that shows the historical performance on sprints to a team in the backlog as they're planning their next sprint so they could do a better job of planning the next one. And we've been getting really great feedback on that because scrum masters do this work manually today, and it's really painful. This is kind of a bit of a shift for Atlassian, where we spend a lot of time building and maturing and making really powerful features on our tools. And now, as we're seeing more and more customers implement Agile and DevOps, it's becoming much more mainstream. We're trying to make the tools easier and simpler for them to use because we're seeing that it's not just the developers, we're needing to bring in marketing, HR, finance, and the rest of the business teams. So that's what I work on at Atlassian.

Rachel Chalmers:

It's super cool. And this new move for Atlassian is very much in line with the way the industry is moving. Hard problems in computer science are tractable and the so-called soft problems, the people problems, those are the really hard ones. So one of the reasons I think Atlassian has been so successful is that it's riding this wave, post Eric Rees, bringing the Toyota production system into the industry through the lean startup, a friend of the show, Jez Humble and Nicole Forskolin, writing up DORA and documenting how using these collaborative approaches, companies can be much more agile and much more effective. Atlassian has built out a toolkit to underpin a lot of those processes, and I think that's why it's become so successful so quickly.

Tiffany To:

Yeah, definitely. I mean, it's amazing to see the different range of customers that use our products, but what you see, as you're pointing out, is that they kind of started in this place of just getting the basics going and connecting those teams, and then they soon run into the challenge of, well, how do we get better at these practices? How do we measure our success? And I think that's where, as you mentioned, those DORA metrics that came from Jez and Nicole were really exciting because people could start to see that, “Hey, we don't just have a DevOps team, we have a way of measuring our success.” But then I think that takes them to this next phase of, “OK, great. Now how do we get better? How do we improve? Where are the actual bottlenecks?” And those are often related to the people, the collaboration, and also the visibility. So one of the areas that we're investing a lot is in the data infrastructure and figuring out what data to collect, but also where and how to surface it. Because what we realized was a lot of teams, the leaders will collect that data. They spend a bunch of time doing that, but then they're not sure what to do with it, right? They build these reports and then they just make them available. But then people, as part of their practices in Agile and DevOps, they may not be going to go look at those reports. What we're trying to figure out how to do is take the right bits of data and actually present it in the products at the points of time where we think it's most useful to certain people in augmenting their decisions.

Rachel Chalmers:

Because the extreme anti-pattern is surveillance and like stigmatizing someone who appears to be unproductive in terms of line of code while overlooking whether that person is a catalyst or whether they're editing code to make it way more effective because it's accomplishing the same thing in fewer lines of code. The positive pattern, which I'm a lot more interested in, is what we've been calling “compassionate software.” So it's things like Launch Darkly doing, feature flagging. So if you make a mistake in production, you can roll it back and nobody has to yell at anybody else and Honeycomb with observability, where you can ask ad hoc questions of why infrastructure is behaving weirdly, both of which proceed from the idea that everyone is smart and everybody's well intentioned. But these systems are much too complex for any one human brain to comprehend. And so we need highly functional, blameless teams, even just to wrap our heads around how they work.

Tiffany To:

I think that's exactly right. I think a recurring theme we hear a lot from customers of all sizes is the engineering sprawl is really something they can't wrap their heads around and they don't really feel like as they add more and more tools, it makes it better. It actually makes it worse. Right now, they have even more data. And so knowing what data is important to who becomes very, very challenging; knowing who to go to for things is very challenging. Actually, this observation is what actually motivated us to recently launch a new product that's just in beta right now. But it kind of follows this trend of, I think, a lot of cloud first companies have realized the engineering sprawl. As you move to the cloud with microservices, it just becomes untenable. And so they build their own tools to try to deal with this recent Spotify release Backstage. I think Lyft has Clutch, and at Atlassian we had built our own internal tools for this as well. And so seeing that pattern as we were talking to our customers, we saw an opportunity to try to put that out there. So we recently launched a product called Compass, and it's very focused not on the technical parts of doing DevOps. It's actually focused on collaboration. How do we actually connect teams together, help them onboard faster? How to connect the dev in the IT team? It's much more focused on those workflows.

Rachel Chalmers:

Super cool. It's a great segue to my next question as well. Which companies do you think are doing this kind of engineering-led innovation particularly well?

