Ep. 22: The power of a technical insight with Ashmeet Sidana

In today's episode, Asim sits down with Ashmeet Sidana, the Founder and Chief Engineer at Engineering Capital. His experience includes managing venture capital funds, serving on multiple Boards of Directors, and helping build industry-leading products such as VMware ESX Server and WebFORCE. Before becoming a venture capitalist, Ashmeet was an executive with hands-on operating experience as a CEO and Entrepreneur. They discuss the incredible power of technical insights in engineering and how business opportunities form the core of engineering excellence.

[00:00] Introduction

[01:35] Ashmeet's Journey to Engineering

[02:57] What are Technical Insights in Engineering?

[05:38] You Don't Need a Ph.D. to Come up with Technical Insights

[08:01] Things That Make vFunction a Unique Cloud Modernization Platform

[12:20] How the Most Interesting Companies Come About

[16:20] Why Engineers Should Interact with Customers From Day One

[18:02] Business Insights Versus Technical Insights

[21:10] People Operate in These Two Basic Modes

[24:27] How to Assemble and Build Your First Founding Team

[28:10] The Best Way to Build a Successful Engineering Company

[29:54] Parting Thoughts

What are Technical Insights and Why are They Important?

A technical insight is an idea that if you tell a good engineer what you are doing, they wouldn't know how to do it. In other words, there is something unique about how you solve problems. If it's a very large technical insight, people will surely be surprised. For example, when Google started, there existed hundreds of search engines worldwide. But what made Google unique was its algorithm's ability to rank web pages. Revolutionary companies are created when people think about existing problems that could be solved better with technology. This is only possible when engineers work backward from a problem before coming up with a solution.

However, it's not enough just to have technical insights. You have to spend enough time thinking about business problems that can be solved with technical insights. Only then can you start thinking about starting a company. And if you can find a big enough, interesting enough business problem, you can build a massive company.

Links and Resources:

Ashmeet's LinkedIn

Engineeringcapital.com

Follow Ashmeet on Twitter