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The First Blockchain Built for Enterprise Adoption
Listen in as groundbreaking leaders discuss what they have learned. Discover the books, podcasts, presentations, courses, research, articles and lessons that shaped their journey. Hosted by: Kevin Horek, Gregg Oldring, & Jon Larson.
Intro/Outro: Welcome to the learner.co show hosted by Kevin horic and his fellow learner co-founders listen in is groundbreaking leaders discuss what they've learned, discover the books, podcasts, presentations, courses, research articles, and lessons that shaped their journey to listen to past episodes and find links to all sources of learning mentioned. Visit learner.co that's learner with two L's dot co.
Kevin Horek: Welcome back to the learner.co show. Today we have Metta Parla car. She's the CTO and co-founder at Casper labs, John and Greg, what are you looking forward to learning from Mehta today?
Jon Larson: Well,
Gregg Oldring: We're both excited. We're chomping at the bit here.
Jon Larson: I'm interested in hearing what Casper labs is working on a blockchain platform for developers to use. I'm really interested in their vision for that and how that will be used by various organizations. It looks like they work with everything from companies to cities.
Gregg Oldring: Yeah. Like that idea of applying blockchain. We hear so much about the blockchain. We don't always there's there tends to be a pretty narrow group of things that they get applied to. It's like currencies that maybe most people in the real world don't care about. When you start to apply some of these technologies to, well, we'll apply blockchain to more real world applications. That gets super interesting. I'm really interested in how in the journey of how she got there. Cause she didn't start off toiling away on this blockchain idea at the beginning of her, high school or something like that. So, so how did she get from there to, this cutting edge and really cool stuff. So I'm excited to hear that.
Kevin Horek: All right. What's the show meadow, welcome to the show.
Medha Parlikar: Thanks so much for having me on. It's a pleasure to be here.
Kevin Horek: I'm excited to have you on the show today. I think what you guys are doing at Casper labs, selfishly, I'm fascinated about and want to learn more about, but maybe before we get into that, let's get to know you better and start off with where you grew up.
Medha Parlikar: I grew up in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, small town, just south, ironically, south of the border of Detroit, a little known fact that winter is actually about 20 miles south of Detroit. It's the Southern most point of Canada.
Kevin Horek: Very cool. Isn't there like a bridge that you can walk across or something. Am I right?
Medha Parlikar: Yeah. There, there is a bridge. It's not quite walking distance, but yeah, there's a bridge and a tunnel. Yeah. That connects to two cities.
Kevin Horek: Very cool. Walk us through, you went to university. What did you take and why?
Medha Parlikar: I came up in Canada through, a first-generation immigrant family. My mother and father came from India I'm of Indian origin and like all good Indian children. I aspire to go into either medicine or engineering. My parents had a rather larger debate about what my academic career would be in my mother one. I wound up going to school for pre-med. I had aspirations to be a physician and it was actually while I was in college that I discovered this was all the time of managed healthcare coming up. And, I kind of had a revelation that I didn't really want to become a doctor. I did get my undergraduate in biology, my undergraduate degree in biology with the intention of going to medical school. I pivoted later in my life, before I turned 30, I went actually back into technology and I was working in technology before that my father introduced me to computation and computing and personal computers in the early eighties.
Medha Parlikar: He got his 2 cents in before mom even got a chance to up at the bat. He got me hooked early.
Kevin Horek: Walk us through the rest of your education and then your career, maybe some highlights and learnings along the way.
Medha Parlikar: Yeah, for sure. So, I, I had early expertise in technology. I had a PC on my desk, but really was kind of oblivious to how much of an outlier was in that regard when, after I got married. Well, so after I got married, I moved to San Diego, California, and needed to get a job and I just started working. When I, when I started working, it became obvious that I had a natural aptitude for technology because I wound up being the internal it support in that organization. Yeah, it was really about, what I learned is that to really stay in tune with, sometimes people can observe things about you that you can't observe yourself. The gentleman that was in charge, he was their it consultant, looked at me and he's like, kids are pretty good at these things. Have you ever considered an education in that?
Medha Parlikar: I had previously kind of, written off, becoming a technologist, but then I had to really sit back and think about what he said. And it was a very passing remark. I don't think he realized, what a transformative impact it had on me. Yeah. After that, after he dropped that hint, I did go back to school and, got formerly educated in computer software and programming. I already had a fairly deep it, bench in terms of, laying cable and supporting operating systems and the internet and all that. I, I felt that computer programming to say, to go. I went ahead and got an education in that and then, transitioned fully for working for a software company and wrote some code. Then, that was around the time of the.com boom. It was around Y2K, did some Y2K work. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Then, again, through my connections was granted given an opportunity to go work for mp3.com.
