SPEAKER_01: 0:00

Welcome to the Cut the Tie Podcast. Hello, I am your host, Thomas Helfrick. And I'm on a mission to help you cut the tie to whatever's holding you back from your success. I want you to own that success. So when you do achieve it, it is yours. Nobody else is. Hey, I'm joined by Bulky. Here we go. You got it. It's pretty close.

SPEAKER_02: 0:18

I would say 90% there. Pretty close as I do it.

SPEAKER_01: 0:25

It really is a marketing technique. Why don't you say your name now? Over and over and over again. Thank you, Thomas. Introduce yourself, please. Who you are and what it is you do.

SPEAKER_02: 0:36

Thank you, Thomas. Um, I'm Balky Kodarapu, a fractional CTO based out of Portland, Oregon. Um fractional is a fancy term these days, but I'll I'll share what it is anyways in the CTO world. So I work uh and help multiple companies um ramp up their engineering efforts. You know, it's never been more important for your engineering arc to be effective with the advent of AI. When I started this, it wasn't a big deal, but today it's it's a huge deal for your engineering arc to be productive, effective, fast-paced. Um, and that's what I do with all my experience in the field working at multiple startups.

SPEAKER_01: 1:21

Even beyond that, right? Where most companies are, they don't need a full-time, you know,$250,000 a year plus CTO. They need maybe that in development, and they need a leader to help them fractionally throughout the like because you you don't need to be in there 40 hours a week, you need to be in there four and a couple for the CEO. Like, is that a fair statement? Like, that's when they bring you in, is when they they need the leadership that to guide the the talent.

SPEAKER_02: 1:47

Yeah, yeah. There there's two personas of companies, if you might, that I work with. One is relatively early stage. They have they have a small team, but not a leader. So, you know, they're running like their head cut off, or the CEO doesn't know what's happening in the engineering team. I bridge the gap there. And the other type of companies I help with is um a little bit later in in the game, they they have a product market fit, maybe even the beginnings of some leadership. Uh, but they they are worried about if this will architecture and the organization hold up as they scale. You know, they're seeing early signs of success, but they're worried if they'll hold up uh for the future. So those are the two types of organizations. And yes, to your point, in both cases, uh a full-time CTO is is an overkill. You said upwards of 250, but the average for a CTO is more like 400, the loaded cost. And that's not even considering the huge amounts of equity you have to shell up to a CTO that may or may not work for you.

SPEAKER_01: 2:54

Right. Well, and exactly. So the 250 mark is more of like your low end to get someone in place. Uh what and I think what one of the problems, people, you know, if you're out there listening to this, if you have someone playing the uh Pete Rose player coach, don't. You need someone to focus on development or strategy, like in and an overarching architecture and you know, organization and just getting set up for AI plus you know, a handful of developers, some on-site, some remote, what you know, just the whole gamut. You can't do both and develop effectively. Like there, there's at some point you got to make that. That's an investment moment. That's a reflection moment, right? The we need someone to come in and professionalize this if we're doing this. Are you typically before a raise or right after or or right in the middle of it? Or like a named guy on the raise book?

SPEAKER_02: 3:41

Uh, to be frank, you know, they they need to be able to afford me, right? So I'll help with guidance and you know I'll advise them before they raise money. But um actually, I'll take it back. Of the three companies I helped, two of them did not raise major amounts of money. Success came naturally to me. I don't mind that, right? So as long as they have cash flow to to invest in their business, it does doesn't have to be that they they need to raise.

SPEAKER_01: 4:12

In fact, one company they need to be to support it, right? It's not something you do and risk your company over. This has to be a strategic hire that obviously if if it fails, they're not done. They have to replace you, but they're not done. Like you don't you don't go do it and say, hey, we're gonna trade a marketing budget for this. Like, no, no, no, no, no. Like, don't go do that. Yes. Okay, cool. Uh well, tell me about your go into your journey a little bit. How did how did you get to this moment in your uh career?

