Samuel Cook & Richard Lucas
Paul Klipp: Making Poland the Place to Go for Talent
Summary Born in the USA, Paul has been in Kraków for over a decade, and was instrumental in the explosion of Ruby on Rails popularity here, the improvement of management systems with Agile methodology and Kanbanery, as well as helping to get Kraków on the map as the perfect place to come for talent. From Paul’s point of view, the advantages of Poland and the companies operating here is abundantly clear.
Mentions & Links LunarLogic Kanbanery Aperitif ACE Conference TEDx Kraków Estimote
Table of Contents 07:14 Intro 09:00 Paul’s backstory. 11:30 How the job market for coders has changed in Kraków. 12:45 From journalism to prison catering. Active Learning & Giving Back to Your Community 18:23 The uncomfortable truth about learning from books. 23:40 Entrepreneur vs opportunist. 26:15 Paul’s impact on TEDx Kraków. 31:20 TEDx’s impact on Kraków. How to Manage Yourself & Your Team 38:15 The death of Lunar Logic. 44:45 How Paul would find clients early on. 49:40 How Agile management fixes our broken system 54:26 Scrum methodology, and its limits The Future of Our Community 59:25 How Kraków will move forwards. 63:50 Will we see the death of apps? 66:41 Outro
Transcript:
7:14 SAM COOK:
Hello again Project Kazimierz listener, this is Sam Cook here with my co-host
Richard alltogether with our guest Paul Klipp, Richard how are you ?
7:22 RICHARD LUCAS:
Very well, good afternoon everyone if it's afternoon when you're listening
7:26 SAM:
And Paul, Richard I'm gonna let you as tradition since you know most of our guest
better than I do introduce Paul. A little bit of his background before we get into that
here.
7:38 RICHARD:
So I think I've first met Paul in about 2007 or 2008 introduced by Ramon Tancinco
who also spoke on this podcast with on of our early episodes. Back then he was
both an entrepreneur and setting up the IT small business alliance which I've had
some failed earlier who wants to start networking community back in early 2000s. It
was called the First Tuesday and Paul was doing some of this interview working
better than what I was doing and always in my life I've been most succesful when I
worked with people more effective than me. I tried to cope with that so we later
worked together with Paul leading the first ever TEDxKrakow in 2010 and we've
stayed in touch with supporting different projects. We're both busy people so quite
often we tend to work together when doing something as today. But Paul also has
been very succesful entrepreneur with a company called LinoLogic which I'm sure
helped until everyone more during the program.
8:39 SAM:
And also a new project that I've talked to Paul is exciting is software as a service
project Kanbanery and I as an outsider observe and looking at this community I
think where I'd like to start with you Paul is your early journey in Krakow and then
just how did you happen as an American to land here. What have you seen during
the early years and getting started here and how things have changed.
9:19 PAUL KLIPP:
Things are changed rather drasticly in the 10+ years since I've first arrived. I came
to Krakow in 2004 and previously I've been working with a company called
LunarLogic in America which is located Ugine Oregan. A lovely little town in central
Oregan and there was a running joke when I first came that a because the company
was growing so fast that the CEO would ask me to go and set up a branch office in
Portland and I missunderstood.
9:56 SAM:
And that was the joke on you or joke on them ?
9:59 PAUL:
Well, I think the joke's on them, because they were out of business a year later and
I'm still here.
10:06 SAM:
What was the original plan comming to Krakow and tell us how it worked out and
your benefits here.
10:12 PAUL:
The original plan was that the company that I was with was growing very rapidly,
they had very demanding client that was throwing more work that they could handle
and they were in a small town where they couldn't hire as many people as they
needed and in the same time this client was interested in offshore more and more,
because everyone was talking about that back in 2004. And we concieved this plan,
this kind of branch office that was abroad and in that way we could both keep that
work. And tap into a larger labor market and also allow our client to have the
benefits of offshoring without losing any of their business. And so because I had
experience working abroad I had worked in Poland for two years mostly teaching
international business and economics. But also doing marketing for a group of
universities in the States and then I worked in South Africa for a couple of years.
Mostly doing consulting. I was a natural for the job of of going inserting the overseas
branch also might help them with their growth I started with the company when they
were only twenty seven people and help them to grow to over two hundred fifty. So I
was eager to do something different so I came over here and started hiring Java
developers at a time when it was ludicrously easy to hire Java developers in Krakow
because the reason we chose Krakow back then is that Krakow has two major
universities that both have good technical programs. And there were very few
employers in Krakow back in 2004 that were attracting these people so a lot of
people were coming to school to Krakow finding it was a beautiful city graduating
with a tech degree and having to go back home for work when they'd much rather
stay here. And so you could just hang out a sign saying now hiring Java developers
and people would queue up outside your door to give their CV. Which clearly is not
the case today.
