Ori Keren Podcast Transcript
Ori Keren joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast.
[00:00:12] Brian Thomas: Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Ori Keren. Ori Keren is the co-founder and CEO at LinearB. If you’ve been in software for a while, think of a time when your team was operating at its best. Quick execution, fast-paced delivery, everyone knew what they needed to do. As the ex-VP of engineering at CloudLock, which was acquired by Cisco, Ori discovered there’s no better feeling as an engineering leader than enabling your team to be happy with their work and deliver efficiently with the highest quality.
That’s why he co-founded Linear B and serves as its CEO. He wants to give organizations the ability to work like this all the time.
Well, good afternoon, Ori. Welcome to the show.
[00:00:54] Ori Keren: Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.
[00:00:56] Brian Thomas: Absolutely. Thank you so much. And hailing out of the great country of Israel, I appreciate you making the time. There is a, about a seven-hour time difference. Actually, eight for us here in the Midwest, but I appreciate, again, you making that time. Ori, we’re going to just jump in here, get started on your story. You’ve got quite the career as a software engineer, a serial entrepreneur, senior executive, and now you’re the co-founder and CEO of Linear B.
Could you share with our audience The secret to your career growth and what inspires you?
[00:01:29] Ori Keren: Yeah, I would say I don’t think I have any, one special secret, but I think the one thing I would recommend is to be curious and to make sure you’re enjoying your journey. I was blessed and lucky to find something that I really like doing.
There was parts in my career that the things that I love doing were, write code, be a, a developer that implements a lot of systems. There were other parts that I wanted to make more impact. So, I wanted kind of like more of a manager. And you know that the right time has come in my life that I say, Hey, you know what, at this point I want to be a founder and start a company.
So, I would say the secret is listen to your gut, listen to your intuition on the things that push you like that you want to do. That’s like the most important thing. Again, I feel. Lucky to be a person that can do the thing that I love doing. That’s like the secret if I have to say and what inspires me, I think again, it’s going back to something very primal, Initially, the first time in my life when I was a kid and I keep telling this story that I had a small computer Simplus Spectrum that I played games on it. But I also learned that you can build things with it. And I remember the first time I built this small program and gave my young sister, she didn’t have a lot of choices, but I gave her this small crappy game that I built to play with it.
And the moment that you see someone trying to consume and go through an experience of something you built. That’s the thing that inspires me. It’s we’re doing it at a bigger scale right now, but it’s still the thing that gives the most inspiration.
Build something, solve a problem. See how people use it. It’s very basic.
[00:03:10] Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. You highlighted some of those things that you found something in your life that really truly gives you that passion. And then seeing people’s eyes light up when you develop something for them that makes their eyes light up, which is really, really awesome.
So thanks again for sharing that Ori. Ori a next question for you. Your company touts streamlining operations to increase predictability, reduce costs and improve the quality of every release. Can you delve into this a bit and share your thoughts on the future of engineering processes and workflows?
[00:03:41] Ori Keren: Yeah. So what we do is software delivery management. That’s how we call our platform and the purpose of our platform. And it roots, it comes to help like engineering teams and development teams to measure the efficiency of their processes. There’s a lot of friction built in.
Inefficiency that are part of the development process, because there’s a lot of handoffs that are involved in that. There’s also an increasing need that comes from outside. Which wants to open up the black box and understand, okay, what are the investments that people are doing inside engineering organization?
How much is going to innovation and how much is going to feature enhancement and how much is going to keeping the lights on and just making sure the services are right. So, our platform as a whole, kind of maps the entities that are involved in this process helps the engineering teams like to find the bottlenecks and improve them.
But we didn’t stop there. And that’s what again, going back to what excites me. It’s not just about measuring it. It’s also about when you see a problem for example, our platform helps you understand what happens to your code from when it’s being committed until it’s out In production in the hands of customers and you’re transformed into a true value when you see a bottleneck, our platform also enables you to solve it, meaning we developed a layer that you can actually code and build. Policies that will solve the problem if it’s a problem of efficiency, so you can make sure that the code review process, for example, will be much more automated and faster.
