How DigtalOcean Used Content To Win Developers

Key Takeaways

• Content as a Product: Think of your content not as marketing, but as a product that solves real problems for your customers and adds value even before they swipe a credit card.
• The Power of Community: How DigitalOcean built a program that invited community members to create high-quality, relevant content, establishing a powerful brand footprint.
• PLG vs. Enterprise GTM: The critical differences in approaching a self-serve, PLG motion (like DigitalOcean) versus a sales-led, enterprise motion (like Sourcegraph).
• User vs. Buyer Personas: Why distinguishing between the practitioner who uses the product and the decision-maker who buys it is the biggest differentiator for GTM success.
• The Myth of "Developers Hate Marketing": Developers, like all humans, respond to good marketing that provides genuine value and speaks to them with authenticity.

Episode Transcript

[01:55] Disha Agarwal: Welcome back to another episode of the Modern DevGTM Brew. I'm Disha, your host, and today's episode is packed with insights for anyone navigating GTM in the DevTool world. Our guest today is Raman Sharma, a seasoned product marketing and GTM leader who has helped shape growth stories at Dev-first companies like DigitalOcean and Sourcegraph. With a deep understanding of what makes developer marketing tick, Raman brings a rare perspective. Having led GTM in both, product-led and enterprise-driven organizations. In this conversation, we talk about what truly makes content land with a dev audience. What is the strategic difference between PLG and enterprise GTM and how to think about both from first principles. Raman, welcome to the podcast. We are really thrilled to have you here.

[02:45] Raman Sharma: It's a pleasure, thanks for having me.

[02:47] Disha Agarwal: Great. So let's get started Raman. You've spent the last few years at some iconic dev-focused companies. But before we dive into that journey, how did you even get started in tech marketing? Was it something that you always wanted to do or did this just happen to be?

[03:03] Raman Sharma: I think it started with my time at Microsoft. I spent a bunch of time as a product manager on many developer-focused products. One of the products was Visual Studio, a much-loved IDE by many, many developers in the world. And that's where I felt like, hey, I loved the product management and thinking about product strategy and roadmap aspects. But I also felt I wanted to understand more around how go-to-market works, how do we take these products to market, how do you think about positioning and messaging and sales orchestration and all those things. So there was a little bit of an interest on that side because of which I very intentionally sought out product marketing roles and that started the whole journey of being in marketing. And as a domain, I feel like I was very much in love with that space, developer tools and infrastructure, cloud and so on. So it's kind of partly intentional.

[04:01] Disha Agarwal: And was that switch difficult or was that very natural for you?

[04:05] Raman Sharma: I must say like I have evolved ever since I started my career in marketing. Initially, like anyone else, I try to rely on my strengths. Like what do I bring to the table? You know, I don't know the ABCs of marketing or not all of them, definitely. But I understand products, I have like a technical background. And these are technical products for a very technical audience. So I kind of relied on that as a strength to begin with. But then slowly and slowly started building more familiarity with the discipline of marketing itself. Difficult to begin with for sure, you know, learning by the day.

[04:46] Disha Agarwal: Great, great, I think, journey there, Raman. So let's talk about your time at DigitalOcean. It's often mentioned as the gold standard when it's come to a Dev-first content strategy. What do you think made it so effective? And what are other DevTool companies still getting wrong?

[05:04] Raman Sharma: You know, in my opinion, what made it very effective was that the people... I think that if you ask a lot of people there who are working on like content and strategy and just producing content as well, they never actually thought of it as content marketing. There was very little like, we need to like be mining for these keywords or we need to be like a lot of SEO orientation or things like that. The whole idea was to build really helpful content for developers. People can discover that content, get value from it and do it consistently multiple times and then fall in love with the company as well.

So I used to hear from a lot of customers that I spoke to that many of them did not even know that we were a cloud infrastructure company. Many of them thought that we are this developer education company and we just build tutorials for them. But only after they had engaged enough with the company did they realize that we actually have, you know, some really really cool products also. So I think that was a big part of it. The thinking about content as almost like a part of your product, which solves problems for the customers, potential customers, adds value to them, even before they have swiped their credit card. So that orientation really helped the company.