12:11 RICHARD:
Clearly not. And also I mean one thing I forgot to mention in the introduction apart
from Kanbanery area which in Kanbanery I understand as a partner for
TEDxKazimierz we're getting the tool for truth for free for a speaker management
program so kudos for Paul for that. But also you did the AC Agile central Europe
conference which I forgot to mention but could you go back a bit further like what's
your what's your background because like and we've still got off we get people like
the personal story didn't start with Eugene Oregon and lunar logic what was your
background did you were an IT guy were you a computer guy ? Where were you
born and where you're from.
12:47 PAUL:
I was not an IT guy I made a terrible mistake one might say although I think it's it's
played out rather nicely in the long run. Of not getting as involved in the computer
revolution back in the days when all of my friends were taking apart their Atari's and
learning how to put them back together again. So I was intensely interested in
journalism when I was young I was the youngest newspaper editor in the history of
the Texas Press Association. I ran my own newspaper while I was still a high school
student. It was a city newspaper for a publishing group. And then I want to do a
degree in journalism and ended up getting dissolution during the process and
switching to anthropology. So I got it undergraduate degrees in anthropology and
english composition and did the only thing that I could with it which was running the
food service operation in a prison.
13:53 RICHARD:
By the way there are three people in this podcast all of whom have slightly strange
sense of humor so if you hear a laughing and you're not laughing you may have to
get used to that to the rest of this podcast.
14:01 PAUL:
Not to discourage anyone from pursuing a degree in anthropology it's been proving
to be immensely useful in many many aspects of my life but getting a first job was
not one of them. My plan has always been since I started anthropology to go into
corporate culture change consulting because that seemed to be a very exciting field
that hadn't emerged yet and so I went back to school for an MBA because I figured
that would give me the credibility I needed to practice. But the last bit of the puzzle
was for an experience I had a degree in anthropology I have a specialization in
international business and I've only ever taken one spring break trip to Mexico in my
life which is the only reason I owned a passport. And so I took a job that my
international human really resources. Professor found for me with a group of a
consortium of universities big ten universities doing marketing for them in Europe
and that's how I ended up finding out that I love travel. But at this point by now the
the IT world was booming, Silicon Valley was being created. The bubble had burst
yet. All of my friends were doing wonderful in the IT and making great money and it
seemed like the place to be. And I didn't have any of the background I needed to
get in there it was just through luck really that after my few years doing consulting in
South Africa I was back in America just after 9/11 which is the worst time in the
world to come back to America after being away for a few years because the
economy was in serious trouble back then obviously and there was a flood of
unemployed MBA's on the market because that was just after Arthur Andersen that
collapsed. And so I got myself a job my job title was chief operating officer of a
marketing agency. My actual daily job duties was mostly making a large balloon
sculptures because this company owned a balloon company that they had bought
and person who ran it had left and so they had tons of balloon sculptures that had to
be made. So that when I was an interesting job and I enjoyed it because I enjoy
every job that I ever do. One of the things that I think is is a very important no matter
what you're doing is to focus not just on what you're doing but more on how you're
doing it I was explaining this to my son just yesterday who hates mathematics. That
one way of dealing with a task that doesn't excite you is to get excited about doing it
as well as you can. And so I was absorbed in this job of becoming America's
premier expert in large balloon construction and even now had folks like Disney
asking me for advice on their own constructions but it was not what I wanted to be
for the rest of my life so I started making it known among my circle of friends that I
was open to other ideas and one of them said you know I'm working with a small
software company in the Oregan. And some of the experiences that you have
you've had coordinating large projects in South Africa make me think that maybe
you could coordinate technology projects as well. And so I kind of jumped into
technology project management with both feet assuming it was like any other kind
of project management. And found a lot of parallels and differences and learned
quickly the best way to learn how to do the job is to do it. The best job you can
possibly have is one from which you are not quite qualified but have some toe in the
doors so you're not totally lost anybody who was over qualified for the job probably
isn't learning. So I took a job for which I wasn't qualified and I think I had to grow
into it quickly. And that's how I ended up on IT and that was a good. That was back
in what 2002, 2003 so at this point I've got people looking at me like I'm a veteran
when in fact. I can very very clearly remember when I had no idea what I was
doing.
18:23 RICHARD: One thing that I've noticed over the years you've been very much
so polymath interested in different areas and now I know a bit more about one of the
nice things about doing these interviews is you get to know things about your friends
that you didn't having spend nine to ten years. I notice very often you're reading a
book that's to do a self improvement again not necessarily according a skill but
some full knowledge. How do you learn because obviously you've been through
formal education but I get the sense you're teaching your your learning a lot through
your own efforts. You're self teaching is that right ?
18:56 PAUL:
Yes alum I I was highly influenced by a talk that one of our speakers gave at the
ACE conference three years ago now.