SPEAKER_02: 4:37

Yeah, I'll do a condensed version. So uh I've been in the field 20 years. Um, the first 10 years I was uh your typical software engineer slinging code at anything that came my way. Uh the second half, uh I decided I cut the tie once where I didn't want to be in the corporate world. Um, built my own startup for a year and a half, but the realization there was uh I'm I'm much better being the the first employee rather than the a founder. Uh so you know, just the my heart wasn't engineering. I didn't realize that until I went uh built a startup on my own. I built a lot of empathy for the business side, which I've would have not gotten anywhere else. Uh, but that like shifted back to being the first engineer, the founding engineer, the engineering leader. Uh since then, I've worked at multiple startups. Um, I my heart is in startups, like where where I can touch and feel the founder energy every day, every second, and I can help them guide in the right directions, right? So um that's what I did. Um about two years ago, I started to realize I built up all the experience skills um to be able to do this much more effectively without being claiming full allegiance to a company, right? So uh that I could help multiple companies. Um so I took a risk, cut the tie again, and then um came out of a startup and um one thing led to another, and I'm a fractional CTO now, loving every second of this journey.

SPEAKER_01: 6:22

Yeah, it's funny how you do that. It's just a similar route where uh I started off as a technologist during dot com and quickly saw that though I enjoyed coding and patterns and all that other pieces, the guys that really succeeded on that were like doing for fun on the weekends. Like they were getting ready to go make their own game on the weekend. I'm like, I am gonna go golfing and drinking. Like, I don't know what you guys are doing. And and I mean, but what I saw quickly was, you know, it just may be another analogy, right? Like I saw managing projects, okay, I could do that. But I could say project manager is really studying it. I'm like, I have no interest in this. Like, but what I was good at was this talking about technology and consulting and the strategy advisory. And the point is, I think just advice to listener is take what you know you do well and go really do that well. Now, the experience you got from being a founder business side really allows you probably to do what you're doing now because you can talk that talk with some empathy and understanding that you would never have had if you hadn't tried. Fair enough? Exactly.

SPEAKER_02: 7:18

Yeah, that that gives an enormous edge to me, right? So most technologists have not done that. So I mean, one in a hundred, maybe one in a thousand who who can understand financials, the you know, the trade-offs of business. Most technologies are black and white. I I'm still that way, but naturally, if you put me in the natural world, that's what I'll do. But you know, I can go back to my founding days and tell here's a trade-off. You're making a very suboptimal technical decision, but here is why. Um, and and that's super powerful for me, especially as a fractional CTO.

SPEAKER_01: 7:53

You uh do you get brought into those times where they've built the POC or the, you know, let's prove it, make some money on it. And you look at it, you're like, we're trashing that whole thing. Yes, listen, yeah, you got your concept, but you can't scale that past 100 users unless you want to put a person every time you put 100 users on this thing, right? So is that where you come in and go, We're gonna here's the re-architecture, here's all the actual customer requirement needs, and here's the with the twist, with with the with the founder mentality twist, right?

SPEAKER_02: 8:22

So this will not scale past 10,000 users, but we're still going to put it in production and make money out of it. And you know, that that's my specialty. So, how do we get to that 10,000 over time at the right stage? That that's the like that's the devil in the details, right?

SPEAKER_01: 8:41

I'm not going to rewrite it today. You're not down revenue. And it used to be so expensive to code, and at least my my perception of it was it was so expensive to build something in parallel. Uh, like it just was never an option from budget. It was like always this kind of Franken code, Frankenstein code that it's like, oh, we had this and we moved over. But now you literally can you know set things up pretty quickly and build something in parallel. Well, at some point there's just an overnight data move and it's over, right? I mean, it's like, okay, we're on. That was not something seven years ago. I think you probably could do very easily. Today, I think is that a fair assessment? Today you could do more weak stuff, but like smaller, yeah, new stuff for sure.

