Bharath Hariharan

Right now, I am figuring out what I want to do next. I was most recently a VP of Apps Engineering at ID.me. And before that, I spent a long career at Salesforce, where I witnessed some amazing growth and was fortunate enough to grow with the company and wore many hats as a software engineering architect, as a senior director of engineering. Just did a whole lot of different things in engineering and product. But at the root of it all, I'm just a builder who's really passionate about technology and trying to build new cool things and use all the tools that we have.

Yeah, basically.

Well, it's been quite the journey. So what's interesting is I always talk about how I started my career. I started my career when Steve Jobs announced the iPhone, in 2007 or whatever. So I joined Garmin back then, which made GPS units, and they saw the revolution coming. Just like most other companies there, Android was a fledgling open source project and it allowed big companies or other companies to build their own mobile phones. So I joined a small tactical team at Garmin that was tasked with building mobile phones. And that's where my love for mobile started. So I worked on basically every layer of the stack. I was a sponge, I was absorbing all that tech had to offer. I worked on device drivers, I worked on apps, I worked on platforms. And we put out two beautiful phones at Garmin, the nüvifone and the Garminfone. They were not really successful as mobile phones because they were competing with the likes of Motorola and HTC and so on and so forth. But those units got repurposed as GPS units and they were super successful in that space. So that's kind of how I started. And from there on, I moved to Salesforce as one of the first few engineers that was helping build up the mobile team there. And that went on for more than a decade where I wore multiple hats. And yeah, that was a fun journey, after which I took a little break like most people in Silicon Valley do, travel the world and so on and so forth. And then I joined Procore, which was in the construction SaaS space. It was very interesting to me because it was the intersection of software and hardware. It was something that I hadn't done before. I led some innovation over there, like conceptual devices like the Procore lens. The Vision Pro had just come out from Apple. Experimented with that with 3D modeling of construction project sites and being able to report defects directly from your Vision Pro into software and so on and so forth. And that was an amazing journey as well. And after that, I joined ID.me, where I brought the mobile team to life and put out the first set of mobile products and went on to lead the entire apps organization. And that was quite the transformation as well, because that was an interesting journey because AI was accelerating so fast. And I'm sure we'll talk more about that. But I think that really helped chart what I wanted to do next and how I want to take that forward as well.

That's a great question. So a lot of exciting things. When I was traveling, my girlfriend and I were talking about building cool apps. We were thinking we should build travel apps, right? We should help people discover the joy of travel and make it easy for them, right? Now, back then when we first started traveling, building an app like that would involve either many hours of my effort coding on weekends and so on and so forth, or hire a small tactical team that would be able to build this, and I would give product direction, and then we would have to create UX separately. We'd have a designer. So we'd have to have a small surgical team. Now that's all different, right? So since I left ID.me, what I've been tinkering around with is the speed at which an idea becomes a real product is so much faster with AI. So I've been building apps myself. I've been working on a couple of apps in areas that I'm passionate about. One is options trading. Another is the travel space. But I'm also exploring options at the intersection of software and hardware, which I find very interesting now because I feel like software has been democratized to an extent. I'm an engineer, so naturally my artistic talents aren't great and I don't design pages very well. But being able to use Claude Design for that has been a godsend. It's been pretty amazing for me to be able to design rich websites and app experiences just by prompt engineering. So I can focus on the technology and the architecture, which is the stuff that I'm good at.

We're kind of in this phase where the industry's evolving, right? And we don't know which direction it's gonna go. I think what's pretty obvious is the frontier AI companies are basically doing more and more of it. So the simple wrapper apps are not really something that probably add a lot of value anymore.

That's a great question. So what I've been focused on is driven by passion. What am I passionate about, right? So travel is a space that I'm definitely passionate about. So I've been thinking about ideas like, what can I bring to that space that's not already there? What kind of disruption can I bring there? Some other areas that I've been thinking about is the intersection of hardware and software, like I talked about. Obviously, there's sensor-based things that we can do that could be very interesting. So for example, vehicle tracking, that could be something that's very interesting, by utilizing hardware, because back in the day, even if you had all that sensor data, you would have to mine all that data and processing time would take forever. Now with AI and with GPUs and things like that, we can certainly accelerate that and it's much, much faster, lower cost. So something at the intersection of hardware and software sounds very interesting.

It is.

I haven't set myself a timeline, and the beauty of being in the position that I'm in is that I'm fortunate to not have to set a timeline. So it's quite the experience where I can basically go and pick whatever passion project I have every week and start working on it. And how I evaluate it is at the end of the week, am I more passionate about it? Am I less passionate about it? Am I feeling more confident about it or less confident about it? And then once you start building something and you visualize something, that's when I get a sense of, can I actually commoditize this? Can I build a business plan around this? Who would want this? What's the market share like for a product like this? Those are the types of things that I'm thinking through, but right now I'm very much in tinkering phase. I'm still very much enjoying the building part.

