Champion Story 08 | Steve Pereira
Recorded on December 5, 2018
Biography: Steve Pereira is Founder of Visible, which helps software product teams save weeks off their improvement efforts and become better than they ever thought possible. Steve provides tools and coaching to teams looking to beat their status quo, clarify and innovate like the world's best startups using the best DevOps principles and practices.
In addition to being the Founder of Visible, Steve has represented the organization as a speaker at numerous summits and conferences including DeveloperWeek Enterprise 2020, Toronto Agile Conference 2020 and DevOps Online Summit 2020.
Steve is also a mentor at Futurpreneur Canada, helping underrepresented early-stage founders navigate their startup journey. He’s also the Community Leader at DevOps Toronto, Toronto’s largest DevOps community that brings like-minded professionals together each month to learn, discuss and network. Prior to joining Visible, Steve was the Chief Technology Officer at Statflo, Technical Advisor at Myplanet, and Systems Engineer at Wave.
First of all, I am excited to be doing this interview with you. Can you share your founder and origin story?
So I grew up in a family of six kids. I'm in the middle though so I have two younger siblings. It's a mix of girls and boys. My parents are, luckily, still married. They’ve lived in the same house since I was born.
Growing up in a big house, with a bunch of people, there were very rare times when everyone was in the house at the same time. There's a big distance between my oldest sibling and my youngest. But it gave me this nice balance where if I ever wanted to be alone, I could, and if I didn't want to be alone, I could find someone who's doing something. I think that balanced me out a lot.
Beyond having to be at family dinner every night, I was left to my own devices to manage my social interactions and to manage how much I interacted with people. That was the only mandatory social activity aside from going to church. I had to go to church 'til I could convince my mom that it was a lost cause for me. But I did that for years, and years, and years.
Being in a family of six kids, you get a lot of alone time, if you want. And sometimes, you get alone time, whether you want it or not, because there's just so much going on. So, your parents can be completely preoccupied with someone else or something else.
My dad worked full-time. He had the same job for 35 years working in telecom. And my mom worked part-time. She would sell Avon, and then she became a school trustee. She was always very involved in school and the church.
My dad's backstory brought me into tech from a very young age, because he would always be bringing home broken equipment. He worked for Bell and they always had old telephones. Then, they started to have weird fax machines and all kinds of stuff that my dad wouldn't just throw out. He would bring it at home so that we could tinker with it. I think more than anyone in the family that was my thing.
I was obsessed with anything new that came home that you could take apart and put back together again. Then you could plug it in and see if it worked. And then, try and figure out what it actually does. I was always fascinated with that. So that set me off on this path of being really into tech.
The other passion of mine was art. I love to draw. I would just obsessively draw or mostly doodling. It was mostly a way of satisfying an attention deficit when I was younger. So I'd be in class and be drawing all the time. I always got in trouble for drawing in class. What I really wanted to do when I was becoming a teenager was work for Pixar and make animated movies. My primary obsession there wasn't necessarily a story, it wasn't necessarily character building, it was like… you can just design something, anything in your imagination and see it in real life. I love that aspect of it.
So, I went fairly far down the path out of high school to adopting that as my career. I didn't have a huge art portfolio. I was trying to catch up in high school and take a bunch of art courses, but I didn't get into a really great school. I just got into one of those, “Give us a bunch of money and we'll train you for a couple of months and give you a certificate.” It was surprisingly great. I learned so much about so many different aspects of life by trying to build it in a computer. But talking to people there, going through that experience, I saw that at the other side was this low-paying job where you're maybe working six months or maybe working nights and then you get fired and you have to find another job. It just seemed like the struggle that I didn't want to sign up for the long term.
I suspect it is because there's always more talent than I think projects going on. It might be a little bit different nowadays where you have so many visual effects in movies and games. Hopefully, it's swinging back to where it's there's a lot of demand for talent.
But back when I was going to school, it was like they were just treated terribly. You were sort of signing yourself up for a life of struggle to pursue art, which is like a timeless tale, right? So I looked at that and I thought, "I don't know that I want to go down that road forever," and the further you go down that road, it's hard to go back. You don't really have people going from art school to business school very often.
So I thought, "Okay, well what's the other thing that you can't really help yourself from doing?" It’s playing with computers, fixing computers, helping people with computers. So I got a job, luckily, through my sister’s friend who got me an interview with IBM. I started helping people with problems over the phone. Just basic tech support. That exposure set me off on the human side of tech from very early on.
