Everyone Is...with Jennifer Coronado
The intent of this show is to engage with all types of people and build an understanding that anyone who has any kind of success has achieved that success because they are creative thinkers. So whether you are an artist, a cook, a bottle washer, or an award-winning journalist, everyone has something to contribute to the human conversation.
Everyone Is...with Jennifer Coronado
Tony Aghazarian: A Technologist Built to Think Differently
In this episode, we sit down with Tony Aghazarian, co-founder of Lighthouse Insight, who shares his unique journey from a diverse upbringing in Pinole, California, to an influential career in tech. Tony’s story is a testament to how a challenging childhood filled with diverse perspectives can ignite adaptability and a deep understanding of the world around you.
Tony's professional journey is nothing short of exhilarating. From his early days at Sony, where he navigated the decline of CRT technology, to his pivotal role at Apple, where he contributed to the emergence of iconic products like the iMac and iPhone, Tony's career is marked by innovation and leadership.
Tony also reflects on his transition from a high-profile tech career to impactful geopolitical work, including humanitarian efforts in Ukraine. His story is a never ending evolving journey of the eternal problem solver.
https://www.lighthouseinsight.com
www.slightlyprod.com
Fortunately for me, the company was absolutely crazy and you know Steve was not interested in the normal way, and so we would get all manner of crazy requests and crazy things to go do. It wasn't like me saying I'm going to keep my head down and do what the company needs. It was I'm going to wait until the company asks for crazy and then I'm going to step up.
Jennifer Coronado:Hello and welcome to Everyone Is I am your host, jennifer Coronado. The intent of this show is to engage with all types of people and build an understanding that anyone who has any kind of success has achieved that success because they are a creative thinker. So, whether you are an artist or a cook, or an award-winning journalist, everyone has something to contribute to the human conversation. And now, as they say, on with the show.
Tony Aghazarian:Thank you very much for coming. To Everyone Is.
Jennifer Coronado:If you could take a second to, for the record, state your name and what your role is, that would be great.
Tony Aghazarian:Hi. Yeah, thanks for inviting me. My name is Tony Aghazarian and I have had a tough time describing what I am. I don't like to be defined so much, but I guess recently we started a company called Lighthouse Insight lighthouseinsightcom and some people would consider it a consulting company.
Jennifer Coronado:One of the reasons we have you here today, Tony, is because a friend of ours said you got to talk to this guy. He's so interesting, and so I want to talk to you about where you started. So where were you born? Where'd you grow up?
Tony Aghazarian:In the East Bay, California, a little town called Pinole, which is closer to Berkeley, I guess is what most people would know.
Jennifer Coronado:What did your parents do for a living?
Tony Aghazarian:Father was an engineer with a private company, a large private company called Bechtel, and later worked for FEMA, and my mother was a musician and a teacher, special eds teacher.
Jennifer Coronado:Your dad worked for Bechtel and then worked for FEMA, so one is technology and one is mission-driven government work. What made him transition that way and what impact did that have on you as you were looking at that?
Tony Aghazarian:So that happened after I became an adult and he wanted to stop working so many hours and and slowed down a little bit but didn't want to. You know, I think a lot of people end up going, you know, 60 hours a week until I hit a brick wall and then go to zero. I actually did learn from him to maybe you know something less than 60 hours is a good thing to transition into at some stage in your life. And he started working for FEMA, but in very much the same way where there's a disaster and they need to rebuild a hospital, and so he would use the same civil engineering, electrical engineering type of skill sets but to help rebuild after a disaster. But he could come in on projects and leave as he needed.
Jennifer Coronado:Yeah, and you said your mom was a teacher and a musician. What sort of impact did that have on you?
Tony Aghazarian:Yeah, she is by far the most unusual thinker I've ever met. She's very unusual and probably on some sort of dysfunctional psychological issue kind of unusual, but amazing in terms of all the things she had taught me. She would raise, she became a foster parent and so, but she was so good with special needs that we would end up getting so many brothers and sisters I have had over 150 foster brothers and sisters and they would show up with still blood on their shoes because the whole family lost except for them, and the police would just drive them to our house and so they would be short term until some grandmother or some aunt would come over and help. But some of them would last four or six months if it was an abuse situation and there's just no one available because these children were, you know, so often disturbed that they needed not just a normal foster family. I grew up with just all manner of insanity around the house of, you know, kids running around that are just not normal and difficult, struggling, and that was normal for me.
Jennifer Coronado:And what did so? It was normal, and are you an only child or do you have siblings? What did so? It was normal, and are you an only child or do you have siblings?
Tony Aghazarian:I'm the youngest of five, so I have two, two brothers, two sisters, and uh and and so, yeah, that was um, and because my mother was busy with, at least sometimes, five other foster brothers and sisters, so a family of 10, oftentimes I was just, you know, following along and so I, in effect, had the rules of my oldest brother, you know, seven years older than me, which you know served me disruptively in my teenage years, when there's no curfews and no rules that your mom brought in, and did that help you learn to deal with different types of people, or did it make you want to behave differently?
Jennifer Coronado:Or how did you engage with your friends who didn't have that similar setup Like how did that work for you?
Tony Aghazarian:I tended to, and still tend to, believe that they were all correct. I mean meaning, they all had a mindset, and so I was. I was the youngest, so I always assumed that everyone else had the right ideas and the right mindsets. And so when I saw two different mindsets, I got to work at, you know, disentangling it so that it made sense to me, and so I could get to the point where I go. Well, I understand why that person feels that way, and I understand why that person feels that way. And so now the world makes sense to me, and so I didn't have to necessarily make them agree, I just had to understand, you know, where they were coming from. So, and so I ended up getting pretty good at seeing the perspective of wildly different people, from damaged and disturbed to highly functional.
Jennifer Coronado:And you ended up going to Cal Poly, right.