[06:21] Disha Agarwal: Got it. So, and what were you trying to achieve with this content? Was it demand gen? Was it community building? Or as you mentioned, was it pure-play developer education? Like what was the end result that you were expecting?

[06:35] Raman Sharma: I have to say it was a combination of all of the above plus brand building. I don't know whether that brand building was intentional to begin with or not, but this content became a big part of the Digital Ocean brand. As I mentioned, talk to customers and they'll tell you the first interaction they had with the company was through content. So yes, DemandGen was a big part of it. Spread enough content out there and Google and all the algorithms and if the content is high quality enough, sought out enough, and is talking about the right set of problems then people will come to it and you will start gathering that SEO gravity.

But the reality is that, you know, immediate conversion does not happen just because somebody, you know, read a piece of tutorial. Repeated interactions with that content kind of leaves that brand imprint in the minds of people who are consuming that content. And these people are almost always developers or system administrators, DevOps engineers. And that brand imprint is so strong that eventually these people, when they do need a product like a cloud-infra product, they come back to us, to DigitalOcean, I mean. So yeah, used to, combination of brand, you know, demand gen, and community building was a big aspect of it as well. The fact that we were giving out this content out for free. And also there was a program at DigitalOcean which actually invited community members to come and build similar content for us. Like it would live on our site, but it would carry their name, their credentials, and it helps community members, people who are into that writing, technical writing, if their content is hosted on such a high-value website.

[08:15] Disha Agarwal: And did you see like a lot of participation from the community wherein they were contributing to this content?

[08:21] Raman Sharma: Yeah, I mean a lot of people, we used to get a lot of insight, like incoming interest from people. But we had high standard around what content can live. I mean, that's that high standard was partly a reason why this content ranked so highly as well, you know. Chances are if you go to Google and you search for any kind of system administration topic or around Linux, databases, networking, chances are you will end up on a DigitalOcean tutorial in the top five. And we wanted to maintain that. So we were very picky around who gets to write, who gets to do things with us as well. There was a very rigorous process of reviews and so on.

[09:01] Disha Agarwal: Got it. So was it like a one-off content piece that they could post or would you sort of onboard them as a partner who would be able to regularly contribute? What was the system like?

[09:13] Raman Sharma: It depended on situation. Sometimes they were like, people would write one-off articles. Sometimes people wrote promotional articles for their product or their open source project or the service that they were trying to promote. And every now and then we were okay with that as long as the piece of content added enough value to the consumer. But in some cases, they were like repeat contributors also. People who picked up one niche of a topic and they used to write multiple pieces about that. It could be MySQL, it could be Apache, Nginx, things like that.

[09:42] Disha Agarwal: So in a sense, you did sort of crowdsource some of your content. And at point of time, how many contributors did you have?

[09:51] Raman Sharma: Actually, I don't remember that number off the top of my head. But I think there was also a time when we realized that, you know, we kind of need to own our own destiny. Because a big part of building that content was also to make sure that the content obviously needs to be high quality and add value. But it also cannot deviate too far away from our wheelhouse, like the zone in which we operate, the problems that we solve. I can build an amazing piece of content that gets a ton of traffic. But if it is not at all relevant to who I am as a company or what problems I can solve, then I think I'll not get enough credit for building that content, nor will it do anything for my business. There was a point when we came to this conclusion that, we have to be doing a bunch of this ourselves because we know best what scenarios we want to be writing about, depending on who our customers are and what kind of scenarios we enable for them.

[10:49] Disha Agarwal: Understood. You also mentioned Raman that the primary target audience for this content was developers. So was it like a conscious choice that you decided to go for developers and not buyers?

[11:02] Raman Sharma: It's a very good question because we came to this realization that the market in which we were operating—so DigitalOcean is a cloud infrastructure company, like Azure, Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services—but the reality is that we do not cater to enterprises. And the company came to this conclusion very early in their life. One of the best things that they did was align around that as a priority.

