Edward Kim, co-founder & CTO @ Gusto shares the different forms that “fear of failure” can take in your engineering org. Eddie shares incredible stories to help you spot the different signs of “fear of failure”. And you’ll hear different ways you can change your team culture, process and operations to reduce fear of failure.

“But as you continue to scale and you grow... that thing that you optimized for starts to become a disservice to you and the company. Because what happens is this fear of failure, if you take it too far, it starts to change a lot of things about the business.”

ABOUT EDWARD KIM

Prior to Gusto, Edward was the CEO and co-founder of Picwing, a Y Combinator startup and photo-printing platform. Before Picwing, Edward worked as a senior project engineer at Volkswagen Group of America Electronics Research Lab, where he led research and development for cloud-based navigation and speech recognition systems for Volkswagen and Audi.

Edward is also the developer of several award-winning Android apps that have generated more than $1 million in revenue. Edward holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University.
 

SHOWNOTES

• What it means to “remove fear of failure” as you scale (2:25)
• Signs that indicate your company is optimized around a fear of failure (6:19)
• How to know when “healthy management” actually means your company has a fear of failure and is holding you back (10:54)
• Other forms “fear of failure” can take in your organization (14:20)
• MTTR over MTBF - Why you should prioritize recovering from failure over avoiding failure (17:40)
• “Rage-fixing” & Eddie’s breakthrough moment confronting fear of failure at Gusto (23:43)
• “Kicking the flipchart” & Eddie’s breakthrough moment #2 (27:52)
• How to maximize unplanned or unintended crucial conversations (33:54)
• How to decide when you need to abandon the agenda and “kick the flipchart” (37:37)
• How psychological safety can make your team more resilient to fear of failure (40:17)
• Takeaways (44:07)

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