19:08 RICHARD:
That's Agile Central Europe unless you didn't figure out.
19:11 PAUL:
It used to be agile central Europe I've rebranded is ACE because we started
incorporating more lean and you UX content into it. So it's not strictly an agile
conference anymore. So it's not the ACE conference. I actually planned that from
the start when I called that the agile central Europe to the reason why I like that title
was that if I ever wanted to diversify the content away from purely agile I could do
so without necessarily get changed the domain. But he give a talk it was Marcin
Florian a consultant from Poland working in the UK. Who gave a talk called "no
learning". He talked about a mentor he had. He would frequently go to this this guy
and say I just read this fantastic thing it's so brilliant it's going to change my life. And
his mentor always asking the same question well tell me how you've used it so far.
Oh I haven't done anything with it yet I just read and I'm really excited about. To
which his mentor reply you haven't learned a thing until you've applied it. Untill
you've done something with it incorporated into your life it's just something that
is waiting to be forgotten and so it used to be that I would read a lot to learn and I
realized that to some extent one can fetishize knowledge to the extent that it just
becomes interesting to be interested and so I would often read lots of history. I
love reading history the same way that I like reading fiction but it doesn't make
a real impact on my life and it takes an enormous amount of repetition
before anything sticks. For example I have read easily twenty books about
Republican Roman history and I'm reading another one right now and I'm still being
reminded as I'm reading the one now of things that I have read twenty times
before and forgotten and now I'm learning it all over again. So simply reading books
I find to be absolutely useless. Great for education but useless in terms of learning
from me the only way that I've really learned something new is what I tackle the
problem that has to be solved that I don't know how to solve. And so for example in
when I took over running Kanbanery one of the reasons why I stepped into that role
is that I'm very interested in design ethnography it seems like a fantastic way to
apply my background in ethnographic research and anthropology as well as much
interests in technology but it's something I've absolutely never done before I know
nothing about and so I simply gave myself the job of designer ethnographer. Job
that I was again barely qualified for, but had some background in that could be
useful and I simply got some books on it. But the thing about the books is that every
single time I took ideas from a book I would translate them into to-do items and I
would actually do them. I would apply everything to a problem I had which was in
the early days of taking over Kanbanery really understanding our clients. What their
environment is. What their needs are. In what ways Kanbanery is currently fulfilling
those need and in which ways it's not and I lobbed right into to interviewing users.
Into evaluating and drawing actionable conclusions from large amounts
of qualitative data and the reading helped me tremendously but if I had only
read those things and never done them I would not be able to to say that I had
learned.
23:01 RICHARD:
Learning by doing something that I think all three of us have experienced and
done and certainly that's the message that we can send out loud to anyone who
is listening to learn by doing things. But we're in an age where entrepreneurship is
very fashionable, cool, sexy whatever you like to call it and obviously looking at your
CV you seem very entrepreneurial is it how you selfidentify do you see also yourself
as an entrepreneur or when you've taken a new task, you've taken lunar logic,
you've taken on Kanbanery, you set up a conference, you set up the first TEDx in
Krakow which is maybe more franchise than doing it yourself from scratch but do
you see yourself as an entrepreneur ?
23:45 PAUL:
I'm more of an accidental entrepreneur. I think I see myself more as an opportunist,
a shameless optimist in the sense that I allways see the best in every situation
including ones that other people might perceive as being really bad and I always
make the best of the situation that I'm in by a literally really keeping my options
open for as long as possible. The first company it might go back a little further I was
going to say the first company actually ran I didn't intend to run and that's the lunar
logic in Poland because when I came here to run a branch office I did not expect my
parent company to go out of business and leave me with the option of either quickly
shutting down the company showing on the bridge office or repurposing it as a new
new business but indeed I put myself through university by running a photography
studio doing some freelance writing I have always preferred working for myself to
working for other people. I think in my case personally I have identified that a lot of
this stress that I experienced in my life is not from bad things happening but from
don't have any control over them and so I much rather crash and burn because of
something I did then even succeed at the whim of somebody else in terms of
regulating my stress levels.
25:18 RICHARD:
So if you're thinking as a team player.
25:24 PAUL:
I'm as much team player any coach.
25:28 SAM:
Well you you like to lead the team in but team members sure your organizations are
very collaborative and that's actually one of the things I will get to a little bit is on
agile coaching. Before we go into agile cuz I really love the work that you've done
on this but you know Richard and you've bounced around. The thing I've been
struck by is how TEDxKrakow almost kick-started or really was you know I think
Estimote founders have some history at that conference and you know Ramon
Tancinco and some of the other people. It really seem to bring together a lot of very
talented people in the community. Why did you jump into TEDxKrakow and what do
you what do you think
looking back at the legacy of that and how everything is progressing here ?