What we realized was that our customers were small builders, small teams building SaaS applications, building ed-tech platforms, building online games, blockchain platforms, e-commerce apps and so on. And in these small engineering teams, the overlap between the users and the decision-makers was very high. So the person who goes to your website, signs up, spins up a virtual machine, and starts deploying an app on it, is very likely also the person who will be swiping the credit card. They're not like two different people in there.

So because of that, we felt that, hey, this is one person, reasonably technical, also in a leadership position in the small company that they're working in. Let's solve problems for them. And what is the best problem we can solve for them? Let's make cloud infrastructure or system administration dead simple for them. I'm not saying that this will work for everyone. Like focusing almost entirely on the user and practitioner persona will not work for everyone. You have to do justice to the decision-maker as well. But in the case of DigitalOcean, it was very clear that the overlap was so high that we could just focus on one aspect and still win them over.

[12:45] Disha Agarwal: Understood. I think that's fair. And how defined was your target audience? So did you have like a very clear view of the developer persona that you were targeting? Or was it like a broader definition for a developer?

[13:00] Raman Sharma: We did not think about this type of a developer versus that type of a developer. We thought about what problem are we solving for that developer. Yes, there are multiple ways of thinking about developer audience also: front-end, back-end, full-stack, JavaScript, Java, and so on. But the way we thought about it was most developers have multiple stages or multiple problems that they want to be solving. They are like architecture problems, there are language problems, framework and library problems, and then there are deployment problems also. We were in that deployment zone. So we tried to own that zone. Hey, let's solve enough problems in this deployment zone. And most often, people who would be dealing with these kinds of problems are people who are on the infra side, infra engineers, DevOps people. So that's how we thought about it—developers of all kinds. But if you're solving this type of a problem, irrespective of who you are, we'll solve it the best for you.

[14:00] Disha Agarwal: Understood. What type of content were you creating at DigitalOcean? So while we did discuss that most of it was educational wherein you were trying to help them solve a problem, were you also creating content which was around product education or activation, or was it purely focused on top of funnel and problem-solving educational content?

[14:19] Raman Sharma: Yeah, I mean, DigitalOcean is famous for this. You hardly ever find promotional product material from DigitalOcean. At least, most of the content that I'm talking about was top-of-the-funnel content. They were all technical tutorials. They were of the variety of "how to do X using Y," where X is a common problem in the system administration space, and Y is an open-source piece of software. "How to configure my Ubuntu machine for best performance while running a LAMP stack application," things like that. Tutorials for the most part, but we also did conceptual articles around, "what is database sharding?" or "how to think about high performance," "how to think about redundancy in your cloud architecture," and things like that.

[15:06] Disha Agarwal: And how concerned or how mindful you were while branding? So for every content piece that you wrote, did you always mention that how would DigitalOcean help, or was it just trying to solve a problem and then anyways who's coming on DigitalOcean, they know that this is an article by DigitalOcean?

[15:27] Raman Sharma: I mean we did it, we were a marketing team, so we did it, but we did it thoughtfully, like where it made sense. If the article that we have written about has absolutely no connection to DigitalOcean, number one, like, why are we writing it, right? But even then, there were some instances. Like for example, if the article is purely about talking about the pros and cons of using a certain type of open source technology, let's say, then it doesn't make sense to talk about DigitalOcean, we would not. But every once in a while, we would write articles like, "Hey, how to configure your virtual machines for best security practices or whatever." And then in the end, we would say, "by the way, we do this for you automatically. If you spin up a droplet in DigitalOcean, we do it automatically for you. So why don't you just try that?" So wherever, tastefully, it made sense, we would do it. But by and large, we were very careful about not being overly promotional.

[16:23] Disha Agarwal: So while you were sort of deciding what content to write, how does it tie to the DigitalOcean brand was somewhere in the background, but it did not need to be in the content always. So you would rather sort of go beyond and create content which would actually be helpful for a developer.

