Get Your Career Unstuck with Quentin Clark #39

The Engineering Leadership Podcast

Quentin Clark, Managing Director @ General Catalyst shares how to get your career unstuck at different scales & stages! You’ll learn different frameworks you can use to benchmark your growth and identify where you might be stuck. Plus different approaches you can take to get your company and the people you lead, unstuck at scale!

"The specifics of the framework are not as important as having one at all. Create some ruler... Like if you're a snail and you're trying to inch your way towards the head of lettuce, and you're trying to measure whether or not you're making progress every day... It doesn't actually matter whether or not you're using an imperial tape measure with inches or the metric system and a yardstick...

You can make up your own ruler! As long as that ruler is consistently being used over and over again. This is why I say it's important for people to have A framework... not necessarily any one framework. And that they come back to it.”

QUENTIN CLARK, MANAGING DIRECTOR @ GENERAL CATALYST

Quentin is a product and systems technical leader with broad experience in the enterprise space. Incepted, built, and delivered successful products over many years - from servers to SaaS platforms and applications. He will be joining General Catalyst in January as a managing director.

Prior to embarking on a career in investing, Quentin was the CTO at Dropbox, where he led all of engineering, product, design, and growth. He worked with them through its IPO, its pivot to Dropbox Spaces, and drove the portfolio expansion starting with the acquisition of HelloSign.

He was at Microsoft for 20 years, most of that time focused on innovation - creating new products and value. The last decade of his time at Microsoft, Quentin was responsible for the high-growth data platform business, including SQL Server. There he worked for Satya Nadella leading the whole data platform business into the cloud.

After Microsoft, Quentin was at SAP for two years, first as CTO then as Chief Business Officer where he led strategy and product direction for the platform and ultimately for the whole company. Before joining Dropbox he spent a year angel investing and exploring the VC world.

He currently serves on the boards of Coda, Highfive, and Minio, and has been investing and advising very early-stage companies.

SHOWNOTES

• What does it mean to get “unstuck?” (2:55)
• How do you get unstuck? (5:32)
• How to divide your time between growth, grunt work, & what you’re good at (7:06)
• Where engineering leaders get stuck + how to benchmark your growth using the 6 areas of competency (10:42)
• How to get people unstuck at scale (15:55)
• Why it’s important to have a framework to benchmark your growth (21:22)
• Quentin’s story of getting unstuck in his career (25:20)
• “Give up” what got you stuck by changing your goals & intention (31:20)
• How to get your company and culture unstuck (37:15)
• Quentin’s podcast “Equivalent to Magic” (44:20)
• Takeaways (45:58)

Quentin's Podcast - Equivalent to Magic: https://spoti.fi/3ulOVwc

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