Medha Parlikar: That was, for me, it really transformative because the technology that they were building back then was really, leapfrogging what everybody else was doing in terms of internet technology. Back then, they were basically, email and static websites was about the most complicated thing. You got a chance to work on. If you had a chance to work on an e-commerce site, you were like really cutting edge, but mp3.com was already building, YouTube back then they already had YouTube type technology for music and they actually built an mp.mp4.com site. They actually had YouTube way before it was even a glimmer in, Google's eye. The technology they built was very cutting edge and really everything I learned there on the job there allowed me to kind of catapult for the next 10 to 15 years in terms of my technical career. Right. I knew best practices that most companies had never even heard of.
Medha Parlikar: I was very lucky to have had the opportunity to work with such a stellar team. So.
Kevin Horek: How did you learn some of those things? Because it seems like back then, and I think in a lot of cases now where you self-taught where you reading books, where you, well, I guess it was a little, obviously it was before kind of YouTube. Like how are you learning some of these things? Was it just trial and error or walk us through that.
Medha Parlikar: Indeed. I've always been somebody that's taken kind of ownership of my own learning from a very early age, really hands-on I discovered that I learned best by doing and much more than reading. I tell people, if you can learn from reading, you really have a superpower. My daughter has her super power sheet. She could learn about block. She learned about blockchain and four weeks reading the Bitcoin white paper. I'm like, wow, that's very impressive because for me, I have to learn hands-on sure. I, I had the opportunity to work with all these technologies on the job, right? I was able to one learn how the technologies work, but then more importantly, that even learn like business workflow and processes and best practices, I was functioning quality assurance, quality control role@mp3.com. I have obviously had my formal education in, when I went back to school for computer programming and then really intersecting those two things in terms of learning the architect, I knew inherently the architecture of systems of computer systems.
Medha Parlikar: Because I had worked with them again hands-on and then@mp3.com learning the, how to manage work streams of code across a large distributed team or large team being able to apply that really was like about kind of synthesizing that information and putting it together. Like this is how you rapidly build and deploy and test code. It was a lot of trial and error, but it was also a lot of, kind of watching and learning and doing from there.
Kevin Horek: Interesting. Okay. Walk us through the rest of your career up until a Casper labs and then we'll get into that.
Medha Parlikar: Yeah, for sure. After mp3.com, there was a bit of a.com boom bust. I actually took the opportunity to not go into the office while, and I started managing a remote engineering team. So I had a small consultancy. Yes, I did some freelance work and I had a small consultancy that I was doing offshore development work, actually with a friend of mine who had a business india. I would do business development here in the U S and we would go ahead and get the technol, the work built and specify it in the U S and then he would go ahead and build it india. This was again, before offshore development thing was actually, it was actually thing. It kind of grew out of a necessity and an opportunity because I had this friend india that had his own tech company, and he was looking for business in the United States.
Medha Parlikar: We actually built this offshore development model for software way before anybody else was doing it. Again, this was interesting. This is an in 2001 in 2002, that were doing it and offshore development processes, sending work quote unquote offshore became a real big thing in about 2007, 2008, 2009. That's when you started seeing it really kind of take off and people having these remote development centers. What we look, what I learned there is when, working with a remote team, you need to communication was really key. You needed to be able to have everything completely specified before you handed it off to your team. So they could work overnight uninterrupted. It taught me a lot about, working from home and really organizing and structuring my time. I had small children then. I had to carve out time and really structure my day in such a way that I could get some work done while the kids were doing something else or otherwise occupied.
Medha Parlikar: I did that for about four or five years, and then went back to work in 2006, I went to go work for Devex. I did some part-time work for them. I learned a lot about, embedded systems working for Devex. I did a lot of white box QA and kind of eased my family back into, me going back to work. Cause I had been away from work, full-time work for about five years at that point. Right? From WebEx, I went into web analytics. I went to go work for website's story, which is a large, no, it's a very, it was an iconic San Diego company actually, they're no longer around. They required. I was there through the acquisition. Ultimately they were acquired by Adobe. When I was working there, what I learned a lot about web analytics, but I also learned that sometimes some of the dark trades are the ones that have the most cutting edge with technology, between website store and mp3.com.
Medha Parlikar: I learned that both of those I learned that both of those companies actually got their starts, believe it or not in the adult film industry and that the adult film industry and these kinds of, what do you want to call it black market, or less than, mainstream type industries, actually a really cutting edge when it comes to technology. They're always looking how to optimize. There's a lot of money in it, unfortunately, and they're able to really optimize their adoption of technology. So, unbeknownst to most Devex, they were video compression company and they got their start, in the adult film industry, they were finding a way to send out high definition video over the internet and they use the Devex code. It, they were very early adopters. Similarly with web analytics, they actually use a lot of web analytics tools as well. Website story was one of the, service providers for these websites.