Tony Aghazarian:Yeah yeah, I studied physics at Cal Poly. It was the major that I didn't think I wanted to study, but it was the hardest one and I wanted rigor mostly, and so I just wanted to learn how to learn, and so I figured I could learn about business or other things in kind of the school of hard knocks. And you know, become an entrepreneur or something was my idea at the moment. But I thought I'm never going to learn physics in the school of hard knocks. I'm going to need to, you know, buckle down and learn the math and learn the scientific background and rigor. That really helped at that point pivot my career towards STEM that really helped at that point, pivot my career towards STEM.
Jennifer Coronado:Now explain to me why was the rigor important to you when it came to approaching what you wanted to do in university.
Tony Aghazarian:Remember, you're talking to a teenager. And so I was a horrible high school student. It didn't show up very much, I was just out goofing around with my friends. And once I graduated I went off to college, because that's what a successful person would do and so. But I couldn't get into a good college because I had, like the, you know, c, d average, and so I decided to go to a community college and I started screwing around there and I realized suddenly that no one cares If you don't show up to class in junior college. You're just paying money for no reason and no one cares at all.
Tony Aghazarian:So I got a reality dose of like what am I doing? This is for me, it's not for anyone else. And so that kind of pivoted to me. It's like so what am I doing here? Why am I doing this? And so then I became a pretty decent student and got my two-year degree moved up to South Lake Tahoe, actually, because I thought I'd ski while I went to school, which worked out well, and I ended up picking colleges that were in pleasant places to be, like San Luis Obispo, and I chose the major. At that point I decided that being a student was what I was going to do, and I'm going to do it well. And so I became a good student and I decided to go take on the hardest classes I could take. Once I got to Cal Poly, I no longer was the best student, but I did take the hardest classes.
Jennifer Coronado:Was there anyone who helped you along the way? Was there like did you have a mentor or someone who pointed you in the right direction, or was it all self-discovery?
Tony Aghazarian:I think at that point it was all self-discovery. You know friends, family, lots of influences, but no mentor per se or somebody you know pushing me along.
Jennifer Coronado:You're majoring in physics. You're coming to the end of your senior year, Tony, and we're approaching life. So what were you thinking as you were getting towards the end of that and thinking about? All right, here's what my next steps are, because it sounds like you're starting to give yourself parameters to follow. So were you defining an additional step for yourself at that point, or was it still more loose?
Tony Aghazarian:I wanted a job and I felt a little bit ashamed at the moment because if you're a undergraduate physics student in the nineties, you would never get a job. You would go to academia and become a teacher or go into research somewhere, but working in industry was, for you know, was so frowned upon and all the examples you had of physicists were your teachers. So I was kind of skulking about trying to get a job without letting anyone know about it. And one of my internships was super interesting. It was cloud seeding, and I don't know if you've heard of cloud seeding, but it's basically, you know, putting silver iodide into clouds and making it rain. And this industry was actually really for the power industry, so they were running gigs out of Costa Rica trying to increase rainfall over reservoirs that had hydroelectric dams and would be able to increase energy flows with more rainfall.
Tony Aghazarian:I was working the radar and there was a pilot who would go up and fly through the clouds, and what was nice about that was that if it was sunny outside you could go to the beach, and if it was rainy and cloudy you go to work. And my teachers were pretty understanding that if it was raining cloudy, I might have to skip a class or something. So it was a good internship and I thought to myself, maybe I'll do that for a career, because that involves that was kind of fun. And uh, but my wife, elena um who at that time was my girlfriend Elena um said hey, uh, just go to the career center and look at those boards and, you know, see what else is out there and just interview. And so I ended up interviewing for Sony Electronics, who accidentally included physics in the list of majors that they were going to interview.
Jennifer Coronado:Accidentally. How did they do that? Did you ever find out how that happened or what?
Tony Aghazarian:I don't. I don't understand the Career Center, how it worked and how they were applying. And you know, I think when you show up to interview you tell them which majors you're interested in, and so somehow they got physics in the list, which majors you're interested in, and so somehow they got physics in the list, which ended up being fantastic. It was a great first job for me because we were working on something called a CRT and nowadays people don't know what that is. But what a great collection of physics in one little glass box. It's got an, you know, it's got an electric electron gun, and it's got phosphorescence and it's got, you know, high voltage and it's just wonderful.
Jennifer Coronado:When I first started in visual effects, that was the monitor everybody was using, and the one that you had to pry out of there called Dead Hands, as the new monitors were coming.
Tony Aghazarian:Yeah, the Trinitron was the best of the best, and so I became a CRT process engineer and so having to tune magnetic fields to get the electron beams to go right between the wires and land on the phosphors, and it was a wonderful experience for me.
Jennifer Coronado:How long were you at Sony?
Tony Aghazarian:About five years I worked in San Diego at their design technology center, and then how long were you at?
Tony Aghazarian:Sony, ultimately helped them outsource to a Korean company called LG, which was a little less known then, and and then after that I I knew that it was time to transition back out of Tijuana, and so I poked my head around and I started to get worried about the CRT industry as flat panels were starting to come into existence and it was pretty obvious that I would be in the unemployment line with the eight track tape engineers and the vinyl record engineers if I wasn't careful. So you know the. So I started looking around and this company you know Apple computer had a iMac factory which had a CRT inside of it, those old blueberry, bulbous iMacs, which is one of the first computers where predominantly women bought actually it's a beautiful machine. And the factory had burned down in Mexico and so they were starting a factory in Sacramento and they knew everything but how to make CRTs, and so I was able to pivot out of the CRT industry and into the computer industry without taking kind of a sub-lateral change in career. So that was like for me, a lifeline.
Jennifer Coronado:When you did the Apple thing, did you have a connection there and that's how you got in? Or did you just hold apply, send a resume in, as we did in the past, or how did that work for you?