When you start, you have this frustration about “Why is this so hard for people to understand?” You're native to all this technology. You know very innately how all this fits together. It's so clear to you. Once you get over that frustration, it's a very humbling experience. Connecting with people and understanding, "Yeah, this is way harder than it should be," or “This is designed in a way that is not intuitive and is not helping anybody.”
So, I moved through this attitude of “why don't you understand this, why is it so hard?” It's like going from being a teenager to being an adult. Everything is so simple when you're a teenager because your vision is so tunneled. You see everything through our own lens. Then you grow up and you're like, "Well, the world is full of infinite complexity." Everything is constantly influencing everything else. That's why the simplest thing is incredibly difficult.
So that practical education… I never went to school for tech. I just went from high school straight into professional tech. And, I became fascinated with how difficult it is to do what we want to do -- regardless of how many tools we have, or what the state of technology is in, and how that impacts people. We're trying to do valuable things all the time. We build these tools and we build all this infrastructure to make it easier. We always have a better hammer. But often times, we trip over that because we go too far in the direction of optimization or we try and use that hammer for everything. I got really fascinated with that, which led me to working in customer support for a software company after IBM. That exposed me to the software world.
I was very young. It's not like I quit my job and started a business. I didn’t come from an entrepreneurial family. I had no connection to the startup scene at this point. And I was working at a small software company that was not a startup. It was like a lifestyle business. There were very mature founders. They were more focused on their quality of life than hitting an exit or raising money. It was bootstrapped. It was hard work, but we had a niche, we had customers and we focused a lot of time on them, not on growing the business.
Then, I went from there back into fixing computers and back into building them, deploying them, and managing them. I worked for a brokerage firm, which took me back into desktop support in a company that made a lot of money. I thought, "Okay, what is it like to work in a company that basically prints money. Where budgeting and scaling are less of an issue and you don't have to fight so hard to do specific things?" But, it was an extremely predictively toxic environment in many ways. That said, I also got to apply all these principles of automation and optimizing to different processes and continue along that line.
Eventually, I got into consulting. At the time, I was tired of focusing on one way of doing things and one experience in the startup world. I thought, "Well, everyone does all these things differently. Let me go out and see if I can get more exposure to more at the same time. And also, maybe help more people and scale myself," which didn't work very well at all. I was not good at that.
Didn't work how you expected?
No. I basically tried to have a bunch of full-time jobs at the same time. I didn't scale efficiently at all. It was very challenging. I had all these clients and I wanted to give them as much of my time as I could. That's just a terrible way to help people or do business, because you end up getting completely burned out.
I went from that back to a single startup. Now, I think I've learned a lot about how to help a broader range of people in companies and I'm ready to try it again. Ready to try the scaling thing again and see if I can avoid the burn out.
I'm so curious in terms of your experience, especially with Statflo and being a CTO. I know you’re also coming from a journey where you've seen the human side of tech. What was that like for you?
I think a major light bulb moment for me early on was meeting other technical folks. I was always interested in different topics of conversation or puzzled by the way people's attention drifted towards tech. My journey goes a long way back in tech. It's been more than 20 years now.
I came to this realization and I don't know if I could actually trace it back to its origin, but I just realized that I didn't really care about tech the same way that a lot of people do. I was always fascinated by what it could do, but I was always unimpressed by its temporality. How transient tech is, or how disposable it is. It's always changing. It's always evolving and there's so much fragmentation in it, all over the place.
I found that if I'm going to keep chasing whatever the latest thing is or trying to understand all of this complexity just so it can go away, then I don't know how I can stay sane. I don’t know how I'm going to be able to contribute anything towards a lifetime body of work, because if I'm constantly shifting my attention. If I'm always just chasing the news, then where is the experience beyond? I've seen all these things in the past and I ignored them because I was always looking at the next thing. That just seemed super unhealthy to me.
I saw another side to this. I don't know if they diametrically oppose or there's a clear dichotomy there, but on the human side, these are problems that we've been working on forever. We're always headed in the same direction, more or less. There's a greater sense of continuity and evolution there. It just seemed so much more worthy of my attention.
Then, I looked around at the industry and all I saw were people focusing on tech and so few people focusing on the human aspect. So few asking what all this does. What happens when you mix tech with the reality of us all being human? That just seemed incredibly underserved and incredibly important to me. So, when you marry those two things together, and no one's paying attention, and you recognize it's incredibly valuable to pay attention to it… How could I do anything else? That's the crux of my obsession. It's taken a long time to commit to, because I'm a lazy, easily distracted person.
