035: Strategies for Leveraging Expertise: Navigating the Tech Landscape

Too many technology employees today, when they go into interviews, they don't know how to present themselves. They'll go into detail after detail of these small things that they did, but they don't talk about what they did in terms of the customer, in terms of the company, in terms of the department, or many times even their teams. Technology companies are hyper growth. The VC backed model is you keep growing and you change every year. And if you can't articulate your results in what the company is doing to grow or change, you're never going to be able to demonstrate your value. And if you can't demonstrate your value, you're never going to be able to get what you want. Welcome to Tech Careers and Money Talk, the podcast for financially focused technology employees. Are you working for equity? Do you have questions on how your career and money work together? Then welcome. Every week we discuss strategies and tactics for how to grow your career, build wealth and reach your financial and lifestyle goals. Hi, welcome to TechCruise and Money Talk. I'm your host, Christopher Nelson. Thanks so much for being here. Today, I want to dig into expertise. Expertise is really where you develop a skill to a level where you can trade it for a lot of equity, or you can build a brand and a business around it. This is a concept that is so important for people to understand when you are strategically building wealth inside of technology and companies. And it's one that's often overlooked. You are the asset. You have to understand that, that you are the asset in this scenario. And you build up the value of this asset as far as expertise goes, become an expert. become very skilled in some areas, and then you trade that for more and more equity as your career sends. Technology companies give equity to highly skilled employees because they want to retain the best and the brightest. This is because They are growth companies. They need very talented, very bright, very hardworking people to continue to grow. That increases the value of the stock and that helps you as a share owner ultimately generate wealth. That's how it works. But the basis of this is on expertise and skills that you build. So this episode, I want to really dig into what is expertise? What does it really mean on a fundamental level? I want to share with you how I learned expertise as well. How I learned this valuable lesson, it was a pivotal moment in my career that really flipped the switch and allowed me to create my blueprint of how I went from W-2 employee to now financially independent. And so in the first half, I'm going to go over the concept. I want you to understand it. give you some real examples of what it is. In the second half of the show today, I'm going to show you the value. I want to give you some concrete examples of people that have leveraged this to generate wealth and also other people that have generated, you know, leveraged this to get some level of financial independence, geographic independence, you name it. Now, this is going to be a two-part episode. I am going to then record another episode that's going to break down how do you assess your expertise, your level, where you are, how do you manage it, and then also how do you talk about it? Because it is so important that we talk about our expertise in a way that accentuates the value. I know many people you get offended and they think, hey, if I'm marketing myself, I'm not being genuine. And it couldn't be anything further from the truth. The hiring manager who sits across from you, they want to understand with sincerity, what is the value, what you can deliver to the team. And too many technology employees I know will focus on small details and they don't know how to articulate this. So this is really, really important. So I want to give you this in the context of my from equity to exit framework. So if you haven't listened to it, if you go to episode 16 of tech careers and money talk, I go through the four major building blocks of from equity to exit. And it starts with expertise. Expertise is where you start building skills, generating and able to deliver some value for companies that you can trade for equity. This is the opportunity that we have working in technology because if you want to get equity anywhere else, you have to buy it. It takes money or you have to build it, which if you don't have skills is going to be a lot harder. This is where we get the opportunity to trade our time and talent for equity to actually get paid while we build skills and we can also get equity. So expertise is the foundational building block. Equity is the second. Understanding what are the types of equity? What is the taxonomy? And what is the taxation around it? And then actually, what is the timing of how you get the different pieces of equity? Understanding how to manage equity, your technology equity that you get as part of the compensation package is critical. And those two are the first two building blocks. You have your expertise, then you have your equity. that helps you generate the wealth. Then the third pillar is the evergreen portfolio. This is your personal portfolio. That is a combination of stocks. That's a combination of private equity and real estate and other things that you turn into a business that you run. And then you can retire into where you can leverage some of that cashflow to start creating other businesses that you want to be in that you can have impact in. Like what I'm doing here with TechCruise and Money Talk. The fourth one is the exit plan. So those are the four pillars, expertise, equity, evergreen portfolio, and then your exit plan. Your exit plan is a five or 10 year plan that is