Tony Aghazarian:No, just a fantastic engineer named Chris Mortensen was there and just researched and looked around and found me and asked me to come up for an interview, and the interview just went really long. I showed up and the next thing I know they didn't know anything about CRT. So they're trying to quiz me, but they don't know what to ask, and so the fun part was they just took me to the factory floor and started walking around and I spent a few hours fixing things on the line and they're like okay, this is right, and so that was a perfect fit for me.
Jennifer Coronado:You fix things on the line for them.
Tony Aghazarian:Yeah, in the interview they were having troubles with magnetic fields and things like that and they didn't understand the impact of magnetic fields on, on, on TVs. And you know, at the early days of TVs you had to actually position your TV, you know, carefully in the in your house even to get it to work correctly. Uh, but because of what we were able to do in a factory to make it tuned for all directions, you don't have a problem when you bring it home, but if you don't have the magnetic field right in the factory, you're going to have a problem if somebody turns their monitor facing north in their living room. And so you know, we had to be very conscientious of what was the magnetic fields like in the factory. So you have to actually develop a series of magnetic coils, like you know, two meters in diameter, to control magnetic fields around your factory. And so again, a wonderful application of physics to you know, to figure all this out.
Jennifer Coronado:I just want to point out to you that I've interviewed a lot of people over the years and not many of them come in and actually solve problems in their interviews, so that that's that's pretty unusual and that's pretty amazing that you did.
Tony Aghazarian:Yeah, it was, it was. It was actually quite a bit of fun and and, uh, I tend to uh be comfortable with kind of uh, you know, let's if. If you're not sure, if you, if I'm the right person for you, then let's just solve some problems together and we'll see how it goes and that works out well.
Jennifer Coronado:Um is fun a big big thing that you need in your job Is fun a big big thing that you need in your job?
Tony Aghazarian:Oh, absolutely. I have been an adrenaline junkie through my teenage years and college years, but at this point fun is solving problems or talking to you, but in general I look for laughter and fun in most of the things I do.
Jennifer Coronado:You said adrenaline junkie. What were some things that you engaged in?
Tony Aghazarian:Well, in high school it was always kind of the rebel and you know, not so much sports, but mostly down the pathway of, you know, going out and driving your car a little too fast or teeping the high school or something like that. And that got a little old. But then when I moved off to college I went to South Lake Tahoe and that became a series of hobbies of oh, I guess I'll ski, and then I'll ski faster and I'll do ski jumps, and then I'll oh, let's do snowboarding, let's learn about that. And then there's water sports, and then there's rock climbing, and then there's cliff jumping, and then there's skydiving, and then you just start adding to the list of things you do to the point of where it's. At some point you're. You're always looking for something that gives you a little bit of a scare and then training yourself to be highly functional while being a little out of your comfort.
Jennifer Coronado:That's so interesting you say that because I think you know your frontal cortex develops I've been reading about this lately when you're around 25, right, but if you can keep engaging in things in that way, it sort of keeps your frontal cortex a little bit alive and open and creative as you get older. Learning to function is very important, but sometimes you can lose some of that creative juice if you're not careful to keep engaging yourself in new ideas and new things.
Tony Aghazarian:Yeah, that was. That ended up being really fantastic for me to keep moving in that direction. At one point I was going to a gymnastics school in Lake Tahoe. There's an adult night and you could go there and you could bounce on the trampoline with your skis on so you could practice helicopters and different ski jumps without actually crashing, because you would put a harness on and then do that and they had a rock climbing wall there and you could climb indoors and so then you'd also tumble and do the backhand springs and the rings and the high bar and things. So we were just goofing around really.
Tony Aghazarian:And at one point the owner of the gym also owned a gym near San Luis Obispo, in five cities down there, and so he called me up one day and said hey, would you like to coach gymnastics? His name is George. I said, george, you know I don't know how to coach gymnastics, right, and he says, yeah, but I'm desperate. So you know how to entertain people with. Entertain people with good times bouncing down the pads. Go down there and just have a good time with the kids.
Tony Aghazarian:And so I went down there and found out that I was actually going to be coaching the boys competitive team and uh, and so I was like what is going on here?
Tony Aghazarian:But you know, again, it was a fun job and so I spent a lot of my college years actually coaching gymnastics, and so I spent a lot of my college years actually coaching gymnastics and so that kept me thinking about like how to, how the body moves and how to, how to have, uh, have fun and how to make it interesting. And so, uh, and they did really well at the, you know, at the state level, um, a lot of you know, mostly most age groups, they would mostly get the the highest levels of gold and things like that. And the funny part of it was that we'd all just be screwing around and a lot of the other gym coaches were like Cobra Kai and so they had a little bit of disdain for me not taking the sport seriously, and then they were pretty disappointed when we would win the gold medals. So it was kind of just a lot of fun bouncing around and having fun wherever we were going.
Jennifer Coronado:That's so interesting because I do think sometimes people forget there can be joy in competition, right In the winning and the losing, and I, philosophically, am someone who's like I'd rather believe things are going to work out okay and be happy on the path to it, and if it doesn't work out okay, I'm disappointed for a couple minutes or a couple days, but I didn't spend the entire time thinking it wasn't going to work out, because that seems like a terrible way to live your life if you're in stressful situations all the time.
Tony Aghazarian:Yeah, one of the boys was way flirty for an eight-year-old and he was doing his highest. He was at the championship and he was the best of these eight-year-olds he's really decent and he was doing his high bar routine and he was doing his highest. He was at the championship and he was the best of these eight-year-olds. He was really decent and he was doing his high bar routine and he was at the top of his routine. He was kind of smiling and twinkling his eyes at somebody in the stands and then lost his spot on his routine for about two seconds, which was like an eternity, and then he finished his routine and he only got a bronze on that performance and he was down in the mats just crying his eyes out because he, you know, screwed up.
