anoopdawar Goto Github PK

• 👋 Hi, I’m @anoopdawar
• 👀 I’m an operator, investor and advisor.
• 🎧🎤 I'm the Chief Strategy Officer at Deepgram. I work with the team on building the company strategy and aligning all functions around it.
• 🌱 I’m currently focused on developing and executing strategic initiatives that drive sustainable growth and ensure our position as a leader in the Voice AI space.
• 📫 If you want to meet me, please writeup an agenda doc and send it my way first. We can go back and forth on it till we think we actually need a sync meeting. I prefer to use vimcal as it keeps my personal and professional calendars in sync. https://book.vimcal.com/p/anoop/25m-dgad

My README is not my way of imposing my "preferences" on others, but instead sharing a "shortcut". It will help you connect to me so that we can collectively accomplish great things together and build trust faster.

Strategic Bent: I like to take a long term strategic stance and focus on user value as well as buyer value.

Principled Approach: There are many ways to approach any given situation. In order to help make decisions, it is extremely helpful to have principles. Principles are guideposts that help everyone take many small decisions every day without having to necessarily consult leadership. They help keep us all aligned. This is especially true for product direction and decisions.

Getting to the heart of the problem: I like to diagnose the problem. It is easy to solution, but it is hard to understand and articulate what we are solving for. I like the Five Whys approach. I think it helps get better appreciation of the problem space and leads to better solutions.

Explicitly state your assumptions: Often we make decisions because we have some assumptions about the situation. I like to spell those assumptions explicitly. Why? Because if one of those assumptions turns out to be wrong, then we know we need to revisit and change our direction. It also helps get everyone of the same page together. I've often found that many disagreements are not really about the actual proposal, but our underlying assumptions about the situation.

Seperating Facts from Opinions: Facts are hard truths. Opinions are our judgement based on that truth. I prefer to seperate them so that we know what is what. This again helps us understand and figure out a path forward easily. As one famous CEO said (I don't have an attribution)-- "If we are going by opinions, lets go with mine. But if you have data, then lets talk"

Positive Demeanor: I've been told I tend to be cheery even when discussing serious topics. It helps me focus on the situation more effectively. I feel decisions should be driven from a point of realistic optimism and not pessimistic fear.

Impatience: Sometimes I feel that I know the answer and we should just go ahead and listen to me :) This is something I'm working on. If you find me in this situation, know that this is an area of improvement. Call it out to me. I will do better.

Iteration After working at GitLab, I'm a big believer in the value of Iteration to move fast. Iteration is often misunderstood. Iteration is in how we act. Make things better than they were every day. The compounding impact of every person in the company working this way is phenomenal.

Pet Peeves (Not doing the following)

• Being unprepared for the meetings.
• Be distracted or unfocused during discussions where the team needs a more purposeful and decision oriented.
• Rambling and repeating your thoughts instead of being succint.
• Vague and confused articulation of the problems.
• Focusing on solutions before articulating the problem.
• Not grounding solutions in service of our customers.