Tiffany To:

Yeah. With the pandemic, it's been amazing to see how companies that you don't think of as high-tech companies but have invested in their digital capabilities and have agile practices. So they've been able to identify and take advantage of new opportunities to serve their customers super fast. And I think some of them are a little more obvious, like Disney, right, with their streaming service. But obviously they didn't do that overnight, right? They built an organization and digital capabilities to make that happen in the timeframe that they did. So pretty impressive what they did. And then maybe a few others that we recently profiled at Atlassian that are interesting. One is: Domino’s. Domino's is invested in their digital infrastructure for quite a while, and in the COVID crisis, we talked to them. The fact that they had not only kind of built these digital capabilities, but connected their business and technical teams together and their supply chain allowed them to innovate really fast. I think in a couple of months, they retooled standard operating procedures that they'd been using for decades to deliver pizza. And so they were able to roll out contactless delivery. They rolled out the car-side delivery. I know right now they're working on voice enabled delivery. All of these things are pretty amazing that they were able to do it so quickly. 

Another company that I spoke to that's interesting is in the healthcare space. And so I think we think of health care as typically not very fast moving. But one of the companies I talked to, Med Decision, which is not a newer company, they're actually 30 years old in the U.S. They had invested quite a bit in a digital platform, but also in an agile transformation. So they recognized that they were going to have to move a lot faster to compete in the healthcare market with so many startups coming up. And so they went through a whole process of really realigning their teams so that their business, their product, their technical teams were collaborating together on initiatives and had much better visibility to what projects were happening across the company. And I think that investment that they worked on over the last 5-10 years, it paid off during the pandemic for them as well because the telemedicine opportunity came up. And so they were able to get a team together very dynamically and put a prototype together and roll that out in weeks instead of months.

Rachel Chalmers:

And that's been transformative. I mean, all of my healthcare over the pandemic to a first approximation was via telemedicine, and my providers did an incredible job of making it seem almost seamless. It's been really good. 

When you look back on your career to date. Tiffany, what are you proudest of?

Tiffany To:

I think for me, I sort into two buckets: more personal achievements and then more and then professional ones. I think on the personal side, maybe because I don't look like the traditional kind of high-tech leader. I'm a woman. I'm Asian. I've had lots of people over my career (men and women) I think, feel less intimidated about reaching out to understand high tech, not just the technologies, but the career paths, product management, marketing, doing a startup and asking me for advice. And so I think it's given me a lot of great opportunities to encourage people to try different roles or have an adventure in a startup. And it's helped me build a more diverse team throughout my career. So I feel really good about that, and I've been thinking about ways to scale that going forward. 

I think on the professional side, I think what has gotten me pretty excited is when you're able to build a new category of technology. And I think in particular, the cloud has been so transformative over the last few decades. And for startups, it's very easy to get going on cloud. But I think for a lot of traditional companies, it's been a pretty painful path for them to figure out how to make use of the cloud. And so being able to work at companies like VMware on virtualization and then a couple of startups where we were building purpose-built infrastructure that made it easier to adopt the cloud, I think that was pretty exciting for me because talking to these customers, you can see that they want to be competitive. They want to be able to respond quicker to their customers. They want to take advantage of the cloud, but they don't have the benefit of a clean slate, right? And so they needed some other technologies to augment the cloud to make it easier for them to be able to actually benefit from that market wave.

Rachel Chalmers:

It was such a privilege to be around when VMware was starting because that company was so incredibly influential. There would be no cloud without VMware for specific technical reasons, which is that before the virtualization extensions went into Intel and AMD chips, it took a 40 percent performance hit to emulate x86. And it was Diane Greene, the founder and CEO who persuaded the chip companies to implement those extensions that made the performance improvement possible. And while most of our cloud these days runs on open source virtualization, it still uses those same technical approaches. So, you say you don't look like a tech leader, but you look an awful lot like people like Diane and Ellen Pao and Christine Yen over at Honeycomb. So you look like tech leaders to come.

Tiffany To:

I love that. I love that we're changing things, and I love that you brought up the technical extensions at Intel because that is literally what brought me to VMware. So I did a stint at Intel. I was working on multicore processors and we were adding those extensions and I looked into, “Why are we doing this, and who's using it and for what purpose?” And then I learned about VMware. It was an amazing journey to be there and work under Diane. 

Rachel Chalmers:

And I love to dwell on those moments because we're such an amnesiac industry in so many ways. We are so obsessed with the new, that we forget these massive level-ups in the past, and that company was really just a pivot for so many of our careers.