That is a great question. So travel itself excites me, but it recharges me more than anything so that I can come back to tech, which is what I'm really passionate about. Within tech specifically, like I said, I've always been a builder, but I've also always been a people person, right? So throughout my journey of leadership, it all boils down to people, process and tools, right? Those are the simple three pillars that everyone operates on in engineering leadership. Finding the right people for specific business domains or expertise, that's important. Tools are largely, quote unquote, solved right now with AI. You have amazing tools like Claude, you have amazing AI tools. So that's basically democratized development, design, product management, those types of areas. It's the glue that binds all this together and makes the universe function the way it's supposed to function. So what I've been passionate about is, I saw the mobile phone, and what really makes me tick is rapid acceleration and feature delivery, right? That excites me because I wanna bring something to the forefront. When I started working at Garmin, I had the opportunity to either work on the mobile phone division or I could work on airplane software. They told me that with airplane software, the code you write today would be released 10 years from now because of compliance and safety checks and all that stuff. It's great, beautiful, very important work, but it wasn't for me. So that rapid acceleration is what drives me. And then it's a bit of both. To answer your question about do I wait for the universe to find me? In some sense, yes. But I'm also sort of a driver in terms of not just technology, but people. I like to be a true multiplier. I like to help people succeed and I find joy in that as well. So a lot of mentorship, a lot of engineering leadership, organizational design, those types of facets of engineering leadership also excite me a lot.

I am.

I feel like in America, there's always been one field that's, quote unquote, high paying, and everyone wants to gravitate towards that field. This is the most successful field. Finance in the 80s, it was tech starting with the 90s. But now tech, it feels like what AI has done is by democratizing tech, it's made that almost less desirable, right? Tech salaries are going down, but tech has become a fabric of everything that gets built going forward, right? So in that sense, that has changed. Building passionate tech is not necessarily about meaning anymore. AI can actually give people more time to do things that they find in the real world that are more meaningful, but I don't know how the economics of that is gonna play out. That's what remains to be seen.

Absolutely, I completely agree with you. In fact, what I think will happen is, a lot of people do computer science degrees because they wanna enter into tech. I think over the next 20 years, they'll probably change to more students wanting to go back into medicine, more students wanting to go back into other real hands-on kind of projects that are, quote unquote, more safe, perhaps, as opposed to tech being a part of everything, because tech's gonna be a part of that job as well. Tech's gonna be a part of medicine through robotics. Tech's gonna be a part of the industrial revolution. Everything else.

Definitely a combination of both. I think there's only a subset of people that went into tech because they were passionate about tech, but I think a majority of people actually went into tech within the past 10, 15 years to make money, because that's where it pays the most, right? And that's probably gonna change, which means the percentage of people that go into tech will change, but hiring changes, obviously, right? So it's just supply and demand at the end of it.

It's a great question. So automation, automation of a lot of things at home.

Interesting home automation projects, right? So I play foosball for passion. That's another thing I do. I compete in local tournaments and stuff like that. So I've been playing around with sensors and building an app for it to measure efficiency on the foosball table. What's my best chance of scoring a goal on a foosball table? What are the accuracy numbers around that? And then using AI to automatically stream the videos, slice it up, and provide highlights and things like that. So, like I said, it's just tinkering with projects that are part of my daily life that's getting me out of bed every morning. I'm like, I want to work on this thing today, and I want to see how far I can get with that.

Absolutely.

It is, it certainly is. I feel very fortunate to be able to do it, but that's what life is about. It's about checks and balances, right? It's about recharging when you can and driving hard and being passionate, and going away and being able to do a 100% passion-based project, right? That's what really recharges my batteries. And then I come back and find an interesting space where I can contribute meaningfully. And that's where I feel like I like to challenge myself. So I also like to go to new areas that I haven't necessarily worked on and take on new challenges, maybe go to a smaller company and try and grow bigger. Challenges like that that I haven't tackled before are very exciting to me, because I am competitive and I pour my heart and soul into it and trying to make that successful.

I wouldn't call it anxiety, but I am concerned for the future of... everyone says the future of tech is nebulous and we need to figure it out. But even in my previous job, when I hired new CS grads, you kind of wonder what is the path for them in terms of mentorship. And there's some companies that have taken the approach of, we're not gonna hire new grads because we want these experienced business domain experts and they're gonna handle everything with AI. Well, that's great, because back in the day, you would hire new grads to help with coding speed with clearly defined tasks. And then you would mentor them and they would grow to understand the business domain and so on and so forth. We don't do so much of that anymore. What causes me worry is if we don't invest in the future of tech in people, what happens? Someday all of these staff engineers and principal engineers are gonna retire, and then what? Who's gonna carry the baton forward? That's one of the things that makes me wonder what exactly is that gonna entail or how is that gonna look.

Yeah, I think I've been thinking about this a bit too in terms of computer science, right? Computer science as a structured program. When I went to school for a master's in computer science, the kind of stuff that I learned was memory management and threading and all these core computer concepts that are still probably taught in school in a master's program. But this reminds me of an interview that I did for a principal engineer a few years ago, and he said, "I don't deal with multi-threading." And I'm like, "What do you mean? This is one of the foundational concepts." And he was like, "I don't have to deal with it. Libraries do that for me now. Why do I have to know it?" And to be fair, I didn't have a solid answer for him. I was like, "What am I gonna say to that? You're great at your job, cool." And AI is stripping away more and more of those foundationals of computer science, or the, quote unquote, importance of learning those concepts. So one of the areas that I've been thinking about is what should a computer science degree look like? What is the structure for that? What should we be teaching? Obviously, everyone's starting to adapt and teach a lot of the tools and how to use AI and machine learning models and things like that. Great, but that seems very reactionary as opposed to being proactive and figuring out what is actually computer science? What concepts are still very important? Architecture is still very important, I think, both hardware and software, right? So that's something that needs a lot of thinking. And I've started thinking about it. I don't really have any answers.

Right, and I feel like the education industry can also be disrupted by AI, right? Obviously, there's a lot of things that you can make accessible to people much easier at their homes, that they can learn faster, learn more, more tools. So it's great. I think the future is exciting.

Thank you.