26:20 PAUL:
The original idea because Richard wouldn't. I recall being at dinner with Ralf Talmen
and he was encouraging you and me and Ewa Szpun and I think there are a couple
of the people at the table I don't remember and he said you know this is this is going
really well in Warsaw and you really ought to be doing it in Krakow. I can give you
the materials I can give you introductions to the folks at TED I can give you advice
and consulting and coaching and I can help make it successful we just need
somebody to take responsibility somebody put their name on the project and and
say I will be the the coordinator of TEDxKrakow and we all just looked at each other
for a long time and at the moment I didn't have anything big going on and I had
been involved. I was running the the ACE conference which was still called agile
central europe back then and I had organized the Rucko conference. Which was a
roaming Ruby on Rails conference that happens in a different country in Europe
every year and I'd organized the one year before that so I just figured that perhaps
in terms of large-scale event
management I was probably the most qualified at the table and so I I felt kind of
ashamed and raising my hand anyway it it turned out really well Ralph is fantastic
and very very helpful he had done it successfully in Warsaw for a few years at that
point and the community came together wonderfully in Krakow. I met a lot of people
that wouldn't have known otherwise. I remember Richard was very active in the first
TEDxKrakow and the woman who was sent since taking it over was one of the core
team members. Also so much of what I've done has been. I've always believed is
really important to do things that benefit the community because we are all in this
together once you choose the community in which you're going to to build a
business or to build a career or build a brand there are so many interrelated
elements for example when I first arrived in Krakow there was this notion. I talked to
a few people who tried starting initiatives to bring together the tech community
before and the entrepreneural community before there was an ocean which no
longer exists I think in the Polish tech
community but it was very much a carryover from older ideas of how businesses are
supposed to be born in Poland of isolationism enclosed this protecting yourself
looking at all other businesses around you as active or potential competitors which I
saw as dangerous because at the time I was running a service business a business-
to-business service company and that was one of the areas that was just starting to
emerge in Krakow that is since boomed. Krakow is now one of the major exporters
of services in the world certainly one major exporters that services in in Europe and
the most important component of business-to-business services is the perception of
the sector so if for example I'm trying to sell business-to-business services to a
entrepreneur in London who's looking to offshore his development services and he's
got a friend who outsource some work to anywhere in Poland and had a bad
experience that's going to color that person's experience of Poland. The
Poland tech community as a whole and so I thought it very important that we
work together in order to make sure that we're all successful it's very much the
same the same fundamental idea that leads petrol companies to all set up a service
stations at the same intersection that just everyone does better when that becomes
the place to go for petrol and everybody does get better when Poland is the place to
go for talent. So fostering an environment of collaboration proved to be very useful
for myself and for many others purely selfish motives and I think that TEDxKrakow
was just another extension of the same strategy of positioning Krakow as an
exciting, interesting, innovative place where things happen because that's good for
publicity, good for marketing, good for branding good for all of us.
31:19 RICHARD:
Certainly I think I remember that lunch in a restaurant on Sienna I think it's not
called Artefact It's called Aparetive. And I remember this silence when the question
came up who is going to run it and I cannot for the life of me remember why I knew
it couldn't be me but I had some very powerful I think it might have been to do with
the age of my children but you had children so it can't have been. I think I don't
know whether it was familiy I think it was a family and some personal circumstances
that I couldn't think I don't think I have a job. I don't try to remember. But also that
was clearly the case that Paul had more experience but for me the selfish reason
was the idea what Paul tried with the IT Small Business Alliance a tried with the first
tuesday. It wasn't proving that easy to get this community going. It was also kind of
selfish reasons that people who were interested in TED and TEDx would be
interesting people. It was
antagonism. TED even then was a major brand it was a much more powerful than
anything that existed localy. And I felt anyone in town. There are probably lots of
people in town who aren't TED and I don't know who they are, but organising the
TEDx will be a way of finding this people. So that is a much better than simply the
entrepreneurship suit because there lots of people who are very interesting
nice attractive inspiring people who have nothing to do with business and
the business community tends to gravitate towards people who are interested in
making money and profits which is a very good thing to be interesting but it's not the
only game in town. And that is much broader than that I felt that the entrepreneurs
need to meet another social entrepreneur, people who are doing things. I think it
worked out very well. It started something that proved to be pretty unstoppable.
33:16 SAM:
Well you think of what grew out of that again you know again Estimote just got
funded Series A fundin. The famous story is they met at TEDx. They met at one of
the TEDxKrakow and you know the open coffee movement started after that.
Google for entrepreneurs and you know just a lot of initiatives. It's very interesting to
see and a case study if you listen to this anywhere else in the world what what the
positive spinoffs of bringing TEDx to the community can become because it hadn't
been successful up until TEDx. The kind of the community movement.