Tony Aghazarian:And his parents come storming down the bleachers and they're they just look mad as hell. And they come over to him and I'm just going bracing for it. I'm going, oh man, we are just been screwing off, not taking this seriously, and we're about to get lit up by his parents and his parents come down to him and they go, cameron, they said, uh, do you think we'd like driving up to San Jose from San Luis Obispo and staying in you know hotels and sitting all day in these gyms. Do you think this is? We're doing this because we like this? And he's like, uh, no, he's like, uh, no, he's like we're here for you. So either you get to screwing around and bouncing around in the pads and laughing again, or can we just go home and and he was like, oh, and off, he went and started bouncing around. I'm going.
Tony Aghazarian:Oh, I dodged a bullet on that one that is really awesome yeah, well, you know, I think all the, all the kids that didn't, that wanted to take it seriously, probably left, left the school.
Jennifer Coronado:Well, I took you away from your your days at Apple and and your beginning at Apple, but you worked there for what? 23 years.
Tony Aghazarian:Yeah, yeah, from 2000 on until just a year ago.
Jennifer Coronado:Yeah, and so tell me after you got in there and you're uh, fixing everything on your first interview like what, what were like next steps and things that were super exciting for you to work on while you were.
Tony Aghazarian:Well, the so we were doing the iMac, and I think the the interesting thing was that we were learning to introduce new products. You know, and I think if you went today around Silicon Valley to all the companies, they're trying to make new products, like Google or Microsoft, facebook or Apple. They're following a new product introduction process that we were creating and, and a lot of that has to start with what we do at prototyping, and that was all happening at this factory in Sacramento, and so the you know the, the way these companies work is it's really a the team sport of new product introduction is prototyping, and so if you think about how you design an iPhone, you would imagine people would go off in their corners and they would write software over here and they would do an electrical schematic over here and they do a mechanical CAD drawing over there. But they're pretty much parallel play.
Tony Aghazarian:The first time all that comes together is when they try and build one, and so the design teams were working in their desks and then they'd all come together for these prototyping events, and that's where everything gets really crazy, and you're never sure what's going to happen next, if it's going to even boot or function or what have you, you learn about what works and doesn't work at that moment, and so there's a huge intensity and chaos and unpredictability, and so that's the environment that I really thrived in and that's what I was doing at Sony and that's what I really honed at Apple, and starting at the factory and then moving into headquarters and moving from, you know, imac to servers, to RAID systems, to the first iPhone, to the iPad, to the watch, to every iOS device up through the Vision Pro, it's been just a nonstop thrill ride of new products introduction. So I really don't care so much about the products themselves as much as I care about the company and the ability to introduce products.
Jennifer Coronado:And how does failure play into development and do you see it as a positive or a negative, and how do you work teams through that?
Tony Aghazarian:If you're learning about the product then you know that's great. There's always these people that fail avoidably and you come down pretty hard on the avoidable failures. And that's really what happens at the beginning is you start out and you go to. You go to some things happening and you're trying to get something done and it doesn't work and you realize it because somebody just didn't do their homework, they didn't practice in advance, or you know they didn't write the code at all and that you really can't tolerate. So you do want to hit hard on failure to execute. But if the thing just you just didn't think about it right.
Tony Aghazarian:You know the unit, I was trying to boot it up this way, you were trying to wire it that way and we didn't and our pathways crossed. You know then that's exactly the whole point of new product introductions. And so you of course that can totally throw off your business model as you delay things. But that's the risk and that's the game. And so if you're not into failures, hardware introductions is a bad game to play. They pay a lot more attention to crossing your T's and dotting your I's in the chip world than you do in the system world. In the system world you can recover in a few weeks, whereas chips you can be down for a year if you screw yourself up. So I was in the system side of things, and so it allowed for a little bit more cowboy and a little bit more ease about failure.
Jennifer Coronado:That's great, and when you left Apple, you were a senior director.
Tony Aghazarian:Right.
Jennifer Coronado:We didn't start as the senior director, so how do you find your way into these different roles to get up to that level?
Tony Aghazarian:I think pretty quickly. I was managing a team in Sacramento and then transitioned into headquarters to lead projects, and what I realize now is that a huge portion of the problem ends up being organizational behavior and the way people interact. You know, they're all just like my 150 foster brothers and sisters right. They're all different perspectives, different dysfunctions, different problems and inevitably you see what they're thinking and then you see what's real and you talk about what's real and everyone can understand that. But and I think few people are actually compelled to do the wrong thing, they're just have a kink in their think and so if you just talk a little bit about what's going, what's real, they usually can move forward as a result of that. You know you're. They say, why don't you manage this team of five people? And then, oh, that was working well, we'll reward you with managing. You know more people and more things and you just slowly step up the ladder, so to speak.
Tony Aghazarian:Originally I was in operations, and so probably the more unusual step is to step from operations into engineering. You know, that's a. That's another big step, because operations teams tend to think about process and engineering teams tend to think about research or development or both. I had developed some methodologies for how we would do test elimination for something called burn-in, and I think the engineering teams appreciated the approach, which was pretty rigorous mathematically, and so I was able to step naturally into a engineering function and start managing from there and then never really tried to grow or get another promotion or something like that. I just ended up taking on new roles that as they came forward.
Jennifer Coronado:You know. Going back to what we were talking about, when you were in college and in school, did you have any mentors or people you looked up to in how they functioned? Or did you find that you were? Because, honestly, because you had a zillion foster brothers and sisters you know how different people think in very different ways Did you just find find forging your own path was the best way for you to?
Tony Aghazarian:do it. Yeah, I had my first manager at Apple. A guy named Greg Larson was a really good man and a good manager, and he was the last good manager I had at Apple. The thing that he told me is that that was really helpful for me and it took me a lot of years to get better at. This was that I terrified him and I have a very unusual way of thinking and a very strong mind, and so when I come at things, I'm continuously disrupting the process and disrupting the cart.
