SV Icons: Sri Viswanath, Coatue

Building engineering teams in the world of AI

Sri Viswanath, General Partner at Coatue, served as CTO of Atlassian, Groupon, and VMware. Throughout his distinguished career in building some of the world's most commonly used software products, he believes in this undeniable truth– the future is in AI. Most developers, he argued, will be AI developers in several years. Under his leadership, Atlassian became the leading creator of enterprise project management software, including products such Jira, Confluence, and Trello. 

Throughout his dinner, he shared his experiences and lessons. We included some below:  

• If you improve by 1% daily, you're 37 times better at the end of the year;

• Sri built Atlassian and grew the company without sales. He argued that you don’t necessarily need sales if you’re offering an extraordinary product;

• Prioritize progress over performance;

• You need to have a culture of continuous and relentless improvement;

• In everything you do, ask why, why, why. This question of why improves efficiency by reducing unnecessary work and empowers teams to take ownership over their products;

• Teams can only make significant progress in a culture of psychological safety, where they are free to task risks;

• Viswanath believes in discussing problems openly because if employees are too concerned about assigning responsibility when problems arise, you get what Sri calls the 'watermelon effect,’ in which everything seems green on the outside but red on the inside, where issues are boiling over. By discussing problems openly, management can assess the “red” areas and address the issues early;

• Sometimes, massive transformation requires changing people because incumbents think in old frameworks - this happened when Atlassian moved from building on-premise software to the cloud. 

Organizer: Georgi Koreli

Host: Chinghiz Dzhumanazarov

Editor: Jacky Lin

Contributors: Ilmir Nasretdinov, Div Garg