taking you from where you are today to where you want to be. It can also be a three year plan. But essentially it is a strategic plan that says, how do I move from one level to the next level? How do I exit where I am today and get to the next level? I have an exit plan for where I am right now to where I want to be in the next five years. I have some clarity around that and I'm working every day and different things that I'm doing to make sure that I can get to that position. You should be doing that too. Expertise is the cornerstone of the entire plan. when i say expertise it is truly the destination what you have a skill i define skills i think the easiest way to think about skills and describe them is it is your education so you get trained to have a skill i was training computer engineering i went to ucc india go took a lot of courses that taught me actually how to code. So I went to school and it helped me get the basis of that skill. That was my education. And I think of this as a triangle. Education's at the top. You go down and on the right-hand side, you have experience. Experience outside of projects, but when you have experience in the workforce and there's real money on the line, meaning your salary or a budget or other things that is real high stakes experience that you can speak to that also then deliver on the other corner, its results. How did I affect the customer? Did I create a product that delivered more value to the customer? Meaning that then we increased the you know, customer acquisition score or customer satisfaction score. Did I, you know, in this again, applies in any discipline, career capital, you think about your education, your experience and your results. This is how you think about your skill and you're able to describe it. And you want to take that to levels of expertise, meaning that you are known for what you are able to deliver. And that's really the results. But you're able to talk about that around this triangle saying that you got educated, you know, and that doesn't have to be a formal education. It could be a certification. It could have been a training somewhere in a live training, an online training. And you get experience, real-world experience, and you deliver real-world results. So building your career capital and getting that foundation of moving from education to experience is really where you start. That's the first part of your career. You come out of school. I know I did. And you spend some time on long projects, and you're trying to understand how you translate your education to real-world experience and what that really means. And you can, even in that microcosm, be starting to build some level of expertise. What are things that you're known for? Are you a competent person when it comes to delivering different projects, delivering things that you're required of? You start being known for different things. As you get into the middle of your career, you may be going into management and you may be developing skills, career capital around a broader set of skills because it's not just your hard skill that you do, it's not just your discipline of whether that's engineering, sales, marketing, human resources, but you're also leadership. It's also management. It's also your relationships and relational capital that you build as well. That's middle career. Then you get to the end of your career. That's when you should have something that you're known for. You then become an expert in something. And maybe it's not at the end of the career. I know plenty of people who in the middle of their career have created interesting roles and opportunities for themselves that they then leverage that expertise to then become the business or the next play that they have. And so this is why expertise is so important and building your career capital in a strategic way in a thoughtful way where you're thinking of it as an asset that you can leverage you may be asking how did you learn this or how did you come to understand this. And I'll tell you the story. I remember it very vividly. I'd spent the first eight years of my career at Accenture. And I was one of a handful of people in 2004, we started the Salesforce.com practice. And so we got some early skills in helping taking Salesforce.com from an SMB, a small to medium business product, into the enterprise. And I had a good run there. But I was getting exhausted. I was getting burnout. And in 2009, I was really burnout. I was working and living in Asia, in Tokyo, away from family, and I just needed a change. So I made the decision to go to work for a startup company. I wanted to go work for equity. I'd seen other people do it to mixed results. I made a very emotional decision to run away from this fear and move towards this startup. And I picked something and chose with my heart. It was definitely not due diligence. It's not a lot of the things that I'm advocating for today. But this is, like anybody else, an origin story. So a year later, I'm nursing an ulcer. The pressure of the recession that had gone through 2008 and 2009 was weighing down on this company. It changed the culture. It started becoming toxic. And it was apparent that we weren't going to deliver on the minimum viable product. Customers, investors were losing faith. Now, I had this expertise, salesforce.com. I traded it for this company that was going nowhere. My belief at the time was that I was stained, that I'd left something that was very good. I went somewhere outside of my network. This was located in San Diego. It wasn't in the Bay Area. It wasn't around a lot of people that I knew. There weren't a lot of people that I can talk to. So I was in my head, and I thought that I had lost all of the value of the expertise that I built. It may sound