Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share Co-founder trust & making major pivots w/ Daniela Miao & Khawaja Shams @ Momento
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
Co-founder trust & making major pivots w/ Daniela Miao & Khawaja Shams @ Momento
How do co-founders know when it’s time to pivot? And how do you make sure your team is on board with the new direction? Daniela Miao and Khawaja Shams (Co-Founders @ Momento) join us to talk about their experience pivoting from a consumer Social Fitness app to a B2B SaaS company. The technical co-founders share their story of starting with a team and not a product, how they decided on a new direction, establishing open communication, and getting feedback from the market.
ABOUT KHAWAJA SHAMSKhawaja is a technical hands-on leader, passionate about investing in people, setting a bold vision, and execution with his team. At AWS, he owned DynamoDB, a highly available fully managed database service serving at extreme scales! It powers much of Amazon retail, Amazon Video, and control planes of critical AWS Services. Khawaja subsequently owned product and engineering for all 7 of the AWS Media Services, responsible for streaming some of the most visible events in the world, including the Super Bowl and the world’s first Live 4K Stream from Space. He was awarded the prestigious NASA Early Career Medal for his contributions to the Mars Rovers.
“It took us some time, but we eventually internalized that we're not the domain experts in this. And in some cases, we learned that the investors knew more about the space than we did. And that's a bad sign, right? Like that's a great thing for an entrepreneur... but it's a really difficult position to put the investors in.”
- Khawaja Shams
ABOUT DANIELA MIAODaniela Miao is the co-founder of Momento, a serverless distributed caching platform. Previously, she was the Director of Platform Engineering at Lightstep, and tech lead at AWS DynamoDB. Daniela has spoken at many events including re:Invent, QCon, and Kubecon. At Momento, she works on distributed system performance, observability, security, and the intersection of engineering with business.
"The hardest conversation... I think I can speak for both of us when I say this, was actually with each other. You know, imagine sort of that brewing sense of doubt and wanting to broach the conversation.
And this is a BIG pivot, right? It's it has nothing to do with each other. And I think that was really profound. It normalized having a pivot... after that, the rest actually felt a lot easier...
- Daniela Miao
SHOW NOTES:- How Daniela and Khawaja met (2:35)
- Starting with a team, not a product (3:56)
- Choosing the idea for a product (5:02)
- Pivoting from a consumer fitness app to B2B SaaS (6:41)
- Getting the team on board with a pivot (13:08)
- How to establish open communication (16:43)
- Advice for pivoting a startup (20:34)
- How to know when to pivot (23:52)
- Why focus so much on values in the early days? (28:04)
- Go-to-market tips for technical leaders (32:58)
- Getting feedback from the market (35:19)
- Rapid Fire Questions (38:06)
View all episodes
By The Engineering Leadership Community (ELC)How do co-founders know when it’s time to pivot? And how do you make sure your team is on board with the new direction? Daniela Miao and Khawaja Shams (Co-Founders @ Momento) join us to talk about their experience pivoting from a consumer Social Fitness app to a B2B SaaS company. The technical co-founders share their story of starting with a team and not a product, how they decided on a new direction, establishing open communication, and getting feedback from the market.
ABOUT KHAWAJA SHAMSKhawaja is a technical hands-on leader, passionate about investing in people, setting a bold vision, and execution with his team. At AWS, he owned DynamoDB, a highly available fully managed database service serving at extreme scales! It powers much of Amazon retail, Amazon Video, and control planes of critical AWS Services. Khawaja subsequently owned product and engineering for all 7 of the AWS Media Services, responsible for streaming some of the most visible events in the world, including the Super Bowl and the world’s first Live 4K Stream from Space. He was awarded the prestigious NASA Early Career Medal for his contributions to the Mars Rovers.
“It took us some time, but we eventually internalized that we're not the domain experts in this. And in some cases, we learned that the investors knew more about the space than we did. And that's a bad sign, right? Like that's a great thing for an entrepreneur... but it's a really difficult position to put the investors in.”
- Khawaja Shams
ABOUT DANIELA MIAODaniela Miao is the co-founder of Momento, a serverless distributed caching platform. Previously, she was the Director of Platform Engineering at Lightstep, and tech lead at AWS DynamoDB. Daniela has spoken at many events including re:Invent, QCon, and Kubecon. At Momento, she works on distributed system performance, observability, security, and the intersection of engineering with business.
"The hardest conversation... I think I can speak for both of us when I say this, was actually with each other. You know, imagine sort of that brewing sense of doubt and wanting to broach the conversation.
And this is a BIG pivot, right? It's it has nothing to do with each other. And I think that was really profound. It normalized having a pivot... after that, the rest actually felt a lot easier...
- Daniela Miao
SHOW NOTES:- How Daniela and Khawaja met (2:35)
- Starting with a team, not a product (3:56)
- Choosing the idea for a product (5:02)
- Pivoting from a consumer fitness app to B2B SaaS (6:41)
- Getting the team on board with a pivot (13:08)
- How to establish open communication (16:43)
- Advice for pivoting a startup (20:34)
- How to know when to pivot (23:52)
- Why focus so much on values in the early days? (28:04)
- Go-to-market tips for technical leaders (32:58)
- Getting feedback from the market (35:19)
- Rapid Fire Questions (38:06)