Tiffany To:

For sure, for sure. And I think it points to the fact that with innovation, part of why it's so hard is it's not just the technology being available, because I think you and I both know virtualization was available for quite a while, but you have to make it usable and then the timing has to be right. And so I think for VMware, they all said the benefit of the market conditions, right, there was a situation where there was a recession. So all these IT organizations were being asked to slash their budgets. They had to do more with less. And so they were forced to be creative and look at adopting things like virtualization. And I feel like that really kicked off VMware's ability to. And build out the solution much more fully.

Rachel Chalmers:

Yeah, absolutely. If you had a do-over, what might you do differently?

Tiffany To:

It's funny because I feel like as you go through your career, there are things where you feel like they're do overs earlier in your career. And then as you get older, you realize, “Oh, you wouldn't want to do a do over because that's part of what has taught you so much.” And I think one of those for me was joining SGI. So I think right out of university, I feel like I didn't really have much business acumen and it was I. I studied engineering and I was interested in cool technology, and SGI was cool to me, and so I joined them at just the wrong time. It's like, their decision to not really lean into x86 was really, really hurting the company, right? They reacted too slowly, but I got to learn a lot from my peers there, [it was] one of my first jobs, and then kind of understand how the interplay of technology and the market waves the economics around that. That really taught me that I needed to understand technology in a much broader context, not just for technology's sake. And so I think for a number of years, I thought, “Hmm, I should have just gone to Google,” because my advisor at Stanford, he quit on me and then went to Google and I'm like, “Huh, Google, maybe I should join this company.” And instead, I went to SGI. But looking back, I think I realized actually, it helped me really frame my thinking around innovation and the context of market waves. And then that's really what shaped most of the rest of my career, right? Because then I went on to virtualization and building other categories of tech.

Rachel Chalmers:

SGI is another company that people don't remember, but they just had this formidable range of hardware back in the 90s with gorgeous names like Reality Engine and Onyx. And they were just fantastic machines. But you're right, they couldn't see far enough into the future, and when x86 became the industry standard, they just didn't adapt quickly enough. It was kind of a forerunner to almost exactly what happened to Sun as well.

Tiffany To:

That's right, it was painful to watch because, like you said, it was amazing technology for its time, but they weren't able to kind of adapt quickly enough.

Rachel Chalmers:

And that's probably the fundamental, you know, it's the innovator's dilemma. They had so much invested in their own architecture that, you know, they looked at x86 and said, quite correctly, “It's not as performant as what we're already building on. Therefore, we'll continue doing it the technically correct way and the best technology doesn't always win.” Beta was better than VHS. 

I preempted my own next question, which is what do you think makes innovation so difficult? So I've given you my version, over to you!

Tiffany To:

Well, I think for me, what's been really interesting is seeing innovation in different sized companies. So I've worked at Intel over a hundred thousand people organization, very well-oiled machine, down to seven-person startups. And so I think innovation is challenging whatever size you're at. But I think the challenges have felt quite different through my experience. So when you're at a startup, you have super exciting ideas. You've got a team that's so passionate about it. You're moving fast, but you don't have all the pieces. I think a lot of people talk about that analogy of you're building an airplane as you fall off a cliff. And in my experience, so many things have to go right for the idea to come to fruition and then for the company to be successful. And I've launched four startups and I definitely tell everyone I learned the most from the one that spent 60 million dollars of venture capital and didn't get the product fully baked into market. Timing and a bunch of other things didn't quite work out. And so even though we were able to build something interesting, all those things didn't quite come together. And so it's like, “Is that innovation?” Well, we innovated on the technology, but we couldn't quite fit all the pieces together and time it with the market.

And then you contrast that with corporate innovation. And I feel like if you take that plane analogy, it's more like steering like a huge container ship, you're trying to move one one degree at a time. And so I think leaders in traditional enterprises realize they're in trouble if they maintain this command-and-control model where all the ideas have to come from the top and the strategies have to come from the top. And I think that's part of what's driven the huge popularity and agile transformations. Everyone wants to know how to do this differently. And I think the challenge is that it's not just different tools that you need, but you need different kinds of leadership. You need different ways of sharing data. You need different practices in different culture so that folks can collaborate with a lot more context because oftentimes these innovations can come from anywhere in the organization. So being able to identify those pockets of innovation, and then nurture them, is really hard; I think it's a relentless pursuit. I don't think you ever get good at it, but you can get better at it and having that insight, I think it's really important. I see that at Atlassian, I'm very impressed with the way they deal with corporate innovation because it's a large company right now and they know there isn't one solution. So we take a whole bunch of different approaches. 