Medha Parlikar: It was only, web analytics content that were looking at, but learned a lot about analytics and, business intelligence, right through that time. Yeah, and a lot of software as a service because a software uptime was really big, just like it was with mp3.com. Similarly with web analytics, uptime is key and, learning how to manage large amounts of sensitive data with the high and high availability zones was something that I learned as, the director quality assurance and release manager, right. Also experienced a theme where I would go into organizations and they would tell me, well, we can't seem to ship our code or keep our customers happy. Right. It was very much with a quality assurance bent that I would go in, but I found that eventually I wound up program managing a lot of these projects where I would not only help get the software tested, but also, provide insight into what was actually required in a given release and wasn't considered risky or not, which is more of a program management type of stakeholder, type of role that I would take to help make sure that we could get the software across the finish line.
Medha Parlikar: I was with that role, I was there all the way up through the Adobe acquisition and I became their senior manager of worldwide quality. I learned a lot and was able to apply a lot of the knowledge that I had around managing remote teams. Cause my teams were remote. I was working remotely fully remotely by then and, wound up spending a bulk of my career as a remote executive, right engineering executive, and really bootstrapping again, everything that I learned way back when in 2002, 2003, around, men doing this, offshore development cycle type offshore development center type of model, right. Where communication was clear, you had to decentralize all of your communications operations, so you can make information readily available for your team. You had to make sure everybody knew their goal and vision and people were empowered to play the role that they knew how to do, you have the play.
Medha Parlikar: Yeah, that was all the way through Adobe. Went to go work after Adobe. I left Adobe because I got bored and then went to go work for a few more small startups where I learned how to do program management and management, and then ultimately landed at Avalara in 2011. That's when I joined, they were there in financial services, they did sales tax calculation. I joined them as again, as a director of quality control and then rapidly pivoted into a full blown, director of engineering, senior director of engineering. My goal was to manage an engineering team at that point and to go beyond just quality assurance in my career and managed the Avalara sales tax engine, their core product AvaTax, and then some of their compliance offerings, as well as being responsible for whole programs. At that point in time where I was responsible for the PNL hiring, obviously always managed hiring, firing that was nothing new, but then really being in charge of the entire product life cycle and customer retention and more strategic goals for the company.
Medha Parlikar: I was with them until 2016 and then, pivot into blockchain in 2017.
Kevin Horek: Interesting. What exactly is Casper labs and how did you come up with the idea for it?
Medha Parlikar: I fell into the blockchain hole and, rabbit hole in 2017 through a friend of mine from Avalara. A lot of these roles that I got really came out of relationships, people that I knew, right. And this was no different. He wanted me to help him run an engineering team because that was my strength was where how to manage teams and get them to do their best work. So got into blockchain through that project. Ultimately that project failed due to a governance issue, a fiscal mismanagement issue and the investors in that project didn't want to see their investment, be lost. They approached me to recapitalize the project under a new structure and that's how Casper labs was born, myself and six other co-founders founded the company and yeah. Two and a half years later, we launched may net the Casper protocol and the rest is kind of history.
Medha Parlikar: Yeah,
Kevin Horek: Very cool. You said earlier that you don't really find, or you learn by trial and error, not really reading, how did you learn about kind of the blockchain and what you needed to know to actually found a Casper labs?
Medha Parlikar: This is one of the epiphany's that I had in this journey. I think, founding Casper labs and the time spent between, 2017 and now I've had a lot of Epiphanes on this journey. One of the epiphany was that I learned by doing sure. In that role, when I kinda got into the blockchain space, I was assigned the responsibility of the program manager for the project and which is more than a project manager. It was to work with the engineers to, specify the releases I had to do more than just manage the project. I actually had to determine how the project evolved. To take the project from an idea or a NASA idea and get it to a full fledged running, and the team was counting on me to define how this project went from just an idea to really functioning, right? What are the order in which you build software?
Medha Parlikar: It was up to me to work with the engineers, to specify everything that needed to be built. It took about, I ran the project for about 14 months. During that time, it was really difficult for me to, kind of connect the dots on how this thing worked, what it was, what are the things that needed to do? How did the components interact, even though I was specifying the releases and ensuring that everything was hit in terms of a given milestone, I didn't feel like I could really explain to an, a 15 year old or a 14 year old, a 13 year old, what a blockchain was. To me, if the way you demonstrate real competency in a subject is your ability to explain it to somebody that doesn't understand it at all. Sure. In evaluating my own depth of understanding, it was, I was, it was very clear to me that I didn't understand it fully.