silly right now, but that was my reality. And day and night, I was feeling the weight and the pressure of what am I going to do next? It was early 2010. The job market still wasn't phenomenal. We're sort of coming out weird around the Great Recession. And so I was looking on LinkedIn. And I saw a mentor online and I pinged him back and forth, let him know, you know, I needed to talk, was just feeling weird. So we jumped on the phone and I immediately shared with him how I was feeling, stuck, didn't know what I should do next, felt like I had this stain. And you know, what he said next stuck with me forever and really shaped a lot of my direction, which was, Christopher, what you have done previously before this has a lot of value. You need to take some time. You need to reflect, you know, write down some of these things that you've done for yourself and just for everybody else and describe that value because there are opportunities out there for you today, right now. Your expertise, it was in the Salesforce.com space at the time, has tremendous value. You just need to go out there and look and understand that. And that moment was pivotal for me because I realized that this particular year did not have any impact into the relevancy of what I had built in the previous five or six years. It had nothing to do with that at all. I had still built this expertise that was really on the rise. that there weren't at that point a lot of Salesforce.com technical architects, which is where I had built my skill set. Within two weeks of that conversation, I was relocating and had a brand new position. within two weeks. And I tell you this story so that you can understand that what we build, our skillset, our career capital that creates expertise is the valuable thing that we can go trade for equity. It was after that I went back and did another consulting role, but it was now my mindset realized, here's the value of what I had. It made me see the opportunity I thought there are a lot of startup companies that are getting ready to go public that need people that understand software as a service, enterprise software, Salesforce.com, Workday, NetSuite. They need to know how this all works together. In 2011, there weren't a lot of experts that could come in. And I also had an experience with Sarbanes-Oxley, which is Sarbanes-Oxley requirements are important when you take a company public. I started seeing the value of my experience and I started realizing I have leverage. I have a way that I can describe that that's of incredible value that I can go trade for equity in great companies. That was the start. That was the start of my journey from equity to exit was really understanding the value of my career capital and my expertise. And I share this with you so that you can understand that you have some value too. You have to understand what it is. That's what we're going to cover in the next episode is really how you go around you know, assessing it, creating the inventory and investing in it. And then also being able to illustrate and tell your story. We'll go into that in the next episode, but I want you to understand, you know, that this is important for technology employees of all level. to understand that your expertise is what gives you the leverage when you're sitting on the other side of the negotiating table looking for a good total compensation package. This is for all disciplines. I'm talking about not just engineering, product management only, but I'm talking about HR, sales, finance, et cetera. Now, I want you to know, I didn't come up with this idea all by myself. Right. This is also if anybody here knows novel Ravikant, who is a great investor. He made some early investments in Uber and Twitter and some of these companies. He said something like, if you build a unique and irreplaceable skill set that can't be done through automation, you have this unique and irreplaceable skill set. That's where you're going to find tremendous financial success and freedom. It's through building these skill sets. And so that's why it's important that you understand this. Now we're going to take a quick break. And when I come back, I want to hit you with a number of examples that are going to bring this to life so that you can understand how other people are doing this and you can do it too. We'll be right back. All right, and we're back. In this half of the episode, we are going to give you some tangible examples, not just myself, but so that you can see and understand conceptually how technology employees leverage their career capital, moving that to expertise to be able to find incredible financial opportunities and also freedom. That's why we're here. We're here to understand how do we meet our financial goals? How do we get financially independent so that we can control our own destiny? So when you think about unique skills and values, let's talk about people at the high end of the food chain, meaning let's talk about the C-suite. When I think about this example, I go to Frank Slootman. Frank Slootman, if you don't know him, I'm going to put some links in the show notes so you can check those out. Frank Slootman is now the CEO of Snowflake. What did he do before he was the CEO of Snowflake? He was the CEO of ServiceNow. ServiceNow, multi-billion dollar company He took over a little post IPO and helped grow and scale that company, helped take Snowflake through one of the biggest IPOs. in the silicon valley in before that he was with a company called data stacks now so what's his expertise ceo chief executive officer well he is known as somebody who can turn around a company and get scaling and you can do it with massive companies he's no has a reputation for putting together high performing teams for taking products and