Notes from a CTO #13: Leadership Quality, LLM locally and Blameless culture
Let's discuss the qualities that I believe leaders/top performers need and running the LLM final on my 8GB Mac.
1. Thought of the Month
This week, let's discuss what makes a good leader.
I have been running Docsumo for 5 years, with an additional year of a service company. Over this time, I have encountered various types of people. I have always been curious about what sets leaders/top performers apart from others. Here are a few qualities I have pinpointed:
Discipline: I've written a blog post about discipline, and I believe it's one of the most important. I've met zero smart people who lack discipline and still make good leaders. The simple philosophy of "lead by example" applies universally.
Ownership: In a startup, ownership is everything. Can I assign you a task and sleep peacefully knowing it will be taken care of? If you can consistently do that, you will become a successful leader in the future. People should feel safe entrusting you with tasks, knowing you will leave no stone unturned to get them done.
No-Bullshit Attitude: A startup is a place where things need to happen quickly. Take action, get it done, avoid unnecessary delays, and don't tolerate excuses.
Humble: While I often say I'm not in the business of selling ice cream to make everyone happy, it doesn't mean I don't care about people. If you care about Docsumo or its clients, I will go to great lengths to take care of you. There are countless examples of this. My philosophy is simple: “Always put yourself in their shoes and consider how they feel.” Be fun to be around and take genuine care of people.
No Blame or Excuse Game: As a leader, what I appreciate most is someone who takes responsibility, saying, "It was my fault. I should have established better processes and checks." I admire leaders who take this stop at me attitude and don't throw their team members under the bus. Even if someone makes a mistake in production, it's not solely their fault; we should have enough safeguards in place to prevent such incidents. The first step in fixing the problem is recognizing that it stops at me.
Being disciplined, taking ownership, keeping things straightforward, staying humble, and not playing the blame game—they're the secret sauce for better leaders and also better human beings.
2. Podcasts/Essays
Will Larson is Chief Technology Officer at Carta. Prior to joining Carta, he was the CTO at Calm and held engineering leadership roles at Stripe, Uber, and Digg. He is the author of two foundational engineering career books, An Elegant Puzzle and Staff Engineer, and The Engineering Executive’s Primer, which will be released in February.
3. Interesting links
Repos:
llamafile and ollama: Finally, finally, an LLM that I can run locally without crashing my 8GB M2 Mac. I've been waiting for this for a long time.
phi-2: The 2.7B model from Microsoft is as powerful as the 13B model and is on par with the 70B model for a few tasks. I am really excited about smaller and more capable models. This increases the horizon of AI by 10X. Now it MIT license.
Rustdesk: An open-source remote desktop alternative to TeamViewer, I just discovered it this week. It would have solved so many problems for me.
magic-animate: Both exciting and frightening at the same time, I don't know how to feel about this. Finally, I can dance like my wife ;-).
For more, follow me on Github: bkrmdahal
Articles:
About that OpenAI “breakthrough”: From the article, “All that said, I am scientist. The fact that a lot of past performance has been overhyped no guarantee that every future advance will fail to pan out. Sometimes you get nonsense about room-temperature superconductors (such narratives always play well initially), and some things really do pan out.It’s all still an empirical question; I for one certainly don’t yet know enough about the details of Q* to judge with certainty.Time will tell.But, as for me, well… I got 99 problems I’m worried about (most especially the potential collapse of the EU AI Act, and the likely effects of AI-generated disinformation on the 2024 elections).At least so far, Q* ain’t one.”
These are exactly my thoughts now when I see hype in AI. I will checkout, but I solved my 99 problems first and if I see potential, I will circle back in future.How I make OKRs more playful for my team using Hill-Charts: Making OKRs is one religious activity we do every quarter, and it helps us maintain better focus. We are constantly improving it each quarter, as it is an interesting way to prioritize key objectives and achieve better results.
The Bullseye Framework: Marketing is something I want to improve in. This interesting framework was introduced to me this month. Help me to narrow down the focus.
Blameless Cluture: Things will break, and the reason they break is not because some wrote bad code but because there was no safe guard to prevent it.
4. Quotes/ Books
Go to bed smarter than when you woke up
- Charlie Munger
One more month of Charlie Munger. In a world where everything is flashy, I am always inspired to be humble by looking at Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett. You need very little to be happy: a family that cares for you, a house you can call home, enough money in the bank so you don't have to see the price of an item on a restaurant menu before ordering, and work that is fulfilling. If you improve yourself daily and are humble, these are not difficult to achieve.
Our Slack channels have a great collection of memes.
That’s it for this edition. I hope you find it useful.
Best,
Bikram Dahal
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