You have quality issues, you can ensure that in certain areas, you pull the right code expert in order to solve it. In high level, hope it explains well, like what our platform does. And that’s the mission that we took. Every day is exciting when you’re trying to solve those problems.
[00:05:33] Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. Problem solving is really, especially when they’re challenging makes people really excited. Sometimes obviously get frustrated, but I love how you kind of delve into that a little bit as far as, finding another facet of your passion here as you work to make things better using this software that you’re developing for your customers.
So thank you. Ori, we are a technology platform publication podcast. We love tech. I cut my teeth as a developer, believe it or not, back in the day. So, you’re obviously leveraging some of that new and emerging technologies in your tech stack. Is there anything you might be able to share with us today?
[00:06:09] Ori Keren: Yeah, I would say a lot of the things that I’m being asked right now by our customers and our partners is, of course, there’s a lot of buzz around Gen AI generative AI and what I can share that when we, as a company, we decided to look at it from different angles. One of the exciting things that we decided to do is to see where we can leverage that strong technology internally.
And I can give two examples of use cases where we leverage it, and it helps a lot. Since we’re now, selling this platform at scale, to a lot of customers, one of the things that happens is our sales reps, they want to ask questions about the product and, we communicate over Slack, as you mentioned in the beginning, some of the people in the company are in Tel Aviv, in Israel, and some are it’s almost 50 50 50 percent are in the U.
S. So sometimes they would ask a question and there’s a time zone difference and they need to wait for somebody from the product organization to answer. What we did. Generative AI and we index our entire internal documentation. So now, when somebody asked this question of a Slack channel, there’s a scientist building a great solution where, first of all I bot answers, if the answer is available within its knowledge.
It saves time, it saves the back and forth. It saves a lot of attention and a lot of things that, that would’ve involved like people here. So, people can be focused on, other things and building that knowledge base. And we do it with other things, with the security questionnaires, et cetera.
So I would say, GenAI is definitely making an impact. We chose to capitalize on it internally to see where internally we can use it to improve our processes.
[00:07:51] Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. And we’ve seen just an explosion of the application of Generative AI. I in the last. Gosh, just a couple of years it’s been amazing actually.
So I appreciate you sharing that. And that certainly is a solution that you could implement and reshift some of your staff to work on those higher-level tasks. So, we appreciate that share. Ori, last question of the day, can you share something from your career experience that would be helpful for those listening today looking to grow their career in either tech or entrepreneurship?
[00:08:22] Ori Keren: Yeah, I would go back to the, to the first question that you asked me about of what inspires me and it’s related. I’ve read this thing where I truly believe in it, that, and you can apply to growth of a company or your growth, the growth of your career.
When you look back in retrospective, everything seems very smooth and linear. Your growth, your career, right? and even if you look at the growth of your company, it’s, it looks like a very smooth line. Okay. We were here. Even if I’ll describe my journey, I will say I was a developer.
I decided to be a team leader. Then I say, okay, I’m ready to be a director. I’m ready to be VP of engineering and founder. But It’s not like that when you’re inside of this. It looks much less smooth. It involves a lot of growing pain; it may be not linear. It’s go, it goes up and down and back up and back down.
And the best thing I think I can share is that’s just part of the journey. My biggest tip is resiliency and you’re going to fall a lot of times. So it’s fine. Falling is part of it. You should get up, see what you learned, get up again and try again. That’s my number one tip, if I can share.
[00:09:28] Brian Thomas: Thank you. And that’s awesome. Those are some wonderful gems that you’ve shared. Obviously, consistency, persistency, but that resiliency is truly what’s going to get you through some of that tough times. Ori, it was a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
[00:09:44] Ori Keren: Thanks for having me. It was great here.
[00:09:46] Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Ori Keren Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