We have a corporate venture group that's obviously looking at startups and what's happening there within the company. We have what's called a shipment program that's very active that lots of folks of the company participated in. The founders are involved and we celebrate participation, not just winning. We want that culture of innovation to thrive. In addition to that, we have a formal kind of innovation program where we're bringing new products to market like that compass product I talked about. It allows us to carve out a set of resources and focus and advisors and a support network for that team. And I think that's super important because that's something I've seen be hard to do in successful enterprises. You have this one thing (we were talking about SGI earlier) that you're really great at and you're successful at, it becomes suffocating for anything else to kind of sprout in that environment. So if you can't dedicate separate resources to focus on that innovation, I think it's very hard.

Rachel Chalmers:

Do you think born digital companies like VMware and Atlassian have an advantage over their older cousins like Sun and SGI in that this knowledge of outsourced innovation and disruption by startups was there from the inception? Everybody knew that they were one of many startups with a small chance of making it, and so by the time they do make it they still have that deep sense of paranoia, the threat of innovation in the valley.

Tiffany To:

That's a great question. I'm not sure. I feel like in some ways, there are advantages because of the way that the company has grown up. They recognize another startup can come in and have a similar playbook, and so you do become more paranoid. You've got to grow and grow those moats. But I feel like part of it is just also just the pace has increased over time. Things like cloud make it so much easier for startups to get going. And so to your point, today you look at Atlassian and the number of competitors that are building solutions in this space. And then you look at more traditional companies like at that time, like SGI or Sun. And it's like, well, it would have been very hard for like the same volume of startups to really get in and compete with them quickly. And maybe that's the shift of, you know, we're talking about hardware and software. I think that that really changes the game as well,

Rachel Chalmers:

Especially with the cloud as an accelerant.

Tiffany To:

Exactly. 

Rachel Chalmers:

How would you distill all of this experience into one or two lessons for our listeners?

Tiffany To:

That's really hard, but I think letting your curiosity drive you is a good thing. I think early on in my career, I felt like I was really indecisive because I tried a bunch of different companies in different technologies. But now when I look back, I think that was really important for me. I needed to have that broader view and understand different markets and different technologies for me to now be in a career path that lasted, where I'm helping so many different companies, right? Innovate. And so don't be afraid of that curiosity. I think that sometimes when you're early in your career, you feel like you should know what you want to do and get really, really good at it. And I think sometimes you have to take more circuitous paths to actually find what will make you happy. I think the other lesson for me that I'm still going through right now is: learn to listen. as you grow in your career. You focus very much on always having the right answers, and that's the metric that you're measured on in school. And then early in your career, it's like, do you have the right answer? And I think that as you grow as a leader, it's much more about how carefully you can listen to folks as opposed to having the right answer. And I think that's a hard shift for folks as you move into leadership. And so I think it's something that you have to make a practice of. Like, I think it was very easy for me to say, “I'm just not a good listener” and my husband will attest to that. He's like, “You're not a good listener,” but it's like you can get better if you keep trying. And so things that maybe don't come as naturally to you, like you can't invest in make those things that become assets for you as a leader.

Rachel Chalmers:

Again, I think that's an incredibly deep insight. I mean, we're talking about how the entire industry rests on the ingenuity of highly functional, extraordinarily communicative teams – that has to come from the leader. And it has to come from the leader listening very, actively and very deeply to each team member and making sure that everyone feels heard and that everyone's insights are incorporated, and that no one resorts to easy blame when something goes wrong because it doesn't get you anywhere. It's not effective. It's not efficient. And it is, you're right, a very hard lesson for all of us. We struggle and struggle and try to show how smart we are and get to a point in our career and then we have to shut up. That feels really frustrating. And yet that's exactly what we have to do.

Tiffany To:

That's right. And I think that actually ties back to the innovation in the Agile organization, right? It's like as companies scale, you have a great set of leaders, but you shouldn't measure those leaders on having them having the right answers. It's: Can they build a culture and a set of teams that can surface more innovation? And part of that is listening, right? Being able to go all the way down through the organization and understand where the opportunities are because they're often not the obvious ones at the top.

