Champion Story 40 | Mike Shaver
Recorded on January 25, 2019
Biography: Mike Shaver is the VP of Engineering at Very Good Security, helping build systems to secure the world's sensitive data. He was formerly the Chief Technical Officer at integrate.ai, an applied AI enterprise software company that uses machine learning and cross-industry intelligence to help you focus on the moment of impact. In addition, Matt is the founder of ScaleDriver, a management consultant firm that provides clients with a system that de-risks innovation and attracts support inside and outside an organization.
Prior to joining Very Good Security, Mike was the Director of Engineering for Facebook where he managed engineering strategy for Facebook’s transition from a web-focused to mobile-first company. Before that he was also the VP of Engineering and VP of Technical Strategy for the Mozilla Corporation where he helped people understand, build, and benefit from an open web. In 2016, Mike returned to Canada and joined Real Ventures. His first investment was the startup called Integrate.ai, where later served as the Chief Technical Officer.
Mike resides in Toronto and is a huge advocate for diversity in the workplace.
I'm really fascinated about your human story, not just your founder story. I’d like to start off with the question: How did you get here?
Yeah, I've been in tech for a little more than 25 years. I grew up in Ottawa where I went to high school. I started working in an internet consultancy back when the internet was pre-web, and got connected to a bunch of web technology as it spun up. From there, I ended up at Netscape for a little while where I was part of the founding team of the Mozilla project, because I had some open source background. I was 21 when we released that, so not fully myself yet, I think. I got pretty frustrated there after a couple years trying to bridge between Mozilla and the rest of Netscape.
Then, I worked on privacy software for a couple years. I worked on getting the core of the Mozilla project out, which was different from the Netscape project at the time, and was in some distress. Following that, it was file systems for large Linux clusters. But as I was doing that, I decided that I really missed working on things used by people rather than by scientists or other machines and their pricey tech stuff.
I did a little time working at Oracle and then went back to Mozilla in, I guess, 2005. One of the things we had just released was Firefox. We had a lot of resources that we were trying to figure out how to put towards the stewardship of the web. I took on the Developer Relations piece. Flash had a big Developer Relations team pushing it from Adobe. Java had one from Sun. Silverlight had one from Microsoft, but there wasn't really one for the web.
We were much smaller than those organizations, but I put together a small team of 3 people, and built out some documentation. We were worried about the Firefox extension ecosystem. We really wanted the browser to have a lot of control exposed to people. It was a very important tool, and we thought it should be theirs. Extensions turned into a big part of Firefox, and it was a big part of its growth. A bunch of startups like StumbleUpon spun out of that, being little extensions at first.
After Mozilla, I ended up at Facebook, where I ran mobile engineering. And I went there because I didn't know anything about mobile or social, so that was a good place to learn about both of those things. I really liked the team. I worked on VR there for a while after the Oculus acquisition. I spent a bunch of time on issues of diversity, especially related to women engineers, which was sort of the area that I focused on. Somehow, I wish I had done better work there. I think it didn't get to a place I was proud of by the end, but I hope it continues to improve.
After that, it was time to come back to Canada. My ex-wife, my daughter and I moved back in 2016. I joined up with Real Ventures, which was not a career path I expected. I didn't see myself as a VC partner at any point. If you had asked me a day before I met with Jan for the first time, I would have said there was no way. I don't have a finance background, but a lot of VCs are deciding if some technical thing is feasible, if that's the team to build it, and if so, helping those teams build themselves and build their products. That’s all stuff I enjoy. So, I did that for a fair while.
Along the way, I made an investment in a company called Integrate, which was founded by another ex-Facebook person. I really fell in love with that company. So, I ended up taking some time off from Real Ventures for medical reasons, and when I came back, I said, this is the thing I want to do. I want to go back and operate. I want to be with these guys, and so I joined. I've been there since November. I run the technical half of the company concerning engineering, design, product management and machine learning. I feel like I know how to do about 10% of it, and I'm having a great time!
Thank you for sharing your founder journey with us. I would love to ask you: How does mental health play into this?
Through it all, mental health has been a part of it. I've had to figure how it fits into my life. We had to figure out how it fit into my marriage. I have to figure out now if it's in my relationship with my daughter, with my girlfriend, and obviously with my work. I had to figure out how much I wanted it to be something that was known about me. I decided quite a while ago, while I was at Mozilla.
In 2010 I got sick, and I was diagnosed with bipolar. We thought I had depression issues before that. I had to start to tell people about my difficulties with my mental health. I did it, in part, because getting help from people is what I needed. They couldn't help me if they didn't know what was going on.
But also because, at least for me, it didn’t put me at very much risk. I already had an established career and I had great relationships with my friends who I knew would understand. I wasn't going to get fired because of it. That's not what Mozilla was going to do. And it wasn't going to end my career. There might be jobs that I wasn't offered because somebody knew I had bipolar, but it didn't stall my career and it would continue to progress.
I hope you don't mind me asking... I've had experiences with depression growing up, but I don't have experience with bipolar. I’m curious, especially for people who may be reading, what is that experience? How do you describe it?