Medha Parlikar: And those were long days. I was working 12 to 14 hour days for the entire duration because I was struggling mightily with my own comprehension. In fact, one of the principals in the project felt that I wasn't quote unquote smart enough to do this job, right. Because yeah, because he, it was, I think that they saw that I didn't really deeply understand the subject matter, but so the interesting thing was when the software got to a point where it was actually a working piece of software and everything came together at that point all, and I was able to actually run the software on my computer. That is when all the building blocks just kind of CA everything just came together for me. It was at that moment when I started actually working with the software, using the software testing, the software hands-on that I had the epiphany that I learned by doing.
Medha Parlikar: It was at that moment in time that all of my understanding, all the year of work that I had put in to that point, everything just came together and it all, the, all the puzzle pieces just clicked into place. From that point on, I completely understood what blockchain was, how it works. My understanding since then has only deepened through building the Casper network, right. And the understanding of consensus protocols. For me, that was the epiphany is that I learned by doing it also explains when I look back all the years that I was in quality control, because quality control really focuses on working software, right? So it focuses on working software. It's you interact with the software to test it. It's not an ephemeral piece of code where you have to imagine how it fits into the broader system. I suspect this is why a lot of people really don't understand blockchain technologies, because you have to understand it by just reading it.
Medha Parlikar: I think a lot of people by doing, and in most people's everyday interactions with blockchain, it's do you really understand how visa is processing your credit card transaction? You don't, you just trust that it works, right? The same thing will happen with blockchain, but I think people want to really understand it. It's hard to understand if you don't get to work with the software itself.
Kevin Horek: Sure. Okay. This is kind of going to be the counterintuitive question, but how do you explain the blockchain to people? How does that apply to Casper labs and letting people actually use what you guys are building in enterprise? Okay.
Medha Parlikar: Yeah. The way I would sum up blockchain is if you think of the internet protocol as an information protocol, you can think of the blockchain as a trust protocol, any information that passes through the blockchain can now be trusted, right? If you want to take, like, what is the tagline of blockchain technology? It's a trust protocol, blockchain also isn't cryptocurrency, right? You can have blockchain without cryptocurrency, but you can't have cryptocurrency without blockchain. The reason for that is you can't trust anything in the cryptocurrency without the blockchain trust layer. Right? Right now, would we transact with the bank or transact with the government? We inherently trust the bank. We inherently supposedly trust the government, right? We trust the government to issue the money. We trust the bank to keep track of our account balances, right. That translates to the blockchain and that you trust the blockchain.
Medha Parlikar: The blockchain is really a trust protocol going into the details of the blockchain. It's a group of servers that all agree on a set of transactions, right? They agree on the set of transactions through this mathematical mechanism called a consensus protocol that solves a very specific computer science or computer engineering problem known as the Byzantine General's problem. That's a little technical, but you can Google it if you're really interested in understanding underneath how it works, but basically it's a fault tolerant fault resistant protocol. What makes it so trustworthy is that you don't know who's participating in the protocol, right? Imagine you have a bunch of random people and they all agree to communicate through some protocol that is guaranteed, that all the messages that are transmitted are the same. They all agree that yes, this thing happened. Right. Because, you know, you don't trust them.
Medha Parlikar: That there's no cabals for me. Right, right. Nobody's colluding. That's really the, like the high value, like the value proposition of the blockchain is that, you can't like the bank can arbitrarily change something. If they decide to change something or Facebook can arbitrarily change something. If they decide to change something and the blockchain doesn't work that way. Right. It's, it's much more immutable. It can't things can't be changed on it. You can get some trust guarantees from that.
Kevin Horek: Right? No, that makes a lot of sense. How does a company leverage the cat Casper labs technology to actually do development and build this layer of trust into what they're doing?
Medha Parlikar: Yeah. Imagine if you have a business process that somehow is streamlined, it becomes streamlined. If now suddenly you can trust the data. There's some very good real world examples for that. Right? So a great example is intellectual property. The buying and selling of intellectual property is a very hard thing to do. The reason for that is it's really hard to determine who owns a piece of intellectual property. If you could register that, let's say every time a patent is approved from the patent office and the patent office then says, well, so-and-so filed this patent and we're registering the owner of the patent as X on the blockchain. Now you can trust that person owns the patent. If that person chooses to sell the patent to somebody else. Okay, great. They sell the patent, they can transfer that ownership of the patent to another person. Now that transfer of ownership is registered in the blockchain.