[16:38] Raman Sharma: Yeah, 100%.

[16:40] Disha Agarwal: And what was the actual content creation process at DigitalOcean? So did you have engineers or dev rels involved in the writing and reviewing pieces or was it purely the marketing team who was leading that?

[16:54] Raman Sharma: Actually, it was, we had a big team entirely focused on content. At different times during the company's journey, the team sat in different organizations, sometimes in engineering, sometimes in marketing. But this team was almost entirely responsible for building new content, also working with the external contributors to ingest new content coming from them. Also looking at like what other content out there already exists that we can be a better home for. That is high quality, just like us, that puts a lot of thought into quality and helping developers.

So a number of those things were in the responsibility zone of the content team. The developer relations team was slightly different. They were more, they were responsible more for what I would call like developer engagement activities, like going to events and conducting webinars. They were, I would say, we tried to focus them slightly more on DigitalOcean rather than just producing high-level product-agnostic content. Engineering had involvement. There were some engineers from within the company who also used to volunteer their time and energy into producing or reviewing this content. But for the most part, the content team was the owner and keeper of content.

[18:13] Disha Agarwal: Understood. And what would the profile of a typical content marketer person look like at DigitalOcean? Since you were writing such highly technical content, which was resonating with so many developers, how did you make sure that the quality of the content was good, the person that was writing was able to understand the pain points of the developers and actually write content which would be helpful?

[18:36] Raman Sharma: Yeah, I think many of these people who used to work in these roles, they considered themselves developer educators. Like they were very passionate about education to begin with, and the fact that they were educating on very technical topics to a technical audience was just a detail for them. So they were just passionate about educating people. And then, like you would be surprised with the number of PhDs we had in the team. So, I mean, if you think about like a PhD profile, they are by very nature, by the virtue of what they have done, detail-oriented, very research-oriented, they'll produce the artifact they produce.

But at the same time, we also had people who were just self-taught engineers who came from a DevOps background. They were working in a DevOps role in some other company, they found that their true calling was actually building content and telling stories, so they came into these roles.

[19:26] Disha Agarwal: I think that really explains why the content was that great. If people who are writing that content really believe in education and really want their pieces to stand out and not just be promotional pieces, and I think that's the result that we were able to see with DigitalOcean.

[19:45] Raman Sharma: Yeah, 100%.

[19:47] Disha Agarwal: So once that content was live, once you were able to create that content, what were some of the channels that you were using to actually get in front of the developers? How did you make sure that the right audience was able to see you?

[20:01] Raman Sharma: For the most part, we published the content on our website. You can call it a blog, but it did not even live under a blog URL. It used to live under digitalocean.com/community/tutorial. But over the years, the company had kind of come to a mindset that, hey, the purpose of this content is to bring people to us. So search engine was a big deal. Google, for the most part, being relatively low. And then we waited, and then after six months or so, we'll start seeing the true power of all the new content. So I would say SEO was probably the biggest channel for us, organic and Google.

[20:37] Disha Agarwal: Understood. So were social media, etc. not really explored at all or, you know, was it like in the background somewhere?

[20:48] Raman Sharma: It, I mean, it was like we used to, I don't think we had a huge push around promoting this because if you think about it, like this is product-agnostic content. Are we, are we promoting like how to configure your Linux machine? I think, as I said, the orientation in the company was we have built this amazing content. We hope that we are solving interesting enough problems and people will discover this content and they will come to us. We did not think that we have built this content, let's drive a ton of traffic ourselves through paid media and through other things to this content.

[21:21] Disha Agarwal: And what is your take on paid amplification for developer content?

[21:26] Raman Sharma: I'm not saying there were no ads, we did paid advertising. I think there's a time and place for it. There is like a lot of people will say that developers don't believe in marketing or developers hate marketing. I don't think that's entirely true. Developers are human beings. I was a former developer. I think they also just like, they also respond emotionally to good marketing and to good advertising. So if you have the right message, if you have the right type of value, if you have the right, you know, emotional hook for them, they will respond to it. Like any other product, you just have to have the right type of value exchange happening.