SPEAKER_02: 9:21

Exactly. Yeah, I've been talking to a lot of uh fellow CTOs about this aspect, right? So until like a year ago, we could engineers could say, no, this will take you know$100,000 to build a prototype. Today, within hours, a product manager could build a prototype and validate it with the customers overnight, even. And I've seen it three times at a company I'm working. A high school dropout uh built a prototype within a couple months. They we got validation. The the pressure is on this experienced engineer persona now, right? So, how do you take this to production, you know, a high school dropout with like that makes 10% of what you make has built and validated the prototype. It's it's a it's a tough but tough spot, but a realistic one that's happening today, right? So it is what you say.

SPEAKER_01: 10:20

I still think I still believe there's a place for the experienced developer fully. And what I mean is the the challenge is probably in the actual persona of the developer to take a step back and see where the real value is. It's not so much in coding anymore, it's in hooking up pieces, ensuring things are correctly built, tuned with a business context, meaning uh just don't code, code, code, code. Like tech can a lot of technology can do that, but you know, let it run the marathon. You're used to running the last mile of that marathon. Absolutely, yeah. And that's where the experienced person should know these, you know, the configuration, setup, cloud distribution, like whatever you got going on from the harder parts to make sure it really works and the security framework, stuff's missed. You've heard requirements, business people, whatever it is. That's where an inexperienced person wouldn't know to ask certain questions. Uh, they probably could GPT it, but they wouldn't know it.

SPEAKER_02: 11:11

Yeah, no, yeah. The context is is especially critical. And the word you use, the business context, was a nice to have. Like I used to like beg and show my engineers some metrics and fully assume that they would never care about it. But today it's an expectation. You will not survive as an engineer unless you seek and and obtain that business context, right? So, of the many things, you know, you need business context, you need to be able to move fast. You know, today you can't say, you know, it'll take time. In your mind, you can think that, but you can't say it out loud because there are tools and uh and the expectations where we need to move fast. In that example where we validated the market segment so quickly, it's upon the engineers to take that to production as quickly, if not quicker. And also, you know, the to the point about experience, I also expect my engineers to build frameworks and coaching to these quote unquote high school dropouts. So when they're building their prototypes, uh that they follow some of the best practices. So when when it when the time comes to go to production, it's it's smoother, right? So because it's going to fall on you, engineer, experienced engineer, you can be in denial today while that's happening uh in the real world. But sooner or later, it'll be your responsibility to take this shitty prototype into production. So you better be proactive and teach that high school dropout how to do it slightly better without compromising their speed.

SPEAKER_01: 12:47

The uh my co-founder, who is uh definitely build it from scratch kind of guy on the tech, and I was like, isn't there an AI you can just like give an example? I was like, isn't there some shit where I can just talk to a GPT and it immediately produces an in-brand landing page on my WordPress website? I feel like that should be easily done. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yes. All right, I'm gonna follow up with you, and you're gonna send me the link to that because I'm like, I'm sending him stuff. I'm like, can't I just do this? And then it just goes and builds it, and then you can just tweak it the last mile to make it more optimized, and you know, and so yes, you know what? Let's share that with you. Who what is the technology, or unless you have an affiliate code, then I'll put it out there. But what should some what should I go do on WordPress? I think of our elementor, like whatever it is. Like, what is it that I would use where I could just talk to GPT or whatever, and it goes and produces the damn thing for me.