Medha Parlikar: Now you can get some guarantees around, Hey, if I want to buy that patent, this is the owner. This is who I should contact, right? It's possible to now buy and sell intellectual property because patents are registered on the Casper blockchain. It wasn't very easy to do that before. Now once you have a list of owners and a list of items, you can create a marketplace right before there was no marketplace. There was no marketplace to buy intellectual, buy and sell intellectual property. Now you can build a marketplace around this because now, who owns it and what they own. There's a way for them to transfer ownership, right? After some commercial terms to this marketplace. Similarly, if you can imagine, something as simple as clinical trial data, while there's a lot of HIPAA regulations around publicly sharing clinical trial data, there's also challenges with even trusting that clinical trial data hasn't been tampered with.
Medha Parlikar: We all see stories about, oh, so-and-so tampered with the clinical trial data because the drug was worth billions of dollars, right? How can you trust the clinical trial data? Because there's huge incentives, right? To push a drug out to market. There may not be trust around the data, but if you could record the clinical trial data to a blockchain, you can then get some guarantees that the data hasn't been tampered with, no single person is able to modify that clinical trial data. You can get some proofs around, how safe the drug is. You can also, shorten the amount of time it takes to audit those clinical, that clinical trial data. Because right now the audit period is actually double of the collection period, because the audits need to go through, multiple layers of security and multiple different reviews to again, ensure because it is life's lives.
Medha Parlikar: We're talking about here by it. The safety of drugs is really critical, but what if you could shorten that, get greater guarantees, get more transparency and bring better drugs to market faster. How great would that be? Right. It would be amazing. Right? These are some of the applications you can use blockchain technology for and note, none of these have anything to do with cryptocurrency, right? These right. You're a blockchain technology we're talking about here is nothing to do with crypto. I think blockchain really presents phenomenal opportunities for society as a whole. Companies can definitely take advantage of it if they want to learn how to streamline information firewall off information. Right? Let's say for example, with you're working in a financial institution and I have to provide all this data to a financial institution, right. How many times do we hear about data breaches, right.
Medha Parlikar: Where my personal information is. Right. The reason for that is these organizations sometimes have to share this data with their internal departments for approving you for additional products, or they might have to do some kind of reporting. Right. From an internal security perspective, these financial organizations don't even like to have your personally identifiable information available. Right. Right. What if you could just, fire wallet away with a information technology provider that encrypts your data and just gives them a token and says, I certify, right. Like a notarized token, I certify that this person has passed this level of KYC. I certify that this is their credit score. There's no need for you to do an additional inquiry. You can trust this token.
Kevin Horek: Right. Interesting. Fascinating. Really?
Medha Parlikar: Yeah. Now your information is securely encrypted and it's firewalled off. Then, financial service providers can get some guarantees around that. You are in fact, a real person, right. That you have this credit score that you own a house. They don't need to know where your house is. They don't need to know, who you're employed with. They just need to know that you're gainfully employed and you've been employed for three years and right. It's, it's a fortune 500 company. That's all that they need to know. Right. They don't need to know any of the other details. This, again, these are some of the other really cool applications of blockchain technology that I expect are being kind to be adopted by companies.
Kevin Horek: Just so me and the listener can fully understand is you can verify, I am who I say I am or have done the things I say I have done without basically giving up super personal identifiable information. Because to your point, you say like, Kevin lives here, he's worked at this huge national company for three years. You can approve him, but you don't need to say like which company, what my actual address is, or potentially even my name. Is that correct?
Medha Parlikar: Yeah. I mean, exactly right. That's exactly right. Like, for example, all you to know is that I'm authorized to work in the United States. You don't need to actually have my social security number. Right. All you need to know is that I make, if your threshold is ID to earn a hundred thousand dollars a year, either I'm above that, or I'm below that you don't need to know exactly what my compensation is. You just need to, and almost all of these kinds of decisions are really binary, right? They're like, okay, easy above or below this. Right. He, is he a us citizen or is he not, is he, does he have a record or does he not like these are all very binary decisions with, and there's no need to expose that level of information or that level of detail and open yourself to that risk.
Medha Parlikar: The blockchain can absolutely provide those kinds of answers.
Kevin Horek: That's what I think is so fascinating about what you guys are doing. Block chain technology allows is it almost allows for, cause not everybody wants their PR all their personal information with certain companies, some don't. Like, I would even say with like social media sites, like some people are fine giving more information to one company over another. Right. It's nice to be able to have that kind of give as much as you want or kind of be more anonymous depending on your comfort level and what they really need from you, because you're right. If it's like does kind of make over a hundred grand yes or no, you just need to check one box. Right. You don't need to know the actual number.
