Gant Laborde on Leading with Innovation – Techstrong Unplugged EP 22

Hey everybody and welcome back to Textron Unplugged. I'm your host, Natan Solomon, and this is episode 22 of our series. In this episode, we're taking you to vConf 2024 at vConf Arcos.

Cassandra Chin met up with Gantt Leor and they discussed the power of innovation. Gantt is the Chief Innovation Officer at Infinite Red, and in this discussion we'll explore the intersection of technology, leadership, and culture. As someone who's risen from a developer to a leader, Gantt sheds light on the importance of creativity and rest in the tech industry.

Without further ado, let's head over to UCON 2024. Welcome back to Text on Unplugged. My name is Cassandra Chin, and today we have Gantt.

Hey everybody, Can you introduce yourself? Yeah, sure. My name's Gat Leor.

I've been in software development for over 20 years. I have worked at a myriad of companies before finding open source, which got me into the world of finding my business partners, one in Portland and the other one in Las Vegas. We form, uh, infinite Red, which is a hundred percent remote company based in the us and we have been a company for coming up on 10 years now.

It's been a wonderful adventure and now I get to talk to fantastic people and go to conferences and just enjoy life. So what do you like most about what you're doing now? So I like to say the fact that I found the company, well, they found me that if I retired tomorrow, I'd stay doing the same thing.

And that's the luxury of, uh, something that you really don't learn. Growing up in the United States. It's always about get more, have more hustle, more sleep less.

And I don't know if just the tech industry has figured it out, but uh, sleeping is important, rest is important, creativity is important. You can't slam people into a creative environment. And where I am now, I get to work creatively.

I get to work with the best people in the world, and I get to just enjoy things. So the ultimate part of what it is, is like you get to choose now who you surround yourself with, and that's like, that's my luxury. I get to choose who I get to surround myself with.

What is your main like job? What do you Do? Yeah, so I am the Chief Innovation Officer of Infinite Red.

What I used to be is just a developer there, and I loved it so much that I was leading initiatives, open source conferences, and then ultimately I was getting job offers from all the, the big companies. And I said, I need to find the excuse to stay. And they said, come in and be an owner.

So I bought in as an owner in the company, and now I have this in innovation front end where I go out and I find technologies that are coming up and coming. I know of a ton about ai. I've been doing AI since 2017 and I wrote a book on it called Learning TensorFlow js, um, with O'Reilly Publishing.

And I get to sort of steer the ship with the long-term viewpoint that our company really appreciates. Have you been working with AI before it became super popular? You know what's funny is I keep wondering when it's become super popular because in 2012 it started to be able to do things that humans could do.

Find a burdenous photo, do this and that, identify these characters. It actually started to become superhuman in its technology where it was capable of actually figuring out these what's in this photo here and there. And so in 2017 there was that episode of Silicon Valley Hotdog, not hotdog, and I saw the source code for it and I said, what is, how come I can't read this?

I've been coding for so long, how come I can't read the source code? And that got me into machine learning then. And then it was just, that's it.

Courses upon courses upon courses said you Couldn't read the source code. Yeah, it's like machine learning stuff. Hard to or impossible.

It was, it was absolutely impossible for me to comprehend because now today we know a lot about, uh, models. We understand the, the, the data. We understand that it's got forward and backward propagation, uh, the way the deep learning's kind of like a common phrase now.

But you have to understand, when I first saw these things and I saw the architecture of the model and the data that was pushing through it, I was like, where's the source code? Where is it? Like, I don't understand what's happening here.

They're just setting up this thing and then throwing some data in it, some weights, some random numbers between zero and one, and then this thing can tell you whether or not a hotdog or is, is or not in a photo. And that blew my mind. I was like, I have to understand this because I think like one of the things that's really cool is computers could do this thing that nobody else could do.

Then websites could do this thing that nobody else could do. Mobile AppSec could do this thing nobody else could do. And now AI is doing something that nobody's ever done before and it's that greenfield awesome energy all over again.

I see. So it's getting everyone excited about it. Yeah, it's, it's wonderful.

So I got excited in 2017, however, uh, arguably the people who were ahead of me were the people taking the courses in 2012 and understanding the image, uh, doing computer vision, breaking ground on that. Uh, they, they, they saw it way before I did. Yeah.

Uh, you do you wanna talk a bit about like leadership skill? Yeah, sure. Yeah.

So, uh, running a company means that I have to marry together the idea of this technology with people. And so that's been a new initiative as well. Uh, if you've ever tried to talk people into doing something, there's the easiest way, which is authority, but there's actually six other ways that you're supposed to talk people into understanding, maintaining and owning an effortful project for them.

And, uh, joining the company and getting into the executive section of that is very different because I used to make clients very happy. You just do whatever they want you, you're the hero, you know, you just code whatever they need and then manage expectations and it's great. Um, running a company means doing that in, uh, a fourth dimension of just time, which is each person's at a different part in their journey and you have to apply the right move for where that game is in its state.

It's really, really complex and extremely rewarding. So, uh, being part of a company, I definitely have, I have a new penant for learning leadership skills. Well, you manage your company.

Do you have to manage like different teams and organizations? Yeah, But um, we are fortunate enough that we get to choose who we surround ourselves with. So my company is all senior devs that are mature in their, in their academic and the coding careers.