SPEAKER_02: 13:33

Yeah, so today my um drugs of choice are bolt.new. If you haven't come across that bolt, you can uh give plain English instructions, and within minutes it'll generate beautiful in-brand websites. So is it bold? B O L D B-O-L-T, as in lightning bolt. Oh, bolt, gotcha. Bolt, uh bolt.new. There's several products similar to that. Another popular one is lovable, L-O-V-A-B-L-E, Lovable. Um, you know, as an engineer, I have to add a disclaimer. They're very good, but not quite ready for production grade, right? We talked earlier about 100 users, thousand users, no database. These work very well. But once you start to build some logic and sophistication, they they'll still work, but people like me are an experienced engineer, um, are are still required to scale them infinitely. But your use case work, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 14:36

Not the microfiners can if I listen to this specific episode, but um, I I think that's what he's saying. I think he uses it to advance it. He's saying, like, to really hook this stuff up to tweak it, get your Google Analytics in, do all the things you really want to go do. Um, I I still feel like that should that should be if no one's solving that, like for the everyday user, that would be an easy$100 a month. Hey, put up a new landing page every time you do this content play. Like, here's the landing page. I know. I I'll leave it there. In your own business, uh, what what what's kind of the current metaphoric tie you you're having to you're struggling with?

SPEAKER_02: 15:07

Well, I believe it or not, I'm still an engineer at heart. So uh that I I'm still afraid to reach out to strangers and ask them to meet with me or give me money. So I I'm I'm getting better and better every day with that outreach. You know, even when I know they may reject me or spit on me, I'll I'll still ask them. Uh I I still want to ask them. You know, that's something I'm learning every day.

SPEAKER_01: 15:37

They're never gonna spit on you. Um I mean, it's kind of hard digitally to do that. Um it may waste your time because you're nice. But uh uh, but but in your own business though, like right, you know, like one thing I, you know, if that's part of lead generation, right? This is where this is my world now, right? Where you don't need it, you shouldn't probably doing it yourself. If you have any level of success at this point, it's like, you know, I know for like a less than a thousand bucks a month, you could pretty much have someone outsource that, have it done well, leveraging technology, humans, all the things you need to go do, put your personal brand right, get all your content right. Like, give you the example, like for like when I work with my clients, I need maybe them two hours a month total. Like, give me an hour to answer these eight or nine questions, eight or twelve questions. That could that's all your content for the month. And uh, you know, let's meet with strategy once a month about what your lists are. Like, and then after that, it's just done. So uh there is probably better use of your time um for sure. Um, but but the point is for anybody who's like that, don't let that stop you. Get out and go do it or go hire somebody because if you you know if you're just starting, you gotta do it yourself. If you've got to get levels like this, budget a thousand bucks or whatever depends on about a month, and have someone who do it for you. It's 250 bucks a week. It's like it's a it's basically like an intern from the Philippines that you know, like you can get it done, but costs. Yeah, actually a Philippines intern. Let's be clear, the costs. Uh anyway. Uh what about when you were coming up through the ranks and you made the move? Did you have to deal with uh you know, I find people have to cut ties usually in something around relationships, finances, health, or faith. Typically, when you make the move from corporate over, it's around uh relationships, specifically wives or significant others and or parents. Um their perception of you making a move from you know steady W-2 to working for some, you know, yourself. Did did you run anything like this in your own journey?

SPEAKER_02: 17:30

Not on the personal side. My partner um is amazing, so she's put up with me with all my shenanigans through the times. Um not not in a personal relationship side, uh, no, uh, but within the organizations, uh, as I switched between various uh roles and as I was growing in my career, the switch and the dance between do I claim allegiance to the business side or the engineering side, it's been always top of my mind. When I first started, I got like starry-eyed and just went right after that startup. I was like in bed with marketing and sales, forgot everything about the engineering team, and that punched me in the face, right? So, because I didn't build the trust uh with my engineers, I just took it for granted. So after that, I I have a systematic way of building trust and credibility with my team. And um, once I know, once I grade that, okay, this is A or better, then I start to like build my uh relationship with the other side. It's an interesting journey for me because I know um and experience that that that trust and credibility with the team is is quite important when I when I ask them to go through hard times, do impossible things or suboptimal things, they have to trust me that I have the best interest about them and the company in my mind. So it's an interesting takeaway there for me.