[22:02] Disha Agarwal: So for any type of content going live, what I'm understanding is there were two main things. One is, actually giving value in that content. Are you actually solving that problem? And second SEO was like a big thing.

[22:14] Raman Sharma: Yeah, and I would say like in the latter years, we became a little bit more regimented around SEO. Like, since we realized that such a big part of discovery for this content and for our company is happening through Google, we can't just build content and let it be. We have to check all the boxes around, give this content the best chance to be discovered by the people who will benefit from this content. And in turn, DigitalOcean leaving a brand footprint in the minds of these people. So we started being a little bit more regimented and like, are we following all the best practices? And yes, we don't want to obsess about the keywords, but are we doing the right level of things? You know, the right keywords, the right meta descriptions and the right hyperlinking from one content piece to the other content piece. We were a little bit more regimented around that. And that actually helped quite a lot.

[23:05] Disha Agarwal: Understood. And in terms of format, what was it? Was it like a text-based content or would you do videos? What worked well?

[23:13] Raman Sharma: Primarily text, with a fair dose of images and diagrams and so on and so forth. But the idea was that people who are reading these tutorials, they will actually copy-paste from here into their terminals or into their IDEs and they're going to try these things right away. So we tried to make that as easy as possible. Videos are great, but videos, I think in my opinion, solve kind of a different purpose. On the developer relations side, for example, we were doing a ton of promotional videos around DigitalOcean, or promotional content around DigitalOcean about how to do XYZ, but using my products, using DigitalOcean products. There we built a ton of videos. So, and that was very handy there because it can very quickly show people how to do something or quickly show people how easy it is to do things on my platform also.

[24:03] Disha Agarwal: But great insights because you wanted people to actually copy-paste content and that is why text worked really well for you. And how are you measuring success? So once you've published content, what metrics mattered for you? Was it traffic, signups, product usage engagement? What were you tracking?

[24:21] Raman Sharma: For the most part, traffic and signups. Product usage was too far away from that point on. Like, you know, for product usage to happen, somebody has to visit the website, sign up, spin up a resource, do something with it, produce an invoice or things like that. At that point, you can't, you cannot very confidently say that, oh, this piece of content actually drove all of this. So for the most part, we looked at top-level metrics. We called it UX, unique visitors excluding customers. So they had millions of, they had millions and millions of people coming to the website on a monthly basis. And then signups, like how many people are actually converting. Converting means like creating an account and signing up for our DigitalOcean account.

[25:05] Disha Agarwal: Understood. Can you recall any specific content initiative or piece that really outperformed?

[25:13] Raman Sharma: It came as a surprise to us. Every time there was a new version of the Linux Ubuntu distribution, and just the sheer, just a small change of updating from one version of Ubuntu to a new version of Ubuntu, just changing the content of the tutorial to cater to the fact that a new version of the operating system has arrived, used to give us a good bump. We saw much more value in just updating existing content. So that was surprising and interesting learning as well.

[25:42] Disha Agarwal: And were you able to get to the bottom of why that happened?

[25:46] Raman Sharma: I guess like a lot of people did that. Once the new version of a Linux distribution kind of arrives, a lot of people want to move to that. And in that process, they discover inconsistencies or breaking changes, which they want to address right away. They go to Google and suddenly land on a piece of content that solves that exact problem for them. So I think a combination of having a very, very topical problem at that time and finding a content to address it.

[26:13] Disha Agarwal: Understood. And you mentioned that, you know, SEO was such an important piece, specifically, you know, in the latter part. Recency is a very important thing when it comes to, you know, discovery. So how often would you actually refresh content?

[26:26] Raman Sharma: Very, very often, we have to make sure that the content is recent, it is relevant, it is catering to the new problem searches that are happening on the internet and so on. So there was a good rhythm within the team around going back and updating existing content.