Rachel Chalmers:

It's an internal shift to be able to derive your ego reward, not from how great an individual contributor you are, but from how much your team members your reports are developing and becoming stronger in their roles.

Tiffany To:

That's exactly right, and I think that's one of the things that's becoming harder now with the pandemic and companies moving to this remote model. Atlassian is one hundred percent remote, and a lot of tech companies are doing that. The communication models are totally different. And so being able to foster that culture, do the mentoring, all those things are becoming a lot harder and take a lot more focus to figure out.

Rachel Chalmers:

Yeah, that's right. Chat and video conferences are great, but they're much lower bandwidth than face to face and they make listening harder.

Tiffany To:

That's right. And I think we're realizing very clearly that there's just meeting overload for folks as well, and that doesn't work. And so we're having to come up with new communication models like we're having to think very carefully about what type of content needs to happen and be shared asynchronously versus: everyone needs to be in the room. It becomes a virtuous loop for us in a way because we have to figure it out ourselves in Atlassian. And then we're thinking, “Well, how do we bring these practices into our products?” Because we know our customers are also trying to figure this out.

Rachel Chalmers:

So that's another great segue. What are some of the other ways you think the pandemic might affect corporations in the longer term?

Tiffany To:

I feel like I've talked about a lot of the negative ones. One of the positive ones, I would say, is that I think lots of companies, especially in tech, have had diversity goals for a while now, and I feel like they're much, much more attainable. So, for example, at Atlassian in just the last three months, close to a third of our hiring has been outside of our headquarters and we have two headquarters: one in Silicon Valley and one in Sydney, Australia. So being able to tap into talent outside of that network means that for a lot of companies, they can think much more broadly about their talent strategy, which is exciting. I think on the flip side of that, they have to counterbalance with a higher bar for engagement like we talked about, and I think people are thinking about their careers in different ways, right? If they're not going into an office. I think that we're seeing a growing trend that's been happening for a while, but for more project-oriented work, right? And so I think over time, companies are going to have a broader percentage of their work pool, not be full time employees. And so they're going to have to think carefully about, “How do you make those teams highly productive? How do they onboard quickly? How do they get to the right data and plug into the rest of the team faster without relying on tribal knowledge?” I think it's just something that companies are going to have to figure out.

Rachel Chalmers:

Yeah, it's interesting because we've seen both of those manifested in our practice when we switched from in-person to virtual accelerator programs. We suddenly got way more diverse applicants because anyone who has caregiving responsibilities can't up stakes and move somewhere else for three months at a time. So that was a real positive. And then we've also moved to this project model, which, you know, a lot of the folks that we work with are on contract and they're putting together different pieces of work. And it means we end up with a lot of digital nomads, which is really interesting. We've got folks all around the world bringing their insights and their perspectives in this very sort of loosely coupled way, which I'm enjoying a lot. 

Tiffany, I've got to ask, how on earth do you avoid burnout?

Tiffany To:

Well, I don't bottle things up, so I think everyone who knows me knows that I'm very transparent. They can look at my face and they know how I feel. And so I'm not one of those people that holds things in, and I'm very blessed to have a really good support network. Friends, coworkers, my husband… But also a new practice that I started recently that I love is: I'm part of a mini board. So there's a group of folks from other non profit industries. We're all at about the same level, and so we've connected through this professional development program, but we continue to meet every month. And I found that to be just amazing therapy for each other because it's not our immediate friends and coworkers, we can see a lot of the challenges that we have in managing our teams are things that we have in common, and so being able to have that shared experience has been amazing.

Rachel Chalmers:

What if this is another virtue of the pandemic and of the digital communications technologies? Because you do need that third space, you have the people at work, you have the people in your personal life. But when both of those folks are stressing you out, where do you go? You know, in the past it would be your church or your professional organization. And I think, you know, with people's Slack and Discord back-channels, we're starting to reconstruct some of those communities where we can just say, “Oh, everything went wrong today,” and your friends all chime in and say, “Yes, me too.” It's crazy. 