33:57 RICHARD:
Ramon Tancinco talks about its relations that you get that when project fails he
never know whether it was a bad idea in the first place it was a great idea with the
wrong people or it was a great idea with the right people but the timing was wrong
that causes a failure. Also the internet was growing and growing an growing and so
the ability to make contact with people through things like social media. Facebook
was a young company backthen in 2010. I don't have know how many years it's
been going but having a community on Facebook made it much easier to coordinate
people and bring them together so there were many things happening in parallel..
We just made it the perfect storm or the right time.
38:14 RICHARD:
Can you talk about what lunar logic is? You mentioned it is services business for
foreign companies. Two things one can you just give a few numbers about
lunar logic as you build it up to before handed delivery because you no longer
running it and also by only describing how you find your customers by browsing
through the job ads of American the positions vacant American jobs sites and for
how you find customers is something that should be interesting to every
entrepreneur and also what sort of business it was when you handed it over.
38:48 PAUL:
Yes absolutely it was. I got the news, the bad news on a Friday I got an email. I only
been in poland for about six months at this point I had hired I think we had maybe
eight or nine people and their job was doing whatever the American head office told
them to do so I had a pretty cushy start-up I had a guaranteed customer I was sent
over here with enough money in my pocket to set up the business and a guaranteed
floor work.
39:18 RICHARD:
Which is incredibly dangerous. If you have one customer don't think that's cushy.
Feel like a guy who gots your life supports switch in his hand.
39:26 PAUL:
And he flip the switch on Friday, a spring Friday I got an email and the wording of
the email is very important it was we've just lost our biggest account which is
another illustration of how dangerous it is to have to rely too much on one client and
so we're going to have to close down. He didn say we're going to close down the
office. He said we're going to have to stop sending work to Krakow. Please shut
down the business before you run out of money. Which gave me an option. He
didn't say shut down the business he said shut it down before you run out of money.
I remember going home in a bit of the panic and taking a walk with my wife pushing
my son who was then only a few months old.
40:19 SAM:
Great time to hear that news.
40:21 PAUL:
And thinking well you know there aren't any really good children's clothing
distributors in poland I think I would really enjoy retail maybe I'll start up a children's
clothing store and import stuff from America. That was my idea. But first I'll take a
crack at keeping
things together and so what I had was a couple of Java developers, a couple of
testers. But what I one thing that I had was very very interesting I didn't even realise
quite how interesting it was is I had a few PHP programmers keep in mind this is
spring 2005. For any Ruby on Rails people out there you'll be able to put into some
context and one of them was a java developer who she told me she just wanted to
do something interesting. She wanted t do something new, something interesting
and so we took one of our internal projects and I suggested trying to do it using this
new framework that was going on in the open source community called rails.
Instead of using PHP she use Ruby on Rails to build an internal time tracking
system and the PHP programmers in the company were looking over her shoulder
and getting kind of jealous at the syntax, the cleanliness and the ease of creating a
basic application using Rails and this was back in the days of rails 0.8 so it was a
good six months before Ruby on Rails was released as stable. So I had in this
company that I had to shut down before we run out of money with about six weeks
worth of money left in the bank. Three of the only experienced Ruby on Rails
programmers in the world who didn't work for David Hanumarhancy. I started
looking for clients and I was looking for two things. Mostly looking for anything that
these people would do. So I was looking for job, I was looking for PHPs, looking for
web development but I was also putting out a few feelers about Ruby on Rails and
one of them stuck in a rather monumental way
for us. There were some there were a few people working for the United Nations
Media Lab in Tokyo who were really excited about Ruby on Rails and it started
playing with it themselves and they were looking for a company that could do
offshore Ruby on Rails development six months before rails was even declared to
be stable. So they were kind of out there too and we found each other because they
couldn't find anybody else talking about this outside of the 37 signals so just as it
has it so happened our very first client and the only one would be able to put into
our portfolio was one of the best-known brands in the world the United Nations.
What are the other striking things
about that a lot of people get really nervous about doing creative agile work with
large institutions and the United Nations was one of those difficult contracts that I
ever negotiated it it ended up being a one and a half page contract and a half page
contract instead of my usual one-page contracts and it was done in an entirely agile
manner with no fixed costs no fixed price even though it was a huge multinational
organization with with loads of bureaucracy on the one side and a Polish supplier
on the other side both of which are supposed to be impossible to do with with
anything but an express contract in an agile way. And just by agreeing to common
goals and putting the necessary trust mechanisms in place we were able to do the
job with a one and a half page contract which is one of the things I'm still rather
proud of. That's how we got started and once we had one possibly the first
commercial Ruby on Rails project outside of 37 signals in the world under our belts
the work for Ruby on Rails just started flooding in.
44:38 RICHARD:
OK and there was something about looking for clients by perusing job at this. When
you think about it is very simple idea but quite often business is a simple ideas that
made a difference and I think is worth sharing.