I prefer to wonder. I always prefer to satisfy my curiosity over walking the path or setting those milestones. I'm not a type A person. Back to me doodling in notebooks in class. I still have, I think, a very artistically focused mind. So, I prefer to explore softer things -- the intangible things, the things that are really nebulous and complex -- where creativity is valued over technical acumen. This made me a weird CTO, I think.
There's a lot of CTOs who will lock themselves in a bunker and come out when they have the stone tablets and plot the course for a company. They’ll come out and say, "This is our technical vision and it's going to get us to where we need to go." My philosophy was always, "Who cares about the tech? Let's do things we know work and focus on being a team. Let’s focus on making sure that we can perform at our maximum level as a group," which means taking care of ourselves, taking care of each other, communicating, collaborating.
What has allowed you to keep moving forward? Because you've been in tech for a while, so I feel like a lot of people could learn from this.
That's a great question. I think it might be hard for me to diagnose. I would say, I owe a lot of my resilience to my dad. He’s a very stoic figure, a very steady-in-a-storm sort of person. He decided very early on how he was going to live his life and he's been extremely consistent. His demeanor, his personality, he's not someone that easily gets emotional. But he also never withheld affection or connection.
So I had a really great role model in my dad. He showed me how to stay calm and manage my own stress levels. I never saw him blow up and overload himself. He crafted his life so that he was able to comfortably live the way that he wanted to live. I always really admired that. I've taken a very different path for myself, but I think having him as a point of reference really set my temperament and set my patience. I’ll think to myself, “My dad would never get upset at this” or “This wouldn't rattle my dad.”
Growing up in a family of six kids, you don't always get attention. You don't always get your problems solved. You don't always get time. You're often left to your own devices, which made me very comfortable with being alone with myself and having to evaluate situations on my own. It made me very introspective and, in many ways, introverted. But, it also gave me lots of tools to manage my own mental state with.
For example, I could be frustrated with a situation. But, the only way I could see to get out of it was on my own, deciding to react a certain way to it or stick it out by being patient and waiting for it to pass. Knowing that with the examples of my older siblings, things do pass. They're great, so I'll be fine. I just looked at my surroundings and I had some great examples of how to stay calm and focus on the positive. That not everything is the end of the world. So, I can relax into how to see myself out of the storm. Having those beacons, the lighthouses in my life, helped me trust that things pass and things get better.
Then, as an adult, I'm not a very...mindful person. I don't practice meditation. But I do believe very strongly in it. I admire a lot of the principles of spending time alone in your head and separating your emotions from what's happening in the world. I've become very interested in how we separate our mental state from the state that we find ourselves in. It's still many, many nights working in previous jobs where I couldn't fall asleep because I was just so stressed out about something, or so afraid to deal with something that needed to be dealt with or make a decision that was extremely difficult to make.
In those times, I would really rely on tools like mindfulness and repeating mantras, writing out my thoughts, trying to get things out of my head. That I would say is most of how I cope. That being said, I think a major weakness of mine is I don't actually reach out to other people often enough when I have stress or worries or I'm afraid of something or have a very challenging situation.
I tend to not want to burden people or go through the challenges of explaining my situation, my thought process, and my emotional state. For me, I think about that as "That's so much work, and that's so challenging, and I'm putting such a burden on someone else to try and help me with my problem."
So my immediate reaction is always like how do we fix this ourselves? I think as I grow as a person, I'm constantly trying to remind myself of leveraging the understanding and the experiences of others -- having that not be a burden, but a relationship. I’m recognizing the value of being part of a community, being part of friendships and building trust by being vulnerable. I think a lot of people perceive me as being an invulnerable person because I'm tall, and bald, and scary-looking. I always wear black and I have a thick beard and typically a serious look of concentration on my face. I have a terrible image for someone who should be perceived as vulnerable.
But I try to balance that out by being very willing to open up, even though it's never really my idea. I'm happy to talk about whatever anyone wants to talk about, but I'm very rarely the person who's like, "Hey, I want to talk to you about something." That's never me, really.
So that's where I find myself having to do with the most work. To become a better person, I think I have to spend a lot of time on that side of the house saying, "I want to talk to you about X and I'm curious to share experiences. I'm curious to hear your perspective. What would you do if you were me?"
I find that extremely challenging, because as much as I have my dad as a role model, we never really went for long walks and talked about our feelings. That was not my house. So I don't come from a background of being vulnerable with people who are close to you. That's something that I've had to learn the hard way and I'm still so, so far from it. But I try to make progress. Hopefully, this is a step.
Thank you for sharing honestly with me. It means a lot.
It's my pleasure.