And so managing them really is a lot easier. Uh, if I was really brave, I would manage juniors, but um, that gives me somewhere to go too, right? I have to start somewhere.

Managing senior software devs is both rewarding and easy. Do the seniors manage juniors? No, we actually, since we're only 30 people and uh, you know, every time I tell people that, they're like, I can't believe your company is only 30 people.

Because if you look up anything on some of the React native, sorry, vov, react Native mobile development, we're the first company it comes up and we're the US powerhouse for that. So what ends up happening is we only have 30 people, and so we don't actually have any junior developers, which is kind of nice. It helps us sell some contracts.

They're like, we want nothing but seniors. It's like, that's all we have. Is there anything else else of interest do you wanna talk about?

Oh my God. Well, how much, uh, how much time do you have? I will just talk all day with you.

Just keep talking and I'll stop you when it's appropriate. So here we are in New Orleans, the one of the best cities in the entire world with a culture that is unique and different from almost everywhere else. We have architecture of French and Spanish food influences, both Cajun and Creole.

We have all the different kinds of things jammed into one spot in a port city that has been flourishing for the past a hundred years. And then the conference comes here and everybody gets to experience just a little bit of taste of that. But honestly, there's so much more to the technology, the culture, and the energy that comes here for this that you get like a taste of here at uff.

And so I love talking about the city because I do, I live in New Orleans and I also love talking about the initiatives of like, kind of growing up here, which is actually really difficult when you're all into technology and everybody's into drinking and food. And then the other aspect of it is that people come here and they fall in love. Like this is a wonderful place.

There's a lot of technology people that move to New Orleans simply because if you have a remote job, you don't have to go in office, you get to choose whatever is right out front your door. They choose culture. So I am big fan of here any city.

It's got great culture. I love Atlanta, uh, new Orleans, Amsterdam, like it's really nice. Is It mainly a food culture or what else is There?

You know, here I would say it's a music and food culture. It's all about how things feel here. It's about taking things easy.

It's about, um, honestly, I think it's the pill that we all need when with our like work, work, work put all the time in, especially the startup culture, which is, you know, sleep on the ping pong table kind of style that we get from California. It's the antithesis of that. It's the other pill that lets you sort of just remember what's really important to you.

And uh, I think that's the fulfilling life that I'm looking for. And then most people are, That's interesting 'cause actually come from California. Yeah, Exactly.

Very work intensive culture. It is, it, it's a groundbreaking, working intensive, amazing culture that can only go so far on that sort of same leg, that same energy, that same structure. At some point you need to come back to the, the tide needs to come back.

Yeah. Yeah. So you've always lived in New Orleans?

Yes. Almost moved a few times. Chose not to.

Yeah. Do you always come back to this conference? Yeah, I love vConf one.

Any conference, there's a million great conferences that come through. New Orleans vConf is put on by Pratik and Vincent, uh, connected events and they know how to do an excellent conference. I also go to several of their other conferences that they have.

Uh, they run Connect Tech in Atlanta. That's a great one. They also help run DevNexus, uh, one in Chicago, Dallas, and a bunch of other places.

I know that, uh, conference needs to focus on the people, as you could tell. I've talked about that a lot. And they do.

So anytime they're around, I'm surely going to their conference. So you really care about the people. Yeah.

You know, I love technology, but you have to understand that without other people, you're just sitting in a dark room looking at lights, right? There's something non-significant about that. There's something insignificant about this.

Kind of like we all felt Zoom burnout, right? Uh, during the pandemic we were disconnected from each other. One of the things that really identifies that I, I see people wanting without knowing how to put it into words, is that your work code changes every single day.

It's like ice sculptures every day. You can't really watch it over a period of time. You go back and look at what you did five years ago, it looks terrible or it's trash.

You have to be proud of like the wind and what are the wins there, the things that you did that people called wins. And then you start to see that line goes, I care about what influenced people. And when you care about that, you say like, now I'm gonna look directly into it, right?

I care about the connections I make and here's the best part. People are a lifelong thing. You can spend the rest of your life learning about people.

It doesn't change like a framework. 0 despite what California tries to do. We're all running on that same software.

We all still want that same connection. We all still want that same in-person event with a great mc and fantastic talks. So when you're looking at code and you think your code is bad, like is how you determine how good your code is or not.

Like, not the code itself, but how other people kind of think of it. Yeah. You know, think about that.

Why do we hate cowboy coders? Because projects used to be so small. There would be like one person who wrote those AppSec back when AppSec came out in the nineties and people wrote software.

It was one person making all the games, making all this stuff. It was different. One person camps, it doesn't work anymore.

Now we figured out how to beat that and make it more impressive kind of culture around the idea of developing ever evolving software. And you know, there's of course the rule that the connection amongst the people reflects in the connection amongst the software. The bugs and communication amongst the team reflects the bugs that are in the software.

It's a Conway's law, right? So what's great about that is we are just looking at a reflection of what we really want. That's an interesting look at it.

It's, it's, it's honestly taken me a long time to figure this out. So learn, learn from me if you can on this and improve on it. I think we talked about a lot of interesting things today.

Awesome. Yeah, I think we did too. We didn't talk enough about your cool shirt or your book or any of the other stuff.

Nothing about you is about you, not me. Okay. Well thank you.

I appreciate it. Um, I am super happy to be here being in New Orleans software for 20 years, traveling the world, meeting and talking to amazing people. And thanks for having me.

Thank You Ga.