[26:43] Disha Agarwal: Got it. So was that content being updated on a monthly basis, on a weekly basis? Just what was the cadence that you had set for yourself?

[26:50] Raman Sharma: I can't speak to the exact details of that. But I know that every sprint that the team was working on, they had set aside some time on what they call maintenance of existing content. So it was never like, we'll get to this six months later on, whatever. It was almost like an ongoing thing.

[27:08] Disha Agarwal: Yeah. So if you had to give, you know, advice to a DevTool startup of what their 90-day content strategy should look like and what their team, you know, when they're starting off should look like...

[27:18] Raman Sharma: My advice would be like, really understand the problem space in which your product operates, try and add as much value in that problem space as you can. If you're a database company, don't just come in and be overly promotional. Try and help people understand some concepts also. And that way, I think you establish your credibility as a company that is adding value, solving problems. And yes, you must have a good product also. I call it owning the problem space. Have you owned the problem space? Have you made people problem-aware and then solution-aware, and then brand-aware? And if you think about it in this way, you'll get tons and tons of content ideas around what you can produce. And yes, some of it is top-level. Some of it is not very conversion-friendly. But you start doing that and then you start leaving a brand imprint in their minds and yes, build some conversion-friendly content also.

[28:13] Disha Agarwal: Got it. And so when you begin content marketing for any firm, would you say that most of the time should then go on the top of funnel and the problem awareness type of content?

[28:27] Raman Sharma: Maybe the better idea is to capture all that interest and try to convert it, try to convert the interest that already exists, rather than starting at the very top of the funnel. So I think it depends on what business you are in and what your brand standing is also.

[28:45] Disha Agarwal: Understood. Yes, so great content also needs a good go-to-market behind it, right? And you have had a front-row seat to both extremes, like from DigitalOcean's PLG approach to Sourcegraph, which was more enterprise-driven. Let's unpack that a bit, right? So what are the biggest GTM differences that you have experienced while working with both of them?

[29:07] Raman Sharma: DigitalOcean was my first experience working in a self-serve kind of a product/company. So the biggest difference that I saw when it came to DigitalOcean was the customer acquisition. Sometimes in a large company, your brand actually pulls you a lot. Compared to that, my experience, by the way, Sourcegraph has both motions. They have PLG as well as sales-led. They started as a sales-led motion because the nature of the product was such that searching across massive codebases across multiple code hosts, that's a problem that a small one to two-person developer team or an individual developer will not face. You run into those problems only when you're operating at a certain scale and at a certain level of sophistication. So they became a very by design, became an enterprise, sales-led company.

But with the advent of AI, the company felt that, hey, we have all the ingredients to build an amazing AI developer or AI coding assistant product also. And the motion for that product should be PLG or self-serve. It should be something that somebody can just go to the website, download, activate, start using right away, either on the web or inside their IDEs. So they had both motions.

But the difference that I saw from the self-serve motion that I had seen in DigitalOcean to the enterprise motion in Sourcegraph was that you almost always have to have a story for the decision-maker. Because the decision-maker and the user practitioner are not the same. For the most part, they are different. Yes, the decision-maker is still a reasonably technical person. They understand what developers are doing, they understand the tooling. They're most likely a former engineer, former developer, but right now they are slightly removed from the day-to-day operations. They don't use the products themselves, but they understand all the concepts. And the language they speak is value, ROI, team productivity, how quickly can my team move, how do I show the value of this thing to my boss or to my CFO? So that's the language that you have to speak. So just distinguishing between these two personas, the user practitioner or the buyer decision-maker, and then talking to them in their respective languages, probably was probably the biggest difference.

[31:08] Disha Agarwal: Understood. I think it makes sense. But, you know, for a DevTool founder today, who might have limited time, team, and money, the question is how do you actually choose what to prioritize? And in your view, is there a right GTM motion for DevTools or is it really about their resources at hand?