unknown: 19:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 19:03

Well, actually, I think what you described something is you learn from it's not a failure, just from a life lesson, right? Or from a life experience where you're like excited to be on another side where you never thought you'd be. You get over there and you're like, yeah, the grass is greener, but it's also different. Yeah. And then uh I don't know how to water this grass exactly. Um, and it's a different language. Um, but you go back to typically, you know, your light goes to where your heart is, right? So if you know, from a personal thing, you're like, I like the technical side. But but you learn though, right, is that you have a skill of translation of I can talk to those people. And so exactly. And then like where you're like, you know, you're saying you're reaching out for lead gen or whatever else, it's kind of like, well, the backside of that is like, you know, all those people who don't do it, you have an advantage over all the engineers who just want to be engineers who don't ever want to go talk, they go to you, and that's why you're a good leader. Like he'll deal with them. We just want code. So I love that. Exactly. Um, just just interest of time here. So who should get a hold of you typically? Like, who's your ideal client and and how do you want them to do that?

SPEAKER_02: 20:00

Um my ideal clients are startup CEOs, whether they're technical or not. Technical CEOs get pretty uh far alone, but at some point it's a breaking point. It's it's the heart their heart is not there, or they don't have the time where they need a leader to uh to lead their team even on a part-time basis. So that's technical CEOs, non-technical CEOs should reach out to me immediately. They don't know what they're doing, so I I can help them.

SPEAKER_01: 20:34

I would think to the uh the the the CEO that's come, you know, the when uh CEOs this is a bigger company typically. So maybe a founder is more product creative type. Um I know there's a company, they maybe they're worth like, you know, 10 million and they're just taking out VC funds, that new CEO is coming in. I think you'd probably be a good person to do the assessment audit of what's what in the technical world. And I would think that's a really good start for you to establish relationship and value quickly. Is that is that a fair place where you can come in and say, hey, you don't really you just want to get a bead on is it good, bad, or ugly, or everything in between?

SPEAKER_02: 21:09

Yeah, yeah. Great point. Yeah, yeah. You you have great instincts. In fact, I I recently built a lead magnet I'm excited about. It's called DevIQ. Um and I work with the founder, CEO, sometimes the CTO, go through a few checkboxes, and that thing will give you a very detailed analysis, uh letter grade of where you are in each pillar of the engineering excellence, and then a plan for where they should invest next. I'm I'm getting really good uh response on that.

SPEAKER_01: 21:40

So are you running through like a through like a survey app or something like that?

SPEAKER_02: 21:45

I built, you know, like a typical engineer, I built it myself uh because there's so much of this sophistication in it. Uh there's a lot of moving parts behind scenes.

unknown: 21:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 21:57

I will tell you guys, I I know he built one. And if you did build one, you can sell it commercially, by the way. There's a thing called Score App Um that does dynamic scoring, and you can customize all the things they find, and there's all these like really cool, elaborate marketing things you can put. And it's very inexpensive. It's like 300 bucks a year. So um take a look at it. You might be like, why'd I build all this? It's really good. I mean, like it's full dynamic, and you can control where people go and how it's questions they see based on their answers and values, and um or buy his. I don't know. I think he just made your product, by the way. If you build one, you know, you know, keep them. Uh a funnels for tech nerd founders is what you should probably call that, and just sell that thing for like a hundred bucks a year, and you're probably never gonna have to go via fractional anything. Uh do you ever find this by the way? Because you're technical, you build something, and then like a 10 years later, you're like, shit, I built eBay. I didn't even realize it. Have you ever done that? You built something, you're like, and it became like an Amazon effectively, and you're like, oh I I did that. I built a Salesforce for myself.

SPEAKER_00: 23:00

Damn it.

SPEAKER_01: 23:03

Um, thanks by the way for coming on. I'm I'm you know, I always ask this question, or I I will say my last guest, I forgot to ask the first one. If there was a question I should have asked you today and I didn't, what would that question have been?