Medha Parlikar: That's exactly right. That's exactly right.
Kevin Horek: Very cool. As a developer, how hard is it to actually get up or, and get started doing development, integrating with the technology that you guys have built the Casper labs.
Medha Parlikar: We pride ourselves in bringing Cass, bringing blockchain actually to enterprise. A lot of the blockchain projects out there require you kind of throw out everything you've learned before and started you with the blockchain quote unquote ecosystem. They call it like the blockchain ecosystem, theory of ecosystem or so the Casper quote unquote ecosystem is more like the traditional development ecosystem. So we bring Casper to it, right? We bring blockchain to the traditional technology ecosystem, right. Versus, having to, cross over into the blockchain space, right. A lot of these blockchain protocols out there use custom programming languages. They have custom tool sets. They're using these weird interpreters, right? There's this long, complicated way to build. You have to run a full blockchain node in order to write or run contracts or even a light client in order to write a write contracts. Right? Developers that are used to working in a certain way are not able to do that when you work with most of the projects out there.
Medha Parlikar: Casper protocol and Casper labs specifically as we built our technology stack in a manner that it's very familiar, right? The way it works is very familiar from an enterprise application development perspective. We believe that the overwhelming majority of developers have never been exposed to blockchain. Right. Our belief is to make that as easy a transition as possible. It's pretty easy if CC plus you can get started in about three to four weeks. There's a lots of open source repositories for people to get involved with Casper, a lot of example, code and tutorials and education. It is the number one job, right? Blockchain is a very big, hot phrase right now if you're in technology and you're looking for the next big thing, right. Dive in, and it's pretty easy to get hands on. Right. You can get hands on very simply.
Kevin Horek: Well, and it's interesting that you say like up and running kind of in three to four weeks, that's a very short period of time to basically move into an up and coming industry. If it's not already there, right. Like it's a mainstream industry. I just think there's a shortage of people in it. If you can be basically up and running in a, a month timeframe and be valuable to enterprise, that's a pretty good transition or career transition. Right.
Medha Parlikar: Definitely. I mean, I think blockchain technology is here to stay. I don't think anybody questions that or doubts that now, I think we all agree. It's going to be here to stay. Enterprises are really looking at how to use this. I think there's going to be a blockchain team in every single company. Right? Like any company that has runs their own infrastructure and their own technology, you're going to have somebody that's on a blockchain team. Right. There's no question about it.
Kevin Horek: Sure. Well, even if you're not hosting like externally too, right. Is that fair to say?
Medha Parlikar: Oh yeah, absolutely. Like I think any department that has their own it team, it group is going to have a blockchain group in that it group. Right. There's an it group in your company. There's going to be a blockchain group in there. Right. Or if you're a software company. Absolutely. Right. You'll have an entire blockchain division if you ha, if you're working for SAS software provider today and majority of software today is SAS, right. There's no shrink wrap software anymore. Everything is client service, SAS software. So definitely a hundred percent. There's going to be a way you will be interacting with blockchain technology for sure.
Kevin Horek: Sure. No, that makes a lot of sense. I'm curious is there, because you've been obviously doing the remote thing for a long time now, and I think a lot of companies, especially bigger companies seem to be struggling a bit with it, or they're going to implement some hybrid model. Do you have any advice or things that you've seen work when you've done on this remote stuff and manage teams and push code? Because that can be one of the challenging things. It's not really that hard to get people to write code it's really to get people to write good tested code. That's not going to break things, especially at an enterprise.
Medha Parlikar: Yeah. A hundred percent. So yes. So it's a challenge having teams work. The Casper protocol, the Casper labs team is a hundred percent remote. We have over 40 engineers now working from all over the world, I've managed, partially remote teams up to 75 individuals. What I can tell you is there's a couple of things you want to ensure that people can do one, as you need your leaders to set a very clear vision and target. That probably needs to be no longer than three months maximum. Okay. So tight targets is really important. Number two, using some form of a Wiki or, asynchronous, I call it asynchronous communication, right? So where people can collaborate. Even Google docs is a great way to do remote collaboration. Writing, having a culture of documentation is massively important. Most enterprises run into a problem where you have a lot of tribal knowledge and the tribal knowledge gets so bad where there's one dude that knows how the whole system works.
Medha Parlikar: Right. What you really need to do is move away from the culture of verbal communication, to a culture of written communication. And, and, you can use collaboration tools like slack, right? Everybody's heard of slack for business or discord. These are, instant messaging that kind of takes place at the shoulder tap, right? The in-person shoulder tap where you walk up somebody's tablet, shoulder, in a remote distributed team, you're sending a slack message. Even that, you kind of run into a danger where you've got a whole bunch of your tribal knowledge locked up in slack, right? Investing in giving your engineers both the, stressing the importance of writing down and specifying what it is they're building and why it's important is hugely is a big focus item, making sure the code is well-documented with comments. People can work reasonably independently, three having a continuous integration pipeline and a focus on testing is massively important, right?