Tony Aghazarian:It'd be very easy to have a manager who just wants to, you know, slow your roll and you know not move so fast, not change things. He certainly had an inclination, but he just turned out to be a pretty wise man and so he just decided to confide in me. That. You know that I was scaring the heck out of him, but it's kind of like one of those things if you bring somebody in who's very talented and is because I had a lot of Sony experience right, so I was coming in with the exact skill set that they needed.
Tony Aghazarian:We developed a friendship that allowed me to take some risks and, at the same time, him disclosing that to me made me very again sympathetic to him and I was kind of like, oh, I get it. And so that helped me and him, you know, move along. And so from that point on, help me and him, you know, move along. And so from that point on I tried my best to tamp down my craziest you know plans and just try and stay a little bit color, a little bit more within the lines and understand what the company needs as opposed to what I thought it needed. Fortunately for me, the company was absolutely crazy, and so from time to time they would come along and have a problem and Steve was not interested in the normal way. If he wanted something, go figure it out.
Jennifer Coronado:When we say Steve, we're talking about Steve Jobs, of course.
Tony Aghazarian:Yes, and so we would get all manner of crazy requests and crazy things to go do. It wasn't like me saying I'm going to just keep my head down and do what the company needs. It was I'm going to wait until the company asks for crazy and then I'm going to step up. That's going to be my time and that just happened over and over and over again throughout my career and over and over again throughout my career. And so you know, I find that when people are, when there's the biggest pressure and the scariest moments and the craziest thing has to happen, a lot of people step to the side. A lot of people that normally are trying to put themselves forward and be ambitious, they get a little scared when things are scary, and so you know, that gives gives people who actually want to go do hard work a chance to run, you know, so they can just move forward in those, in those critical moments. And so over time, uh, I, I really enjoyed the the craziest of moments.
Jennifer Coronado:Can you define what would be a crazy moment for you, like something that was you're like I don't know how we're going to do this and yeah, I mean just as just, for the most recent example that everyone has is COVID.
Tony Aghazarian:You know you, you come in one day and say everything's shut down. You know how do we run a build in China? How are we going to execute to a hardware schedule when everyone's in their at their homes and a lot of people are like I don't know what we're going to do? You know, I'm like I know what we're going to do and so everyone gets. All the normal people who are up there trying to control things just didn't know what to say. They all got out of the way and we just were able to go implement, um, a whole new product introduction process that survives COVID, and you probably noticed that we didn't miss any beats in terms of introducing products.
Tony Aghazarian:And what I think is fascinating is that, if you look back over time, uh, each time the rest of the world was suffering, whether it's a 2007,. You know financial crisis, and we come out with an iPhone or thecom crisis and we come out with an iPod, or you know COVID, and we're and we're working hard at the vision pro. All of these moments where there's huge layoffs, there's huge uncertainty and there's huge fear Uh, we were the contrary contrarians of the market, where we were just doubling down on something truly, you know, magnificent. And you know I think, uh, steve and Tim, you know I think they went through some hard times financially, but they saved up a lot of money and enabled us to go and do things you know at those moments, and so I was super lucky to have been able to be on those first teams to to go do those things when, you know, everything else was in chaos.
Jennifer Coronado:But do you hire team members that scare you. Is that your philosophy, or?
Tony Aghazarian:No, absolutely. I had a friend of mine one of my best friends is likes to make fun of me and he would. And somebody would come up to me and go, wow, tony, you're just so smart. And he was in front of him and he's like, and he said something to him like, tony's not that smart, he just surrounds himself with smart people. And the other guy says, well, that sounds smart. But I had to think about it, I went. That's probably true.
Tony Aghazarian:Most people on my team are quite a bit smarter than me and very unusual in their skill sets. You know. You take, for example, our mutual friend, you know, wayne, who's. He's just got a series of skill sets that I can't even approach and so can be intimidating third parties. That who basically ostensibly thought they worked a hundred percent of their time for me was about 5,000 people and my staff was divided in half. I had half my staff my direct staff were leaders, managing team members, and half my staff were individual contributors who just sat and thought about things and, you know, would go through things and just analyze what we're doing and that would be. I had like the smartest software engineer I'd ever met and a one of the best system designers and humble, aspirational leaders, aspirational examples to every other engineer that they'd ever want that role and paid them the same as the directors. And so, at the end of the day, you end up with two career paths for every person. They could either be a leader or they could be the person who's really influencing things by deep diving. And I called that my you know, my technical staff, and they would influence me all the time.
Tony Aghazarian:I remember one time, at the beginning days of COVID, I was like, okay, let's go solve this problem. And I was like we have some hard work to go do. And I started describing what I think we needed to go do, and it was my technical staff, not my management staff who came to me and said you know, you can't do that right. And I was like what are you talking about? People are scared and they're at their homes and they're trying to take care of their kids, and so just pause for a moment before you start beating the drum too hard. And so I, you know, went out and deleted my sort of Slack message or whatever I was thinking about saying and, and you know, reined it in a little bit and balanced my perspective over what we needed to do with the team and and how we were going to make the company successful. Also, because I have so many ideas that don't work. You have to have people that tell you they don't work.
Jennifer Coronado:That's important because sometimes people, particularly who are successful like yourself, they get to a point in their career where they don't want to hear the no anymore. Right, they don't want to hear that's not going to work, which you sounded like you were that person early in your career, and they get. I think they become lesser in their roles because they can't admit when they're wrong. So I think it's great that you sound like that, that's you're able to know. All right, maybe this person has the better idea.
Jennifer Coronado:I love the idea, tony, of the the two paths, because sometimes I think in a lot of companies you go well management's the only way you can really make a better salary. But not everybody's equipped to be a manager. Some people are, just as you said, good individual contributors and big picture thinkers, and so when you try to fit people into a box where they're suddenly they need to shift towards management but they don't necessarily have that skillset. It frustrates people.
