The 2 Things You Ask Your Team When You Pass $1B w/ Hippo’s VP of Engineering

**Mike Gordon** (0:00)
So, lately, now that I've had more ways to track what we're doing, I've become interested in seeing where is our investment. We think we're investing in one way, and we may be investing our time a different way, and so it's helping me understand that. And that's really, if you think about, the first level of managing this is just when is a project gonna get done, and can I actually predict that?
Once you're kind of past that, you go into, well, where are we investing? And where should we be investing? And how are we spending our time?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:31)
Have you ever wondered how your dev team ranks in terms of productivity, speed, and business impact? With LinearB's new engineering benchmarks report, you can find out.
The product of comprehensively analyzing the work of almost 2000 dev teams at close to 1 million branches, the 2022 engineering benchmarks report is the first ever look at what performance metrics make engineering orgs elite, average, or underperforming. Best of all, if you want your dev team's number to go from average to elite on any of the benchmarks, the report also provides concrete guidance on the behaviors, tools, and processes you need to get there. To explore the report in full, visit linearb.io/benchmarks or click the link in the show notes of this episode.

**Dan Lines** (1:12)
Hey, what's up, everyone? Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Dan Lines, and today I'm joined by Mike Gordon, VP of Engineering at Hippo Insurance.
Now, for those of you who don't know, Hippo reached unicorn status in 2020 and has really established itself as an innovator within the insurance industry.
But personally, I know Mike because he is a customer of LinearB and a really smart dude and someone I just enjoy speaking with. So Mike, thanks so much for joining today.

**Mike Gordon** (1:43)
Yeah, thanks, Dan. It's great to join you.

**Dan Lines** (1:46)
Awesome to have you on the show. We're gonna dive into all the great things that you're doing at Hippo, what you're doing with your engineering team, why it's so successful, things like that. But first off, I want to give our audience a chance to know you a little bit better.
You graduated from West Point and spent about five years or so in the US Army. How did you find your way to becoming a VP of engineering at this unicorn startup? What was your career path like?

**Mike Gordon** (2:19)
Yeah, so it was very gradual.
After the Army, I left and worked for Northrop Grumman in Los Angeles. I was at Northrop for a few years, working on things that were pretty close to what I was doing in the Army with networking and communications. And then I jumped over actually to Cedar Sinai and led the web application development team that built most of the internal business applications and then managed the internal and external websites for Cedars. So I kinda jumped from environment to environment gradually and then after Cedars, Google came calling, moved up to Northern California to work for Google and was there for almost nine years.
And then went to look for something different and Hippo was here as a unicorn, not too far away and had a lot of interesting problems to solve and an engineering team to build. So I came to Hippo. So I kinda went step by step along the way for a few years at every step, going all the way from the culture in the Army, that's very regimented, through Google, that's very not, and then finally ended up at a startup.

**Dan Lines** (3:26)
Yeah, that's kinda quite the differences from military type, I assume, military type behaviors at Google, which is a little probably more open. What did you learn? You were at Google like eight, nine years just saying, what did you learn from your time at Google before you joined Hippo?

**Mike Gordon** (3:45)
Yeah, one of the things I learned from Google was really, how is the best way to engineer something? And Google really had hundreds and thousands of engineers working thousands of hours to build systems that showed, well, what does a world-class distributed system look like? And what does resilience look like? And if you were to do deployments a certain way, what do the experts do?
And so I learned a lot there. I learned a lot about distributed systems and scale and how to manage a release process and how to deploy in an incremental fashion. And how to deal with worldwide availability.
So there were a lot of different lessons I learned at Google. And I was working both on the front end and the back end, all the way from a capacity of writing code to managing teams that ended up growing pretty large. And so got a lot of different experience at the company.