Ignite Startups: The AI-Powered PR Platform Built for Startups with Misha Makara | Ep283

**Misha Makara** (0:00)
At what point is a failure a failure?
How do you set your own personal limits? How far are you willing to go with something before you say, all right, we've tried that enough? And one of the things that I do when managing Agile teams, I love the idea of a senior developer coming, or any developer saying, I'd like to go try this. But then me responding back saying, all right, you really only have Wednesday afternoon to go do this. If you can do it and it meets these requirements, then we will continue and I'll give you Thursday, Friday, like whatever to continue. Or if it doesn't, hey, we tried it, we're going to put our lessons learned on the shelf and we might come back to that. Or I didn't get to finish the experiment because of these things, let's extend it. So the lesson learned would be, make sure you have limits on your experiments, don't just keep going forever and ever, otherwise that's how you end up working yourself.

**Brian Bell** (1:11)
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Ignite Podcast. Today, we're delighted to have Misha Makara on the program. He's a co-founder and CTO of Rally AI. Before Rally, he spent 15-plus years as a venture firm. They would call him when a startup is on fire, technically, and he spent over five years at T0's SEC-regulated digital securities platform. Pretty exciting. And now he's working on Rally, which is a system that uses AI to accelerate PR. So we're really excited to have you guys on the program. Thanks, Misha.

**Misha Makara** (1:39)
Yeah, it's my pleasure.

**Brian Bell** (1:40)
I'd love to start with your origin story. What's your background?

**Misha Makara** (1:43)
Sure. So I studied cyber security, and one of my first bosses, I went to the Rochester Institute of Technology. My first boss was Brad Paxton, who's the guy that was in charge of the team at Kodak that created the digital camera. So fascinating guy to have as your first boss, first mentor. I remember him pulling me into his office and going, oh, Misha, this thing just got declassified. We can talk about the cameras that we were using in Apollo and all this. It was great.
I was working for him as a sysadmin doing work on truly large scale systems. We were working on data capture systems for the census.
He saw me and one of my friends as I was in the undergraduate program and said, you should really consider starting a business. I had really never thought of myself as a business person. I'm an engineer. He said, no, these are the same things. One of the most interesting things that he taught me was, you have this one mindset of a CEO being the Elon Musk, the Steve Jobs, but a CEO can also be an engineer and look at the business through the lens of experimental design. And that's one of the things I really like to get into with you today about how do you both set an engineering culture and how do you design and iterate through product ideation? But anyhow-

**Brian Bell** (2:56)
I love the Kodak story, right? Because they had the digital camera, right? And the executives, this is famous in business schools, right? Like I have a business degree, undergrads, and the opposite, like I'm not an engineer, you know, business degree and MBA. And like that Kodak case is like told over and over again in schools, you know, they literally had the digital camera and they just like shelved it because it would eat their revenue, right? Yeah. They were afraid to cannibalize their own cash cow.

**Misha Makara** (3:21)
Exactly. And Brad was the person that was literally told, you hide that in a desk drawer where no one will find it. And it's weird to think in another universe, Kodak could have been the Google of our time. One of the things that I know if you can see it, he gave me on the way out when I finally finished the story. But yeah, he encouraged me to start a business, a web application development company, and I ended up selling it. But he used to have right back there, that's the page from Alice in Wonderland, where Alice comes to the fork in the road and meets the Cheshire cat. And Alice says, hey, which road should I go down? And the Cheshire cat says, well, where are you trying to get to? And she says, I don't care so much. Then it doesn't really matter what road you go down. And she said, I always keep that up there because it's okay to do pure research and it's okay to do applied research. But again, as a facilitator, you have to define and set your limits about how much are you willing to experiment. And it's also okay to tell your people, we're going to try this, but here's the sandbox that we're going to play in. And if we will either get this result, in which case we'll go in this direction or this other result in this other direction, or we'll get no result and we're going to have to go retry the experiment.