Tony Aghazarian:The people that were my technical staff really were horrible at management At some points. I tried to have them manage people, and it just turns out that that level of genius doesn't blend well with you know, managing people who are not quite as good, because either they're overly conflict-oriented or they're passive, and you know too passive. And so you've got to have the striking, that balance of you know what to what to do with an employee and so, and so they're hard, very hard to manage these technical staff members, and so you have to realize that the, the difficulty of managing them, is worth the, the output. You know, the, the, the, the one-off earth changing idea, or how to really simplify a problem, you know, or the credibility of your organization really at whole.
Jennifer Coronado:Yeah, absolutely, and I think sometimes people too, when they see like a leader title or whatever they're like, well, I want to do that because that's the best job. Well, to be honest, the leader title is not the best job, it's. Your job as a leader is to make everybody else around you do a good job, and so sometimes that means you giving up the cooler sort of sexier stuff that might come with what you think is cool about it?
Tony Aghazarian:Yeah, absolutely I'm. I'm very well known as the probably one of the best delegators at Apple. I got really good at giving away work, Um, but you have to give away autonomy and authority at the same time to get it to work.
Jennifer Coronado:Yeah, Now why do you think delegation is important?
Tony Aghazarian:Well, you remember, I was running a very large organization, but even at my first management responsibility, I was so frustrated with how management wouldn't listen and I had ideas of how we could solve things, and they just wouldn't listen to me. It was actually one of the hardest things I did. So when I'm the first manager, I'm going okay. The first thing I'm gonna do is start letting people other people have their ideas. I finally had my moment of power where I could roll out all of my ideas unchallenged, and the first thing I did was to surrender that to my employees, and so that was pretty hard for me to do, actually, but because I had that frustration, I decided that I wasn't going to be that, and so, pretty early, I surrendered judgment and, in general, I still had my thumbprint on a lot of things.
Tony Aghazarian:I think the key there is you just can't hold people.
Tony Aghazarian:You can't be prescriptive and hold people accountable at the same time.
Tony Aghazarian:You have to choose Either I'm gonna tell you what to do, in which case if it works, it's my credit, if it fails, it's my fault, or I hold you accountable and let you use your tools and methods, and so that ends up being the better model. So I would just hold people accountable. And then they would come to me and eventually realize they're going to get grilled for failure because they don't have a good enough strategy. And so then they come up and say well, what are your ideas? And then I could still share my ideas and then they could choose which one was best. And that was basically the birth of the technical staff approach, which is having a group of people standing around here really helps you, because if you're accountable, you'd rather get the answer right than to get your way. You know, when you're accountable, you better get the answer right, and I do think that Apple doesn't care about you getting your way or your ideas, they just care about getting it right. I think that model worked really well there.
Jennifer Coronado:It's so great that you it sounds like you found the perfect culture for yourself. Curious why you retired from Apple, yeah, and now you worked with the Stimson group as well, which you're sort of a board member on that, and that's a think tank out of DC right.
Tony Aghazarian:Yeah, my son went off to college and we had an empty nest, and so it was a good time for us to celebrate life, and so I knew I was going to be taking some time off, and that's really an employee mindset, isn't it? I'm going to take a year off, and so now I've realized that I wasn't taking a year off. I was actually just leaving the boss-having industry. I started reaching out and started to understand, because one downside to being part of a company like Apple is that you become very insular. You live and breathe and think about Apple products, and that has a huge impact. I'm really happy about the work that I've done there. However, I didn't know anything else that was going on outside.
Jennifer Coronado:Right, it becomes your identity.
Tony Aghazarian:Oh, my goodness, I can't tell you how right you are. Is that? You know my brothers and sisters would introduce me? This is my brother. He works at Apple, his name is Tony, like my identity is, my name is third on the list and and so, yeah it was.
Tony Aghazarian:It was really a problem for me to you know think about leaving that identity behind Ended up doing a mushroom trip with a guide to help me get through that, and it was like a light switch fix, and so that went away really quick, so that was solved fast.
Tony Aghazarian:The idea of reaching out and looking around was really the most important element of my transition, because then I started paying attention to what was happening, and at that time we were having, you know, ukraine war had broken out, and so I was trying to help with technologists there and started getting a little bit more involved, and so somebody would introduce me about. The other geopolitical issues are popping up, and before I know it, I'm talking to the Stimson Center, who works on geopolitical issues, and there's, you know, 6000 or so think tanks in the United States, and most of them are in DC. But you know, most of them are just places where angry people who aren't in power. You know when the Democrats are in power in the White House, the Republicans all join think tanks and write, you know, hate pieces and and vice versa, and so I didn't understand any of this when I was getting involved. But this one center is apolitical and and they don't just publish white papers, they actually do stuff.
Jennifer Coronado:They go and they're on the ground in a lot of areas.
Tony Aghazarian:Yeah. So I started getting involved and I'm going oh, this is fun, because you know I dig in a little deeper to their chemical nonproliferation effort or I, you know, study what they're doing with, you know, rhinoceros preserves in Africa, and so they just go through and try and solve a problem that no one else has been able to solve and then prototype it, and then they just try and get rid of it as fast as possible. Somebody else will take it and run with it. That's their mission, and so I couldn't be happier to be involved with that type of thing, because you just gotta, you know, learn about what's happening in the world, and through that process of solving and working with different people, then other people start to get an idea of who I am.
Jennifer Coronado:And out of the woodwork, I start getting all these people coming to find me to help with other things. You worked at Apple and then you start reaching out to people and suddenly you're involved in geopolitical engagement. And who do you reach out to to start being involved in that? Like, how does that happen? And how do you end up at the center that's named after the former secretary of war from you know, the Roosevelt administration? Like, how did that happen?
Tony Aghazarian:Yeah, sometimes you just have a conversation with people, and so I was at a, you know, for example. I was at a resort and met this woman who worked at the World Bank and I'm curious, I'm like the World Bank Last enough. I've heard that before. I have no idea what the World Bank is, and so I just like the World Bank. That's not. I've heard that before. I have no idea what the World Bank is, and so I just like what are you doing? What does that mean? What happens? And I just try and understand that.
