Hiring top-tier talent, the importance of adopting an evolutionary mindset, and taking critical feedback to solve technical problems w/ Sergiy Nesterenko #265

**Jerry Li** (0:00)
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**Sergiy Nesterenko** (0:34)
When you're selling to an enterprise, right, we're talking like the big, big enterprises, you're not selling to a person, you're selling to an organization, and there's a big difference there. There are many people involved in that procurement decision. You have your champion, who is the direct person who believes in your product, they may or may not be the user, right? They may be different from the person who's actually going to drive your product and deal with it day to day, but they're almost certainly gonna be different from the person who signs off on the budget and gives the approval, certainly different from the person who detracts and says that we shouldn't pursue this company's priority. You have to solve for all of them. Would the CEO care about your product? If not, would the SVP underneath them care? If not, does the VP care? If not, does the director care? And unfortunately, the lower down you go, the less you have the ability to get somebody with real power to step in and push it through. So how do you arm all of those people with evidence so that when people come and say, hey, this isn't going to work, you have educated your champions with the answers to those questions?

**Patrick Gallagher** (1:35)
Hello and welcome to The Engineering Leadership Podcast brought to you by ELC, the engineering leadership community.

**Jerry Li** (1:42)
I'm Jerry Li, founder of ELC.

**Patrick Gallagher** (1:44)
And I'm Patrick Gallagher and we're your hosts. Our show shares the most critical perspectives, habits and examples of great software engineering leaders to help evolve leadership in the tech industry.

**Jerry Li** (1:56)
Hey, Sergiy. Thanks so much for joining our show today and been looking forward to this conversation with you.

**Sergiy Nesterenko** (2:01)
Yeah, likewise. Thanks for having me, Jerry.

**Jerry Li** (2:03)
We had a conversation earlier to kind of talk about your story and the insights you learned as an entrepreneur. So there's so many different things I think can be really inspiring to a lot of engineering leaders and leaders in general think about starting their own company. Can you give us an introduction about who you are, what the company you're building and how do you get into it?

**Sergiy Nesterenko** (2:21)
Yeah.
So my name is Sergiy Nesterenko. I run a company called Quilter. At Quilter, we focus on circuit board design. So we focus on creating these green things that stitch together a whole bunch of chips to perform all sorts of electrical functions. Necessary obviously for cell phones, rockets, cars, just about everything nowadays. Got into it actually out of my previous job at SpaceX where I was in the avionics department focusing on designing electronics obviously, and just felt some of the pains of electronics designed there, and that kind of inspired me to start this company here.

**Jerry Li** (2:48)
What's the inspiration come from?

**Sergiy Nesterenko** (2:49)
It's probably a story common to a lot of founders is, I'm effectively my own customer when it comes to this product. When you design a rocket, obviously you might imagine there's hundreds or maybe even more than a thousand circuit boards throughout the rocket, but that's only a part of the story. For every circuit board that you design that you fly, you design many circuit boards to test which are going to fly. So you end up with quite a few people designing quite a lot of circuit boards for all sorts of purposes, and one of the pains we ran into is that it's very manual, very slow process. So SpaceX is obviously very famous for kind of having high pressure on speed. Critical path and speed matters quite a bit. And all of a sudden, when you have to take two weeks, three weeks, four weeks to kind of sit there and manually draw every detail of something like this, you start to ask why, you know, why isn't a computer doing this? Why is it taking me so long? Why can't I paralyze it? How can I make this go faster? And unfortunately, at the time, there is no kind of good answers to that. For my time at SpaceX, we kind of just took it for granted, right? That's what it is. Everybody in the industry draws these manually. That's just a part of the status quo. But already the problem was felt. And for me, kind of the second piece that kind of caused me to go after this is the realization that maybe the technology has matured enough that we could tackle these problems. So kind of identification of a problem that is technical in nature and then identification of technologies that might unlock that technical problem. And so those two come together to potentially make a good company.