44:53 PAUL:
The three ways in which we found most of our clients early on and I used to look for
people who are hiring web developers because I figured these are people who need
web developers and there is a rather small number of people when you think about
the billions of people on Earth the number of them that hire web developers is really
small and there's a lot of overlap I should say that the people who offshore web
development into a subset of that community so what I would do is approach them
in a helpful way I'd say you know that you're looking to hire somebody on site but if
you would like to have more flexibility and the benefits of at least offshoring if not all
the work that you doing some of the work as it gives you the flexibility to expand and
contract because any development project is going to have. A greater need in the
early stages when you're building application initially especially when you're a web
startup you need a good sized team to get the application out there and built and
then you need to focus more on marketing in growth and so you don't necessarily
need the same number of programmers. And programmers are expensive. So I
have a core team on site and then use a more experienced company to help get the
core team up to speed and then once you once you build initial project you can
refocus your costs on marketing and reduce your team size without any without
having to lay people off if you work with us and that resonated with enough startups
to get us enough work. The other way that I was looking for new work was by being
helpful. The New York tech meetup community was one of the the rapidly growing
communities. The meet up was focused in New York and meet up itself started the
meet the New York tech Meetup. And so I went to New York as I had a couple of
clients there that attended in New York tech meetup meeting physically and joined
the mailing list. I would strongly caution against just trolling these kind of mailing
lists looking for work but by meeting them through people who are already members
and then concentrating most of my efforts on the list at being helpful I was looking
for people. Not people who are looking for programmers offering to to do work for
them but looking for people with questions that I could answer and just generally
being helpful constructive member of that community I got a lot of work as well.
47:29 RICHARD:
I think being helpful as a business strategy is a good idea being helpful as a
characteristically human being is a good idea. Being helpful it is is not just good for
the person who hoping but she is good for the person being helpful because at the
end of the day you feel more satisfied with what you did with your life and if you
want help I don't see any downside of being helpful and it's very nice to hear of a
situation where that public spirit in this turns into Dolars or Zlotys whatever kind of
currency you count your wellbeing.
48:06 SAM:
The best sales tactics and the best marketing tactics or to give something valuable
that you should charge for free which you were doing and you can now automate a
lot of this online which is what I do and then people say wow. The free stuff, free
advice, the free help is this good and what's the paid stuff like and that's a great
strategy. The key is giving without expecting in return and then things start to come
back but if you're given a manipulative way like right away I need something back I
think that's that's when people's sense that and run away. So you obviously did it
the right way.
48:46 RICHARD:
If Krakow all our listeners community people being weirdly helpful than blame Paul
Klipp.
48:54 SAM:
It's a great strategy. I mean everyone's mother I'm sure has been the like this the
whole life in a very helpful without asking for anything in return. That's just a great
life strategy. But applied to business and specific way. Paul you were I think you're
very well known for a lot of things you know the Ruby Rails on Rails movement here
in Cracow which Base and a lot of other companies came. Poland or Krakow
specifically became known for that programming language expertise. But the other
one is agile. So talk about agile, that movement your role in it and how you've seen
that grow and you can also talk about the ACE conference and explain that to the
people who might be wondering what that is.
49:49 PAUL:
Sure well I have I mentioned earlier that I jumped into project management with
both feet and started from a very traditional approach to project management and
initially it was very satisfying for example I would talk to the programmers at the
Lunar Logi in The States and ask them about what they were doing and how that
worked, what needed to be done in order to achieve their goals and compare that
with the client's goals and then map out the critical path and get estimates and all
the parts and put them all in Gantt charts. When I started putting these huge Gantt
chart all of my walls people started saying uuu and aaa, this looks like structure this
looks like like like clarity and so initialy it was very satisfying but after a while I
started to discover that after that it did that initial clarity is very much an illusion. The
best thing to do with the paper that estimates are written on is not to read it and
believe that. It's more useful in the smallest room in the smalles room in the house.
The way that we were building software was fundamentally flawed success that was
based on 4 pizza and and 8 pot of coffee all nighter is the day before the release in
such is not sustainable and they're part of my job and I think the fair part of a lot of a
project managers jobs becomes explaining why deadlines are missed and
explaining why budgets are exceeded and such just because we take this thing
which is a very constructive and creative act which requires a great deal of
collaboration and we we break it into pieces and assigned areas of responsibility
when indeed it's very much a team sport and nobody can take whole take complete
responsibility for the outcome without high degree of collaboration and I kind of
missed it. When Kentbex first book on XP came out I read it I didn't entirely
understand it wasn't until the scrum movement started that agile became
understandable simple enough for me to wrap my head around. All I knew was that I
didn't like my job as it had been previously I did like did not like the job of hanging
over people's shoulders and asking them what they were going to be done. Of
asking people to estimate things that couldn't be estimated and then demanding
that they tell me why they were wrong. Of making excuses or accepting blame when
things didn't go right and playing a kind of intermediary between technical people
and clients because one of the things I learned as a non-technical person working
closely with technical people is that the fundamentals of the creative process of
creating software can be understood by a non-technical person and technical
people are perfectly capable of communicating and interacting with other humans.