Tony Aghazarian:So I just spent hours listening to her talk about what happens at the World Bank, and then she would ask me like what are you doing? And I'm like, I'm thinking about what's next for me and I'm trying to understand a little more about you know where, how I can help. And I'm not going to. My next game is not going to be bigger than Apple, you know, let's be clear, right? And so I'm like so I want to do something that has some sort of impact, and so I thought maybe I'll help with industrial policy. Uh, is what my thought was, and the reason why I thought it would be useful is because I spent 20 years dealing with industrial policy, and so when you tell me what the US and China are going to do with their currency or their import or their trade laws or what have you, I will tell you what Apple or Google or anyone else is going to do about it and how they're going to work around your policy so they can still make the rest of the world work.
Tony Aghazarian:It turned out to be a very useful input for the DC belt, right. So I'm an unusual person because for the DC belt right, so I'm I'm an unusual person because anyone in government and and military or would love to get out of it and get into tech where they can make more money, and so there's not much going the other direction. And so for me to be able to go over there and say I know a little bit about what industry will do when you, that that industrial policy ended up being a useful thing to them and so got me more introductions. And so once I started talking to somebody at the World Bank and I told her what I was looking for, she said, oh, you should talk to this person, and that person was working on humanitarian shelters in Ukraine, and so I started helping him with some shelter work and I went to Ukraine to work on some shelter work.
Jennifer Coronado:You went to Ukraine.
Tony Aghazarian:Yeah, during the war I actually discovered that I don't really like charities. I don't trust charities. I feel like you give them a bunch of money and where does it go, I don't know. I don't mind giving money as long as I trust that it's going to be used for good. And I know there's a lot of corruption in Ukraine.
Tony Aghazarian:So I went out to actually like, let's go take a look and see how we can help, and I found some of the best you know ways to help from a humanitarian perspective, because this gentleman, eric, had developed, you know, a shelter that you could build for about $3,000 on top of rubble. And, you know, get a family through the winter. That's a big problem with these displaced people. And so I went out and I looked at places and, for example, one place we were working on uh had. They were retrofitting an old dorm and so the government had given the real estate over. We were. It cost us about $3,000 per home to retrofit the electricals and get new kitchens and new showers and things. And the government realized that if we put displaced persons in there, that they couldn't even afford the energy because of the war, and so these buildings had free rent and the government paid for their energy and they knew that when they moved in, there was not like they get to move back after the war because there is nothing to go back to, it's all rubble. The deal is you get a free home forever, free rent and free energy, and it costs. You know, our move Ukraine is the name of the organization I was working with that cost them $3,000 to provide it and I'm going okay if there's corruption. I can't figure out how they're the worst crooks I've ever met, because for $3,000, you give a home for forever. You know, like that's a deal, and so I was super happy to participate.
Tony Aghazarian:While I was there, word got around that there's some you know silicon valley guy, and so a bunch of uh you know uh technologists started crawling out of the woodwork to talk about drones and how they can reduce their radar cross sections and how they can do things, and so we ended up just helping you know technologists and then I would bridge my Western coalition of technologists together and we would just solve problems that are interesting to solve, which is crazy to me that the military couldn't do that, but the military in Ukraine was very much kind of a Soviet area leadership and attitude, and so they were very traditional. And so it's all the 20 somethings that were, you know, climbing in their cars and driving to the front lines to disrupt that. Really, you know, stop the immediate rollover of Kiev, and things like that. So it just ends up being a bunch of technologists who are all trying to solve a problem.
Jennifer Coronado:Sounds to me, Tony, like you went to another interview and then you went down to the assembly line and you started fixing things again.
Tony Aghazarian:Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. It was a lot of fun just to solve problems that they were trying to solve and how to integrate technology, and I think that through some of that work, ukraine's going to become one of the epicenters of drone technology and manufacturing as we go forward, because that's what they've built out.
Jennifer Coronado:So, tony, you've done this, you have your consultancy, You've started. Now what's your next big idea for you and what you want to do?
Tony Aghazarian:It's kind of funny is that we are starting a company and I do the opposite of every book you could ever imagine on how to start a company, because their ideas are you know, hey, you got to focus and I'm like or I could just do like 12 different projects and they're like, and you got to be all in 80 hours a week and I'm very much on the pathway of uh, I'm going to go spend a month in Australia with my wife and you know, getting on a, on a sleeper train, and have a good time, and so I have no ambition to grow it. I have an ambition to stay busy and because of the things that I do that are problem solving in nature, people come find me and so I end up just having people knock on my door, you know, once every couple weeks with kind of a new thing that they're trying to do, and I try and help them. And if it's a pro bono make the world a better place, cause and they're all working for free, then I'll work for free, and if they're out there to make a buck, then they need to pay me. And then the other part of that is that people who want to live a different life than what everyone else has been doing in the grind. They're coming to find me to go how can I do more of that? And so I get a lot of career coaching conversations that popping up where people are wanting to do exactly what I'm doing, which is, you know, float around and get involved with some things, but not take life too seriously.
Tony Aghazarian:I'm in really enjoying, and I want to bring more people on board that actually want to have a good time and want to have fun and solve problems, and so that's kind of what I'm doing right now, and so I do a little bit of some training on how new product introductions work, or I'll work on some startups or, you know, work with teachers, helping them buy homes or start nonprofits, things like that, and so I don't have a plan of where this goes. I just know. I just know where it came from. So I think the next thing is just to is to keep helping people, and what I like about this is that there's no, there's no one coming to me that doesn't want to solve a problem, and so you know, my method works very well when everyone wants to solve a problem and works really badly when there's a particular interest that doesn't want the problem solved and so, for example, I don't think I could probably help out with renovating the, you know, rethinking the healthcare industry.