teams that are struggling to meet sales goals that are struggling to become profitable. All of the things that are critical to help these companies grow and scale. And he's had incredible success. And when I think about that, and when I've read a couple of his stories is, He made a decision early in his career when he was getting some opportunities that people were turning their nose up at, these turnaround opportunities. When he saw people who wanted to go and they wanted to cherry pick and take these great companies and just sort of ride them to the finish line, he wanted to go do the hard work. He wanted to go and be known for turnarounds. So what's the reward for something like that? Well, right now in 2023, public record, it's a public company, cash and salary bonus, $886,000. So he has a small amount of cash and a stock package worth $22.7 million. And my understanding is this doesn't even include some of his pre-IPO options. This is just the package that he's going to get in this year. Why is he compensated so much? It's his expertise, his specialization. And if you go around the circle, right. I mean, I don't think his educate, nobody's really asking questions about his education anymore, but you go to the base of career capital, his experience. And the results that he've delivered, you know, that's why those two are at the base of the triangle. They have the most weight in this conceptual model of career capital, how you build your skills. It has an incredible weight and he's proven that. And so he is getting that. And when you look at his compensation, you have. You know, one, one 24th of it is cash. The rest of it is stock all focused on upside what he can deliver to the company. This is an example. This is a, an extreme high performance example of somebody who has built some level of expertise in how they get compensated for it. And I'm sure that in his interviews, never been sat in on a Frank Slootman interview would love to, by the way, anyone has one coming up. And I'm not talking about an interview like a podcast interview. I'm talking about interviewing for a position. When he articulates his experience and results, I am sure that it's compelling and it's obvious on paper what he has done for these particular companies. That is an example at the top end of the spectrum where expertise, building your career capital, gets him to a point where he's financially free. He has from, I'm sure from ServiceNow, from data stacks that he helped lead to an acquisition. He's got more money than he ever needs in his lifetime. Let's say that Frank Slootman is financially independent. He loves what he does and he's continuing to do it. That's one example. I want to tease out a couple examples of people that I've interviewed that you can go back and listen to their story of how they've built expertise that can create some level of security for them and freedom. So in episode nine, I interviewed my good friend, Darren Murph, who was the head of remote at GitLab. Darren if you look at where he worked if you look at his work history you'll find that he worked at a lot of different companies and he built the skill for communications and then he also created this opportunity for himself to become an expert in remote work. While other people wanted to go in the office, he wanted geographical freedom. He wanted to be able to work from where he wanted to work for. That was his personal goal. And so, and when you listen to the interview, it was very insightful to me how he always had that front and center that he saw no reason to go into an office. So he kept shaping and understanding the way that he worked. And he created this body of expertise so that when companies started being formed all remote, and they wanted somebody to lead the effort to, well, wait, how do we design the organization? And how do we communicate as a team? And what type of artifacts should we have to organize ourselves? He was ready. He had been doing it for years. He had the experience and he had the results. Darren has built this expertise to be the head of remote that is getting him a lot of opportunities for speaking engagements, for consulting engagements. And I know for a fact that this is a level of expertise that he has a business around. And if that's what he chose to do, he could do that full time. I also know that because of his expertise of remote work, that is first and foremost to also how he lives and how he executes. So he is somebody that geographic freedom is the most important thing to him. And so he is able to work geographically free because he has the expertise and it's understood and it's expected. Again, this is an example of where expertise can get you leverage and the leverage can be for the freedoms that you want. It can be for equity. It can be for geographic freedom, or it can also be just a security, a hedge that starts becoming this other business that then when you get to some level of financial independence, when your evergreen portfolio is producing a certain level of income, maybe it's covering half of what you need or three quarters of what you need, you can move into a consulting career. that doesn't produce as much income as your normal salary, but you're fine. And then you're getting more freedom. That's one of the concepts in moving from equity to exit is you're trying to activate freedoms. It's not just about a big pile of money that doesn't do anything. Let's talk about interview number or episode number seventeen my interview with adam broda adam broda is a senior product manager at a large technology company and he runs. Broda coaching broda coaching helps non tech executives and employees get technology jobs. It helps these people that have these highly valued skills understand how to