There's two to fax fly in the face of traditional assumptions that that technical people
are are antisocial geeks who can't speak English and that what they do is
completely incomprehensible to the non-technical mind since I had learned that this
was possible. Scrum was basicly very different idea which is that we're all in this
together is mostly a learning experience and the best way to do that is to learn
together and share responsibility throughout the process based on trust and
transparency and communication and to me what it meant is that I'm not solely
responsible for being the intermediary between these two fundamental aspects of
the project. The clients and the the development team and that it doesn't have to be
about promises and blame it can be about collaborative created activities. When I
had the opportunity to do any things anyway that I wanted to when I was running my
own company we started immediately implementing scrum by the book. Poorly at
first. But over a period of many years we learned to do it very well.
54:26 RICHARD:
There may be some listeners who don't know what Scrum is. We have all kinds of
people listening, this may be the first episode. Could you in a couple of sentences
describe scrum ?
54:34 PAUL:
Scrum was one of the first approaches to agile software development which was
clear and simple to understand and implement and fundamentally it says that
software is built by a team and that everybody involved in the software development
process is a member of the team and so rather than having a lot of roles it has very
few. Everybody involved in the software developement process is either a product
owner which means one person who is responsible for representing all future users
and the business needs. So that there are numerous people putting different
demands on thesoftware development team. A scrum master is a specialist in
understanding how scrum is supposted to work to act as sort of a coach and a
mentor. And the team and that all of these people talk together on a regular basis.
Specifically they talk every single day in what's called a stand-up meeting in which
everybody else who's a few questions about what they've been doing, what they
plan to do so that everybody is always on the same page and that everyone plans
together and that everyone shares and successes at the end of each release and
that rather than trying to plan a huge project all upfront its built-in small iterative time
box. Time box means that you commit in advance that over a period of one week
over a period of two weeks to over a period of 30 days the team is going to focus
only on completing a subset of work. Now I've since founded there are better ways
for many teams to work then scrum which is one of the reasons why I started a
company that builds a product for doing things in other ways Kanbanery supports a
combined approach which does away with the fixed time iterations and is more
focused on how to maximize. How you flow values through the system and how you
maximize the clarity of information to everybody who has an interest in it but this is
where I got started. Agile to me means a different way of looking at building
products by recognizing that any kind of a new product development is a creative
act done by a group of people who have to collaborate and trust each other and
communicate throughout the entire process.
57:00 RICHARD:
I picked up one thing I remember when Paul was first explaining to me he said that
every day there's a meeting and during the meeting people say what they did
yesterday what they're going to do today and the role of the project manager is to
deal and what's getting my way. Any barriers and the role of the project manager is
to just deal with the barriers. It's just that I am a great fan of daily planning and a
great fan of a very very simple concepts to make people productive innovation. This
was fascinating for me and canba is the basis of the Japanese manufacturing
miracle. Toyota, the famous for being the company that led canba. I don't know if it's
actually true but it's famous for it. Toyota do their best. I think 400 or 500 percent
more productive than the american car company who invented it. Henry Ford is an
American so the japanese imported american ideas, revolutionized them and now
the rest of the world works to a Japanese standard. 'm very interesting your ideas
about what Krakow is going. On where technology is going but let Sam ask that
question is his way.
58:16 SAM:
Well, Paul again as a as a new member of the community. Relatively I've been here
16 months now and a historian by training which is another completely worthless
degree right if you're in the tech field as I like to point out. Some of the best
technologists I mean Steve Jobs famously dropped out of college and just audited
calligraphy and art classes in history and all kinds of the things that interest him. I
think that was a great point that you brought up and one of the things that really
strikes me about Krakow and one o the points i've made about this is of course the
programmers are great here but I'm more interested in the musicians, the
composers, the artist, the writers, the videographers.
Where do you see the entire community here going ? Where we strong, what part
still need to be developed ? You were at the beginning of this great movement that's
kind of emerging in Krakow in Poland more broadly so what do you see in general
going forward the future of this ?
59:26 PAUL:
It's really difficult for me to say because I saw a lot of change over the time that I've
been here not nearly as long as Richard has been here but I remember the
frustrations that were associated with even getting small groups of entrepreneurs to
trust each other and share in the early days. These days all of those people with
whom I used to work with the first attempts to get open coffee going and with the IT
Small Business Alliance are all very successful and when I go to tech events now
I'm seeing a much younger age of people who have a completely different mindset,
a completely different approach to collaboration to work who see their futures
differently than we did and so I think that even just a the ten or twenty year age gap
between me and the people who first started trying to build an entrepreneurial
community here and the people who are actually going to be building the
entrepreneurial community - the future is so striking.