Tony Aghazarian:You know there's just too many people who want it to stay broken. It's just maddening, right. And so you end up with, like you know, that kind of thing is probably not my best fit, but there's lots of people who are at a point where they are all in on solving a problem and that they they ask around and you know my name pops up and I come over and I'll help people, you know, work backwards through their problem and and figure out how to, you know, unblock all the things that are preventing them from rethinking this.
Jennifer Coronado:Education. You talked about being passionate about helping with education. Can you talk a little bit about what your help, what you're doing in that space and why that's important to you?
Tony Aghazarian:I tend to adopt purpose, meaning that I like solving problems, and so, uh, I, I tend to not be so passionate about one particular cause or another, but my wife likes the climate to be solved, she likes, uh, civil liberties for women, she likes education, and so those are now things that I'd like to help out with. And so, you know, I'm not from Ukraine, but no one likes a bully, so I'll help out there. And, you know, any place I can go, help is good for me. And so, with education, you know, it's an interesting thing is that I'll tackle any variety of things.
Tony Aghazarian:And so, for example, I have a friend of mine that's a teacher that can't buy a home. Why not? You realize that there's a lot of reasons why teachers can't buy homes, and none of them are blocking. They're all just stacking and it just seems insurmountable. You know, what I've learned over time is that 30 non-blocking issues don't add up to a block, and so you just have to work through one at a time. And so I would say something like why can't you buy a house? And the answer is, well, can't afford a house. And I'm like, well, that's why we'll get financing for a house, and what have you and I, obviously I have enough money to go help them buy a house, but they're not interested in charity, they want to, you know own their home.
Tony Aghazarian:And so we would do something like I, would then create an LLC and we'd be 50-50 partners in an LLC. And so I said, okay, this LLC is going to go buy a house and I put no money into this LLC. They put no money into the LLC. And so we go find a house and we say we're going to buy this house and we're going to be equal partners in this. It's unilateral exit, which means, if I get tired of this, I push a button and the house gets sold. If they get tired of it, they push a button, the house gets sold and they have the right to buy me out at any point in time. And so and I hope they do and so then we need to go get money. Of course, there's no down payment available. In fact, we need more than a hundred percent financing because we have to be able to pay for a roof or something like that. And so you work backwards from there and you say, okay, well, we have to get a loan. So, um, let's go see if we can get a loan. And it turns out the, the bank of Tony and Elena are willing to give a private loan, uh, to this LLC. And so, uh, and you know, these places are around the United States are not. We're not talking about multimillion dollar places, we're talking about a $200,000 home. I can give a private loan to this LLC, which is a good win for me because, you know, back at that time, there's no interest coming from anywhere. Right, a loan is a good business for me. And they got a loan that they couldn't otherwise get, and they actually. So we give a loan for like 101% or 105%, depending on whether how much money we need in the bank to cover, you know, incidental or urgent causes.
Tony Aghazarian:Next point, which is well, what interest rate do you give them? And the answer is I gave them a good rate because the risk is very low. And so if you went to a bank and said you know this is 100% low and you have to give, you know it would be extortion level rates to get that, and but that's because they don't have the ability to sell the home and I'm I'm the decision maker on whether this home gets sold or not. And so if I don't like what's happening, as either the member of the LLC or as the bank, I can just push a button and the home gets sold, and so this is a very low risk loan because I know the person who bought the house me and I know the property. I've reviewed it carefully and so at the end of the day, it's a low risk loan. So I give a competitive rate, which means even the interest rate is so much lower than the teacher could get by themselves, and probably even I could get by myself if I wanted 100% loan. And so now they have a home that they otherwise couldn't get.
Tony Aghazarian:I'm making money as a lender and I also get 50% of the profit of this home, but I do nothing. They do the property management, and so lots of investors might say, well, why don't you just buy the whole house yourself? And the answer is I have to pay 10 or 15% in property management fees or I have to go, you know, unclog toilets, and so the teacher has a home, everyone's winning, and they don't feel like there's any charity in this. In fact, if you, if you think about this issue right now, you probably think yourself who got the better deal? You know? And the answer is you. Who got the better deal? You know? And the answer is you, you.
Tony Aghazarian:It's not easy. It's not easy to figure out who got the better deal, which is exactly what I was looking for, which is you know us all to win. And so now I did that again, and I did that again. And so now there's you know, three teachers in their homes and, and so it's a way that I help you know with. You know education, and sometimes I'll work with Icon Academy or other people to ideate on how they can, you know, help democratize education so that you can learn online and maybe get credentials. It may not be as good as a brick and mortar school, but you know, if you can get free education and get free credentials, then the driven can achieve something.
Tony Aghazarian:It makes a better society and so you know I I'll approach whatever problem I can find. Uh, I'll go down to cal poly and I I help, you know, talk to students and connect them to jobs and things like that, and give, give little speeches. You know, mostly around stem. Because the same thing, I know that teachers, all they can see is academia, they can't see industry. When I show up there, you know the, the, the Apple guy who introduced their first iPhone, who was a physics student. It's sexy enough that it can compete with I'm going to, I'm going to go into research or I'm going to be a professor, and so they can see that as an industry option and they don't have to go on to a PhD program if they don't want to.
Jennifer Coronado:You give them options, you know of what they can do with their life. Well, Tony, I'm so glad that we found you and that you were willing to talk to us today. We appreciate that.
Tony Aghazarian:Thank you, it's been a lot of fun.
Jennifer Coronado:Thank you for listening to Everyone Is. Everyone Is is produced and edited by Chris Hawkinson, executive producer is Aaron Dussault, music by Doug Infinite. Our logo and graphic design is by Harrison Parker and I am Jen Coronado. Everyone Is is a slightly disappointed productions production dropping every other Thursday. Wherever podcasts are available, make sure to rate and review, and maybe even like and subscribe. Thank you for listening.