Medha Parlikar: That is something that's kind of table stakes. It's, it's almost always the number one thing I would do when I come in as a, a head of quality control or quality assurance is that you need to set up continuous integration and you need to do configuration management with your pipeline. This is a very technical term, but basically it's an assembly line for software. You need to make sure you have an assembly line for your software, right? The last thing is provide space for the team to get together, right? The Casper labs team does do offsites. We haven't been able to because of COVID and the team really missed that, but we did horse trade instead of spending money on, an office building or office space, we would spend it on off sites, right where the team would get together and do planning and have an opportunity to get to know each other.
Medha Parlikar: You can have small localized offsites instead of a big bang off site, depending on the size of your team and empower and encourage your leaders, an opportunity for the teams to get together, right? These are like the really big things. It goes more into culture where you knew, people you want to hire people that are, that have a strong desire to be there. They're intrinsically motivated, right. They really love, kind of shaping their own future and working on things. They have a strong desire, right. To work autonomously. That's something that we do look for a Casper, right. And a lot of pair programming, right. You can buddy up and have, working sessions together over zoom call. Right? Zoom has been zoom or Google Hangouts, which is what we're using today are really great, for collabing,
Kevin Horek: Interesting that you mentioned paired programming. I do it all the time and I find it actually really useful. What do you say to the people that think it's just, you're basically paying two people to do one person's job or some variation of that. Like, like obviously it's working for you agree with it, but I've heard quite a bit of pushback in my career from different types of people, especially in some of the bigger companies. What do you say to them or the naysayers of that?
Medha Parlikar: What I say to them is you never want to have a bus factor of one with your code, right? You always want to have at least two or three people understanding how the code works, right.
Kevin Horek: To your earlier point, right? Like don't have one person that knows everything.
Medha Parlikar: That's exactly right. Right. You do pair programming, it offers a couple of opportunities. One, you can compare a junior program with a senior programmer and you're ramping up that junior programmer onto what the senior program he does. He's learning his, he's learning about his coding style. He's learning about, he's learning about the system, right? They're talking through the code and the implementation together, particularly if they're solving a tricky problem, these are not eight hour sessions. Usually they're two to three hour sessions where the senior programmer can say, okay, you need to update this, this here, and write the work through it together. You also want to have a strong culture of code reviews, right? Every pull request in Casper is code reviewed by at least two people. You do pair programming, it also shortens the code review process because they've already set expectations about what the code looks like.
Medha Parlikar: It also provides immediate feedback, right? You're providing immediate feedback to that junior engineer. It's very rare now at Casper that you have two senior engineers doing a pair programming session, unless they're working through a really difficult problem, in which case they may get, you may see two senior engineers or two principals on a single pair programming session. I think, from a cross training perspective, it's great from a morale perspective. It's great. It gives immediate feedback. When you look at code reviews, coupled with pair programming. Honestly, like if you think about the cost of a bug, right? Deep code reviews and solid pair programming is the best way to prevent bugs, right? It is the number and bugs are expensive, right? Blogs can be very encrypto sometimes bugs are like hundreds of millions of dollars. If you think about what happened recently in crypto, right? Bugs are expensive and preventing bugs outweighs this idea that, you'll just want one developer working on a problem.
Kevin Horek: Well, and I think, and you could tell me if you disagree with this, but I also think your training, your people a lot faster, and no matter where you are skill level or in your career, you can always learn something from somebody that's more junior than you and from somebody that's more senior than you do. Do you agree with that?
Medha Parlikar: I think there's, yes. I mean, people like Casper labs is I believe that they should feel like 80% successful in their job. Right. You should always feel about 80% successful. Right. Because then, you're growing and sometimes the growth is soft. Sometimes the growth is hard technical skills, but yeah, like when you are mentoring someone junior and your senior guy, and they just don't understand what you're saying, that's a soft skill, right? The senior guy, I think, is learning soft skills. The junior guy, I think, is learning hard skills. It's pretty rare that the junior guys going to teach a senior guy any hard skills, but he is definitely teaching him soft skills because he's learning how to mentor and train. I find a lot of times working in technology, we often have technical managers that are either very strong technically, or they're very strong management, finding someone that is both technically that has both the hard skills and the soft skills is very challenging.