It's difficult for me to even get my mind around let alone predict. One of the big
challenges. The second big challenge that we had after just collaborating and
sharing and learning from each other and such was initially that there was one there
is a lack of money for one there weren't a lot of investors and investment
opportunities for startups in Krakow and that's changing we've got foreign funds
taking an interest in what's happening here we've got a number of other investment
vehicles are now available to polish based startups. The other is that one of the
biggest problems that Poland used to have in terms of technology start-ups is that
even during the recession's that plagued the last decade Poland was a consistently
growing economy going was the only consistently growing economy in Europe and
it's a country of 40 million people which means if you're starting a startup in Estonia
you have to target a global audience because Estonia is not big enough to get rich
off as a startup whereas in Poland you could target of Polish audience and build a
rather large and successful comfortable company serving only the the needs of
Polish internet users and that used to be the biggest problem we face but now when
I'm talking to young entrepreneurs it's very rare to see startups whose web sites are
in polish that are thinking predominantly of dominating the Polish market. There also
used to be a lot of people who were thinking about well let's look at what's working
so what is working abroad and see if we can replicate that in Poland and so you had
these knockoffs of fereign ideas. Let's make a Polish version of ebay, lets make a
Polish version of Facebook, let's make a Polish version of classmates.com what
have you. Now I'm seeing people thinking about innovative ideas that the world
needs that they can contribute to create it so it's a whole different group people
thinking completely differently then me and my friends 10 years ago were thinking
and I think the sky's the limit for them.
63:07 RICHARD:
And I think that's true everywhere and the great thing is now, just a my previous
interview was with the head of Campus Warsaw. the Google Campus Warsaw was
talking about how well the community's doing there and it's actually is good for
Krakow for Warsaw to boom. There isn't this historic rivalry thank goodness has
begun to melt away as people realize that you know if your neighbor makes a
fortune, some of that will reach you. What about technology trends which ones are
the big ones for you and obviously everyone thinks about mobile. There are
buzzwords like the Internet of Things which quite often the buzzwords don't identify
what individuals think is the most important. What technology trends you think are
the most important for project Project Kazimierz listeners for the next five to ten
years ?And you're allowed to be wrong.
63:53 PAUL:
I'm not guaranteed to be wrong I think and this is really just a personal opinion that
we are going to see the death of the app that the end to the specialist product that
will fix everything and that the technologies that are going to be shaping the future
are going to be technologies that are more intuitive that are build more into people's
existing lives that replace multiple solutions or allow people to more naturally live
their lives as opposed to the next coolthing.The next cool things are still popping up
You see people get really excited over a pitch. I would like to say that that we finally
cracked the social media thing we can stop now. It is not going to go away entirely
but I think perhaps one of my hopes is the growth of design ethnography and lean
UX and lean startup is getting innovators more in touch with the real needs and
feelings and experiences of the people who they depend on to grow their
businesses. So that we end up with a whole generation of more integrated intuitive
technologies that don't require as much icons on our phones and products scruded
to our walls in such.
65:43 RICHARD:
Very interesting I mean I've noticed the way technology is changing people like the
way people socialize, the way people interact, the way what people do for fun.
Its fundamentaly if you look at a bunch of teenagers or even adults or even older
adutls at the city around the Ipads, sitting around the phone. Sharing experiences in
a way that sharing is experiences that couldn't be shared fifteen years ago because
the thing that's on the screen. I think the possibly the biggest change may be in
people, rather than in tech. The technology is going to race away but it's very hard
to anticipate what people are going to want to need. If the people who want to meet
the changing so I think there's a kind of interaction between people and technology
which is quite unpredictable but I'm tend to be optimistic that these people get better
and technology. They gonna foster that technology to what people really want. And
it's just what people really want it good for them.
66:41 SAM:
Paul thank you very much for joining us I think we we've definitely got a lot for
people to think about and the impact the TEDx had on Krakow's ecosystem. How to
take a really bad situation like death of Lunar Logic and Oregan. Rest in peace and
make it into a global very successful technology company in Poland. Starting the
agile movement here in Poland and also some future ideas and technology also
your work in project management. Making that easier and better for the world with
Kanbanery.
Thank you very much for this. That've been very helpful to listen it. I know that
everyone is definitely going get a lot out of it. Again thank you Project Kazimierz
listener for joining us for another episode we have some great ones coming out in
the near future so please go ahead and listen to the short break we have after this
the conclusion of the show and we look forward to seeing you on the next episode.
68:00 RICHARD:
Yes indeed if you liked the show please leave us review and iTunes if you hate it
just send us an email. Thank you very much indeed.