I was first diagnosed with depression. Clinically, for the first time, in high school and I took some terrible medication for it, Imipramine. I think it's a tricyclic. It's very primitive. I missed a little bit of school, which actually kind of changed the arc of my career. So, that was the first piece of it.
And then, I would be on and off medication. I always wanted to be off of it, or I would forget to take it, or never schedule to refill it. I missed some work in 2000. We were living in Montreal for a couple months and I ended up leaving the company. So, when I got sick right before Christmas in 2010, I was living in California with my wife and daughter. We went down there for 9 months because Mozilla was looking for a new CEO, and we were trying to ship Firefox 4. It felt good to be closer to the biggest center of people in tech. We spent some time together. My daughter was still in pre-school, and my wife wasn't working, so it worked out pretty well.
But then I got sick. I was like, "Well, shit, I'm depressed again." I was depressed and not doing anything. I wasn't reaching out to anybody. I wasn't looking for help. I wasn't getting out of bed. My wife called the doctor. She found HERon the web. She called, left a message, called back, and then came in with the phone and said, "Hey, could you talk to this person?" I talked to her a little bit. dR Rachel Goldstein, in Sunnyvale, and it was great. Right away, I was like, "Okay, I think she can help me. I'm going to try this."
I look back and remember how difficult that time was. There were all these things I was really proud of. Once I got the bipolar diagnosis, I looked back at the things I was proud of and was like, "Was that just the hypomania, did I even accomplish that, or was that the disorder talking? Was any of that really mine?" Because in a lot of ways, a lot of the stuff I built my career on, feels like a hypomanic episode in hindsight.
Shortly after that, I left Mozilla. because I didn't have a lot left to do there. We had shipped Firefox 4, which was sort of bittersweet. It was nice that the organization I had built was able to do that without me, but I wanted to be there when they pushed the button. I wasn't able to do that. I was trying to figure out how this diagnosis fit into my life. So, we moved back to Toronto. I only stayed for about 6 months before moving back to California again. When we returned, I got to work with this doctor again. That was great. I hadn't found a doctor I wanted to work with in Toronto.
Once we moved back to California, I started working for Facebook. Again, I was doing really great stuff. I was really proud of being part of transforming that company into a mobile power house. But then Christmas happened. Christmas has never been a good time for me for whatever reason. I think some of it's seasonal affective and some of it is historical Christmas stuff. And this time, I ended up back in hospital again.
After that, my wife did some research. She was a medical librarian, so research is her thing. That was the first time I'd come across transcranial magnetic stimulation TMS or RTMS (repetitive). They did that at Stanford, where they've done some of the original trials. So, I signed up. It took longer than we first expected. But I did get better. Getting better always leads to the question, "Did the treatment help or did the depression just go away cause it's a cyclical condition." Either way, I was better. I went back to work at Facebook.
We used to have these “all-hands” meetings at Facebook where we talked about different aspects of the company and our plans. One of these meetings was themed on different people around the world who built their businesses, organizations or charities on through their Facebook accounts. People came in and talked about how they did that and why that was really important to them. We had a session at one of these events and the theme was, "How does our product matter to you?" We were looking for people at Facebook to share their comments on how they're connected to our product.
So, I got up in front of about 8,000 people and cried a bunch. I talked about how I used Facebook while I was in the hospital to stay connected to people, but also to see the life I was working to get back to. I used it to remind myself that this was the life I belonged in. I shared how much I needed that. How much I needed to see other people overcoming things and through that borrowed strength from them.
Everyone was super supportive. I got lots of hugs when we got off the stage. That was the first public thing of that sort that I had done. After that, people started to really approach me for advice. Sometimes I didn't think I could give them advice. I felt like they wanted a solution that I didn't have for myself, so I didn't have it for them. But, I just sat and talked about things with them. And I realized that a lot of what I could offer was empathy and my own experiences.
Thank you so much for sharing that. What can people do to take care of their mental health or emotional well-being?
I mean, mental health and physical health are tied. So, you should do a much better job than I do with managing your sleep, eating properly and getting exercise. I've basically asked the whole company to help keep me on track. Many of them have agreed.
Also, I did this activity after leaving the hospital in California the first time. It’s part of a deep program and the activity is called WRAP, Wellness Recovery Action Plan. The idea is that you do this activity when you're feeling healthy. It lets you capture some of your healthy judgment. You keep track of stuff like, "Things I can do to really improve my mood?" Like cooking, taking a bath, watching a movie, hanging out, playing with my kid. These kinds of things.
It's sort of like touching-up-the-paint kind of stuff. Because when you're feeling depressed, you can't think of the things that you would usually enjoy. At that point, the world doesn't show color anymore. And then, there’s another activity that’s part of this that is about identifying the signs that things are getting bad for me. Like, "Did you shower today? No. Yesterday? No." Okay, maybe you're getting depressed. These are things to watch out for. And it also becomes things that other people can watch for you as well. It's a tool, not just for yourself but for your support network.
These are so helpful. Thank you for sharing and for having this conversation with me today.
I won't say my pleasure. It's difficult. But some things you do because we want to do them and some things you do then because you want to have done them. This was something I wanted to have done, so thank you for your opportunity.