Medha Parlikar: Right. So, at Casper, what we're doing, Casper labs we're doing is we are taking our folks with the hard skills and we're training them on the soft skills. Right. We can kind of, express that leadership skill and our way of thinking and our way of doing things all the way down through the ranks.
Kevin Horek: No, I think that's really good advice, but I'm curious, is there anything that you've learned kind of in your personal life outside of your day-to-day business life that you've actually been able to apply back into Casper labs and other companies you've worked at?
Medha Parlikar: Oh my gosh, there's so many things I don't even know where to begin. So there's several podcasts. I love the Tim Ferriss show. Like that's a great podcast in terms of, personal hacks and productivity I've recently started using, the full focus planner from Michael Hyatt. He's a, he's a fantastic entrepreneur. I like to read a lot of books around, I like to learn a lot from other entrepreneurs, right. I like to listen to podcasts that teach a lot, talk a lot about leadership, right. And some of the skills around leadership. I can always be trying to learn, try a lot to do reading. I try to, spend a good amount of time on reading and networking. I think I'm not a particularly strong networker. In my role, I need to, meet a lot of people and get to know a lot of people. This is something, this is an area where I'm working on quite a bit and reading a lot of books around, how to persuade people, right.
Medha Parlikar: How to convince people. This is going to be a big thing for Casper as we work into, the larger decentralized community as how I can help encourage them to understand what are the things that are important for the protocol and get buy-in. So, those are a lot of the areas where I'm personally working, spending a lot of time trying to grow into these big shoes. I got big shoes to fill.
Kevin Horek: Nope. Fair enough. I'm curious, obviously, your C-suite and you're busy. How do you actually find time to listen to podcasts and read books and, even just enjoy some of that personal time and make time for these things.
Medha Parlikar: I just, you have to just prioritize it. It really comes down to just making it a priority. There are days, and you have to kind of check in with yourself and really see what it is you need at a given point in time. I feel like not every single day is balanced, but if I find that the entire week is balanced, I, I consider it a win. There are some days where I focus a lot on work. I'm at where I'm working a really long day. There's other days where I'm focusing a lot on the family or focusing a lot on friends or I'm focusing a lot on my planning. Right. I feel like any, I don't think that every single day is perfectly balanced. Right? I do. I do try to read before I go to bed. Otherwise I just can't turn my brain off.
Medha Parlikar: Right. There needs to be something fairly, benign that I read before I go to sleep. Otherwise, if I get too, if I'm too mentally stimulated, then it's very hard for me. It's hard for me to shut my brain off. And I prioritize sleep. Sleep is extremely important to me. If I was to tell people like, if you want to be your very best what's, what are the two big things, two big leavers you need to turn is what you eat and how much you sleep. So I'm extremely conscientious about that.
Kevin Horek: No, I, I think that's really good advice, but we're kind of coming to the end of the show. How about we close with mentioning where people can get more information about yourself, Casper labs, and anything else you want to mention?
Medha Parlikar: Sure. Casper labs.io is our company website. Casper.network is all about the public network. If you want to get to know me more, you're welcome to follow me on Twitter. I'm at M Parla car. I have my moments on Twitter, so it's always fun to interact with folks on Twitter. So yeah, follow me there.
Kevin Horek: Perfect Metta. I really appreciate you again, taking the time to be on the show and I look forward to keeping in touch with you and have a good rest of your day.
Medha Parlikar: Thanks. Same to you, Kevin. Thank you.
Kevin Horek: Okay. Bye. Well, John and Greg, what did you guys think of that?
Jon Larson: Oh, it was really interesting. I was interested in her inner journey from when she first started in the tech industry and how she got into being a developer. I was really interested in her present company and how they're applying blockchain for both her examples where I know your customer applications. Also with clinical trials, that was really interesting. It made me start to think of like how blockchain can be applied in other ways.
Gregg Oldring: Yeah, that was super cool. I I'm really excited to see what happens for her company cause those ideas around application of blockchain. Super cool. And she's fantastic. Also, I just have to say that just seems really like awesome. One of the things I took away was actually the, she said how she took ownership of her own learning. And I loved that. I thought that was so cool. That's something that I take away from her and something I'd want to kind of pass on to my kids to, just take ownership of your own learning as you go. That's brilliant. Yeah.
Kevin Horek: For me, I'm kind of the same way with like learning is I'm more of like a trial and error type. Sometimes like everybody forces you to do certain things and it's like, well, I really like trial and error when she talked about how, and she didn't really understand the blockchain until she actually started using and testing the product. I think I'm like that sometimes too. It's like, I don't really fully understand something until I actually can like play with it. Yeah. So I thought it was cool.
Gregg Oldring: Brilliant.
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