SPEAKER_02: 23:16

It's you know, fractional is a fancy title these days. A lot of us are going in for many reasons. Uh, but like the the impact of being fractional and having to work on all these things, how how does that impact personal life, right? So, you know, um it does, right? So no matter how resilient and strong I am, um you are uh that it still impacts having like you already have your personal, your family, your health, your financial. You throw like three more clients into the mix that that want your attention. So I went from four things to worry about to seven things suddenly. So um there's no easy answer there, but you know, uh every morning I start with a uh like a daily health tracking checklist. By the way, you know, I'm very focused on my health right now at the stage I'm in my life. So I make sure I check off the maximum number of things on my uh on my health and mental health checklist. You know, some of the things like have did I take 10 deep breaths today? Did I meditate for 15 minutes today? Did I get the morning sun? Am I working? Uh I'm sleeping without any digital devices nearby, things like that.

SPEAKER_01: 24:40

You know, I like that I'm hard to do is because you're like, oh my god beeping. Do I get up?

SPEAKER_00: 24:46

Do I get it?

SPEAKER_01: 24:48

That's by way. I uh on the days that you accomplish it, I'm I'm gonna probably make the poor assumption you have more productive, happier days. When you get the stuff yourself and health done first, you feel you don't feel like guilt, you don't feel things in the background.

SPEAKER_02: 25:00

Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. So it's like I scare scale on a zero to ten if I'm like nine or more. Naturally I feel happy. Um, I get a nine when I play tennis.

SPEAKER_01: 25:10

Uh we're gonna take that offline because I just started playing tennis, and holy cow, and we we'll take that offline myself. Awesome. I'll leave this guy's like the you know, it I ran hundreds of I think a thousand or so interviews that I've done through GPT and or through our AI stuff. And I said basically, what are the themes? Where do people cut the tie? So as I form my book and I'm like really trying to make value out of this, it is finances, which is money you make, how you spend it, right? Stuff, it's relationships, it's health, and it's faith. And um, you know, as I looked at things I try to cut the tie with or improve my life on, health was a big one and has been, um, specifically mental health and physical. And so I applaud you for doing that. Because once I moved, I had this video of me from the last 18 months moving from eight working out every day, seven days a week, for the most part, unless I'm injury, I really need the day at 8 a.m. Just religiously be in there no matter what. 35 minutes some days are shit, some days are great, right? You see it, I go from this guy that's 235 with giant loaf handles to abs in 18 months. And I'm and I turned 15 days, they turned 50 in two months, and I have abs again. I was very happy. Uh uh a friend of mine, a gay friend of mine, said, Hey, how you're doing? I sent him back this picture because he knew me, I was fatter, and he's like, Where's your OnlyFans account? I'm buying in. I'm like, dude, I'll get it.

SPEAKER_00: 26:25

I'm gonna the biggest compliment you can ask for. It is the big thing. Get out of the things that'll work out in my life. I can at least just pretend to be gay for a while and get hit on something great.

SPEAKER_01: 26:35

I'll take compliments wherever I can get them right now. All right. See, you didn't see the you did your show, it didn't you didn't see it going this way. You know, you never know. Thank you for joining me today. Uh, once again, how do you want someone to get a hold of you and who should get a hold of you?

SPEAKER_02: 26:49

Uh I'm I'm on LinkedIn every day, so just look me up, Balky. I'll be the only one uh that'll come up on LinkedIn, and I spend unhealthy amounts of time talking to people and sharing my insights. Uh, you can get 95% of what I know on LinkedIn. I'm an open book, so please connect with me there. You'll make my day if you send me a connection request or a comment on my post.

SPEAKER_01: 27:15

Awesome. Thank you so much for joining today. Appreciate it. Uh listen, Bulky, thank you for coming. Anyone who's still here, uh, thank you for listening. Get out there, go cut a tie to whatever's holding you back in your success journey, but own your own success, define it, and let nothing stop you for getting it. You get what you get one shot at this whole deal, so go get it.