Tiffany To:

That's exactly right. I think the other way I avoid burnout is to really try to focus on my physical and mental health. Exercise is definitely a no-brainer, but something else I've tried recently, I'm still really bad at it, is mindfulness. My husband laughs because he's been trying to get me to do it for 10 years, and I'm like, “No, no, no, no, I'm just not good at it.” But I've been starting to do like 10 minutes a day, and I will say it is. It is transformative. Like, you just feel less reactive in your day, which is amazing because now I think most people are on slack more than email. And so the pace of your feeling of needing to respond is just highly stressful throughout the day. And so being able to spend just 10 minutes in the morning for me to try to reset my brain. It's been amazing that it's paying dividends, so it's something I'm going to keep trying to try to do.

Rachel Chalmers:

It's aspirational for me. I try and fail. But two of the favorite people I've ever worked with who were just like super even tempered even when things were going pear shaped, both had a meditation practice that they were very serious about: Sam Ramji, who's at Data Stacks now, and Walter Roth, who's at Moment Sales and in fact, Miko Matsumura, who's a crypto investor as well. Three of my favorite people I've ever worked with all meditate, and it's so apparent in their affect and in their ability to deal with setbacks. And I think there's so much to it. 

Tiffany, what is the best way for our listeners to connect with you or to follow your work?

Tiffany To:

The best way is through LinkedIn. I quit social media seven years ago, so I never know what's trending, except when I ask my husband; he's the one that keeps me current. So LinkedIn is the best way to reach me.

Rachel Chalmers:

What does the future look like for you personally?

Tiffany To:

I think for me, I'm at a point in my career where I have been thinking about what's next for me. I'm very excited about what I'm doing at Atlassian, but I'm also thinking about, “How do I scale some of the things that I really love doing?” And I really believe that if you're privileged enough to attain some level of power, whether it's economic, social career, then it’s your responsibility to figure out how to use that to empower others. And so I think for me, when I think about the things that have brought me the most enjoyment over my career, it's like mentoring folks, working with women and underrepresented groups. I recently coached a set of female entrepreneurs in an accelerator here in Sydney, and so I've been trying to think about how to do this at a broader scale. Very likely in the future, probably a few years out from now, I'd like to be more involved in the venture capital space and focus that on women and underrepresented groups. Because when we talked about this theme of innovation, I still see there being just a huge divide in terms of the amount of venture capital that makes its way to women and underrepresented groups. And I think part of that is just the process by which we allocate that funding, right? It's not very systematic. It's through relationships and network, and I think a lot of those groups just don't have that network and they don't see themselves in those founders and entrepreneurs. And so I think as you talked about earlier, it's starting to shift, but it's still slow. So I feel a sense of responsibility and being involved in that. So that's probably on my next horizon, but right now, I'm pretty happy here in Australia.

Rachel Chalmers:

We'll definitely volunteer you for some mentoring in the AlchemistX network. You get to wave a magic one the next five years of our industry play out exactly the way that you hope they will. Everything goes right? What does the world look like five years from now?

Tiffany To:

When I think about the trends that we were just talking about, I just see those expanding to the next stage, right? I talked about the fact that just a lot of these companies are now tapping into broader talent. But I think if we zoom out even one more level, I see that trend going even further: Talent in developing countries… That's an untapped pool. There's this brilliant guy, Balaji Srinivasan. So you know how people get to say they knew the band before they were cool? I feel like I kind of get to say that about Balaji because I invested in his first startup. And at that time, I remember him telling us about this passion project to kind of identify and connect the world's talent, specifically underprivileged talent in Third World countries. He went and took a detour as a VC and a CTO at Coinbase. But recently I heard him on this epic four hour podcast, Tim Ferriss. I'm guessing you've probably heard that one, and I realized he relaunched this project, which is really awesome to hear because I remember him being so passionate about it. And so the idea that we can not just tap into talent pools outside of Silicon Valley, but then kind of move it to this next stage of all these people that are much more underprivileged, I think, is an exciting view of the future to me. My parents immigrated to America from Vietnam during the war, and so my dad has told me many times, “If we had stayed in Vietnam, you wouldn't have been able to study engineering, you wouldn't have had this career.” And so you think about all the folks that don't have this privilege and the ways that now that we're so connected we could actually tap into that talent could have a much more exciting view of how talent is leveraged across the world.

Rachel Chalmers:

Yeah, that's a deep component of our mission at AlchemistX. Capital is highly concentrated here in the valley, but talent and ingenuity and aptitude are evenly distributed across the world. So if we can build that bridge to those communities, it's a win win. Tiffany, it's been so great. I hope we can get you on the show again, and thank you so much for taking the time.

Tiffany To:

Definitely. That was so much fun. Thanks so much, Rachel.