[31:26] Raman Sharma: Would I sound like a McKinsey consultant if I said it depends? I think it totally depends. It helps if people have a reasonably crisp idea of the audience that they're trying to go after. For example, I go keep going back to DigitalOcean. I think they massively improved their own life, massively simplified their go-to-market by deciding that enterprise is not a target for them.

I think they probably only realize now, like how big of a decision it was at that time and helped them so much. But let's say you want to go after enterprises, I think then you have to, you can make a self-serve investment, but you have to think about it, think about self-serve in the right way. If you think that like many people theorize that, "oh we'll create a self-serve motion, developers will start using it, become evangelists of my product in their own organization. And all my sales pipeline problems would be fixed." It rarely happens that way. Right. So you have to still build that pipeline. All of these users, free users or tinkerers, they have very little incentive to go and like do pitching on your behalf.

So, so that's one, right? The second is if you want to have, if you're okay with smaller customer sizes, smaller ACVs, and a ton, like a long tail of individual developer users. If you're okay with that, even from a monetary perspective and from your unit economics work in that way, then yeah, by all means, create a self-serve motion. Probably the most efficient, the fastest way to get product feedback, the most efficient in terms of customer acquisition. You don't have to spend a ton of money on like customer acquisition and things like that. If the product works, if the product has good retention, like the word of mouth spreads, and then you can also add like some vitality into your product as well. You know, you can, a user can invite other users, you can create the concept of a team and things like that. So that loop already sets up. Yeah, again, depends on like, what is, what are you trying to do? Are you convinced that your, in order to make money, you have to sell to enterprises? Then you have to focus on enterprise sales, go to market at the end of the day. But if not, then yeah, go self-serve, go SMB, go individual user, go small teams, go startups.

[34:11] Disha Agarwal: Ready?

[34:12] Raman Sharma: I'll try.

[34:17] Disha Agarwal: So, yeah, what's the best piece of marketing advice that you have ever received?

[34:21] Raman Sharma: Know your customer better than anyone else.

[34:25] Disha Agarwal: And you feel that, you know, at Sourcegraph and at DigitalOcean, that something that became like a core for you.

[34:32] Raman Sharma: 100%, like some of it was, and I encouraged my team to do the same thing.

[34:36] Disha Agarwal: Understood. So what's the last thing that you Googled?

[34:39] Raman Sharma: Google, like I hardly, I barely use Google these days. I use Perplexity.

[34:44] Disha Agarwal: Wow, I think you're the third person who's telling me that, you know, this week that rather than Googling, they'd rather ask ChatGPT or, you know, they'd rather, ask for Perplexity. All right, if you could take a six-month break to master any new skill, what would that be?

[35:01] Raman Sharma: I think it has to be something creative. Like, for example, I've always been very envious of people who have good design skills. I think some of it is taste as well. But I think that taste also comes from like intentional practice and spending time doing it. So it has to be something in that creative field, either design or like picking up a musical instrument, like guitar or something.

[35:22] Disha Agarwal: What's one piece of career advice that people should absolutely ignore?

[35:28] Raman Sharma: I have found like very absolute advices kind of not helpful. Like for example, "you should always do X" or "you should never do Y." I feel like almost all advice should come with context on. So whenever people say that "absolutely no X" or "always Y," I always look at it with a little bit of suspicion.

[35:51] Disha Agarwal: I think that's fair. And what is your go-to tool or software, you know, to stay organized and productive?

[35:57] Raman Sharma: Oh, I actually use Notion very heavily. Okay. Notion is a place where I do a lot of writing. Sometimes I like to write, and sometimes I feel like there's a writer's block. And the way I try to overcome that writer's block is just dump a bunch of bullet points in Notion, and then once I feel like I have enough content, enough ideas to write about, then start thinking about the next part, which is the narrative and flow and so on.

[36:23] Disha Agarwal: I think that's fair. Thanks for playing along and, you know, sharing such amazing insights, Raman. Really appreciate you being on our podcast.

[36:32] Raman Sharma: I had a ton of fun. Thank you for the lovely conversation.

[36:35] Disha Agarwal: Thank you.