start going to work for equity and that was part of his stories he realized that he could make. so much more money if he started to go to work for equity. He then started this consulting company on the side with the permission of his employer and has built a tremendous following on LinkedIn. On LinkedIn, he has over 300,000 followers. He has a growing business that he is growing and scaling because he wants a business that not only is something that he's an expert in that brings him joy, but also brings in some income and is a failover switch for his job today, right? It is something that, and don't get me wrong, he loves his job. He loves being a technology employee. He loves being a product manager, and he is in a sweet spot in his career right now. But he has this other expertise that he's built up, and all of it aligns with part of his day job. He is a hiring manager. So he is telling people what are things they need to do to get hired. By practicing this, he's becoming a better hiring manager. But this expertise, this career capital, gives him leverage in this consulting business so that he has a hedge. He does it for security. So these are three examples that it's important for you to understand, give you leverage when you build expertise at different levels. Now, I know for myself, I built a set of skills when I was an executive. I moved up to be a director, senior director. I was a chief information officer, a vice president. The executive skills that I learned through different training and coaching, that allowed me to transition quickly into running a private equity company. So running WealthWord Capital We've raised over $20 million. We manage right now around $320 million of assets under management, apartment buildings, mobile homes, automated teller machines, ATMs. I got leverage out of my executive toolkit, and I was on the software buy side, so I saw a lot of contracts. So as I went from working with lawyers around software contracts to working with lawyers around private placement memorandums, and setting up funds and those types of things, I already had a skill set that I could leverage. When it came to running P&Ls and running spreadsheets, I had managed and owned a lot of budgets. I could do that. When I had to put together a strategic plan, I could do that. So this is where my skill set as an executive gave me leverage. I get asked frequently, You're running this podcast, you're scaling this media and education company. You're also running a private equity company. How do you do it? Well, as an executive, you're running multiple facets of your business. I'm not working near as hard as I was in tech and I'm managing a lot of these things, but it's because I had a skillset that I'm able to leverage. In all of this is career capital. It's education, experience and results that grows over time to be a level of expertise that gives you leverage. A lot of technology employees fail. They do not manage their career capital very well. I'm going to give you the three big reasons why they don't. They don't have a clear framework to assess their career capital and they don't have a plan to manage it. And I'll tell you right now, number two is many technology employees do not know how to articulate their skill set in terms of results delivered. They're going to tell you the what they did. They're not going to tell you this. So what, what I mean, so what you need to talk about how you impacted customer, how you impacted company, customer company, department team. And then ultimately, and this is the saddest thing, is that we're so busy moving forward, go, go, go, go, go, that we literally just don't write down what we did. Like we forget about it. And when we're in an interview, it comes up, but it's not meaningful in the way that we share it. It's anecdotal. What i want you to take away from this and this is the wake up call is the wake up call for you that your expertise your skills what you're building have value. Can you have a distinct advantage when you work for a technology company you getting paid a salary. You're also getting equity in exchange for your time and your talent. You're getting all of these things and you get the opportunity to build a set of skills to invest in that as you go. That is also where you get real leverage as well. You're getting paid to do that. And so what I want you to take away from this episode is that you are the asset. You are building a set of skills And it's around this career capital, your education, your experience, and your results. And if you focus on it intently and you build this expertise, that is going to get you leverage to make more equity. It's also going to give you leverage to create other opportunities for yourself. And this is the foundational component of from equity to exit. And this is where I'm going to continue to go through this platform and this framework with you so that you understand what you need to do to make that work. As I mentioned, this is part one of this particular episode of this particular subject matter. So this is expertise. In the next episode, I'm going to have a book into this where it is going to tell you exactly what you need to do to be able to inventory your career capital, to invest and test your career capital, and to illustrate and tell your career story so that you understand exactly what you need to do to get the most value out of what you're doing. I hope that you enjoyed that today. If you have any questions, you're curious about anything, just send me an email at ask at techcareersandmoneytalk.com. That is ask at techcareersandmoneytalk.com. And if you want to know more, you want a weekly tip on, you know, growing from equity to exit, then subscribe at techcareersandmoneynews.com. Thank you so much.