Bill.com’s Subbu Allamaraju on the Power of Choosing Yourself

What if the next phase of your life isn’t waiting on a promotion, a plan, or anyone else’s approval—but on a decision you haven’t made yet?

In this episode of Keep Moving Forward, we talked with Subbu Allamaraju, vice president of engineering at Bill.com, about what it really means to evolve personally and professionally. His journey from academic researcher to tech executive spans decades and household names. But the most profound changes haven’t come from climbing ladders. They’ve come from trusting his intuition and letting go of the need for permission.

Subbu’s story is a reminder: The life you want won’t show up with perfect timing. You have to choose it—deliberately, and more than once.

2025-06-03  • 35 min

Shaping Distributed Engineering Team Culture with Bill.com’s Subbu Allamaraju

Keep Moving Forward

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Stop Waiting for the Perfect Moment

Subbu didn’t wait for someone to declare him “ready” to lead. He stepped into ambiguity and started learning by doing. That mindset shift—from permission-seeking to proactive growth—became a defining feature of his leadership style.

“At the time,” he recalls, “I started programming a lot... without having much access to the internet and the rest of the world.” That scrappy beginning carried forward into how he builds teams and drives change. “I could go solo fast, but getting others along with me was not something I had figured out at the time.”

Instead of waiting to feel fully equipped, Subbu took action—and learned through the friction. “That lesson of realizing ‘I need to get better at this’ grew stronger and stronger... even to this day.”

Let Go to Grow

One of the most striking aspects of Subbu’s journey is how often it’s involved letting go—of roles, assumptions, and parts of his professional identity.

“I was a team lead as an IC,” he says, “and I didn’t know how to lead a large group of people with different voices, different ways of doing things. I struggled with it.”

But it was through that struggle that a deeper insight emerged: leadership wasn’t about knowing everything—it was about creating the conditions for people to willingly move forward together.

“I tell my direct reports, ‘Your first job is to build your team, but your second job is to create willingness for others to work with you.’ If you can't influence others to work with you, then you can't be effective.”

Choose the Life You Want—Deliberately

Subbu’s success isn’t an accident. It’s the result of intentional decisions—sometimes uncomfortable ones.

“When you’re remote, you need to be more proactive,” he explains. “Create content, create ideas, create artifacts so others find you. But if you're waiting for others to talk to you... you'll be forgotten.”

He’s applied that same principle across his career: lead with clarity, show up consistently, and create space for new ideas—even when they challenge the status quo.

“Every opportunity I have,” he says, “I'm changing the talent profile of my team so that we are able to bring in newer and newer ideas.”

Subbu’s approach to reinvention is quiet but bold. It’s not about chasing trends or waiting for the perfect conditions. It’s about making deliberate choices—again and again—to grow into the person, and the leader, you want to be.

Reinvention doesn’t require permission. It requires clarity, courage, and the willingness to let go of what no longer fits. Subbu’s journey is a powerful reminder that you don’t need to wait for the perfect moment—you just need to start.

Transcript

Subbu Allamaraju:

Learning through that struggle, making the mistakes and reflecting on those mistakes, we realize, "Oh, gosh, I need to get better at this." Technically, I'm okay, but I need to really understand people. I need to understand people as they are so that they are willing to partner with me to create outcomes that grew stronger and stronger even to this day. So I tell my direct reports, "Your first job is to build your team, but your second job is to create willingness for others to work with you."

Caleb Brown:

Hey, everyone and welcome to Keep Moving Forward, the podcast from X-Team for tech professionals who are passionate about growth, leadership, and innovation. I'm your host, Caleb Brown, and in each episode, we'll dive into candid conversations with the tech industry's brightest minds including seasoned leaders, forward-thinking engineers and visionary experts. Today, I'm joined by Subbu Allamaraju, vice president of engineering at Bill.com. Subbu has led engineering teams at some of the biggest names in tech from Yahoo to eBay to Expedia. He brings a deeply thoughtful and pragmatic approach to leadership, rooted in decades of experience guiding high-performing teams through complex technical and organizational challenges.

In this episode, Subbu shares how his transition from academic researcher to infrastructure leader reshaped his understanding of influence, scaling, and human dynamics. We talk about manufacturing willingness, bringing strong distributed teams, mentoring in a remote world, and how technical leaders can develop in the strategic and human competencies that will never go out of style. If you're an engineering leader looking to grow your influence or an individual contributor thinking about that next step, this episode offers practical wisdom that will stick with you. Let's get into it. Thanks again for joining today. I think you have a very interesting background and I'm excited to get into it. So without any further ado, maybe we can go ahead and jump into that because one of the things I thought was interesting was that you started your career in academia with a PhD before moving into tech into the late '90s, so I thought we'd just kick off by you telling us a little bit about that background and what motivated that transition.

Subbu Allamaraju:

Yes, Caleb, first of all, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be taking the time to chat with you about my journey. Hopefully, we'll cover some interesting ground during the course that is helpful for the audience. My career is somewhat unorthodox in multiple trends, but I believe most careers are unorthodox in some sense, so I don't think I'm special in any way. I've had the fortune to go all the way to master's and PhD before even starting my career, studied electrical engineering, and then at the time, I started programming a lot, I think back in the day was Photon and somewhat mainframes in my university in India. That interest in software development, without having much access to internet and rest of the world at the time, this is the '90s, I worked on some interesting technical problems, mathematics and computer simulations and modeling.

That led me to a technology career, because in late '90s, India was starting to boom as a tech destination for a lot of western companies. I joined a CAD/CAM company. I forgot the name of the product, but the company may be around. We worked on CAD/CAM software for a number of years, and then that led me to a company called BEA Systems in the US. It was a very young company at the time, early 2000, which used to make WebLogic software, app servers, J2EE. That brought me to the forefront of the technology. And then as it happened, I also happened to write some books at the time on J2EE, very popularly sold at the time when the internet was... Folks were trying to figure out how to build enterprise software. I think, in today's standards, it looks primitive, but it was innovation at the time, early 2000 to 2005, I think five-ish. That led me to other tech companies like Yahoo, eBay, and Expedia.

Caleb Brown:

Yeah. And we're definitely going to get into that because I want to understand some more lessons you've learned from all these different domains that you've been at. But I did want to ask, before I move on to that, if you could walk through your evolution from a deeply technical individual contributor to more of a people-focused leader, because sometimes that skill set that brings you to being a deeply technical individual contributor is maybe not always the skill set for being a people-focused leader. But you've done both, and I do know many folks in my career that have done both, but just wanted to hear a little bit more about that evolution because they are different.

Subbu Allamaraju:

They are different. And I began to realize that difference earlier in my career around maybe 10, 15 years ago when I was still an individual contributor trying to lead larger and larger initiatives beyond my own capacity. I think that realization that I cannot scale until I can scale the people around me, I think happened when I was eBay... Leading larger initiatives in the company. And as you're right, that skill sets and competencies are different. In fact, I can refer to a popular model from the 1950s. It talks about the competencies of individuals. You have technical competencies, and then you have human competencies, and then you have strategic and kind of visionary competencies.

I think the first friction I encountered was my own peiple competencies were not the greatest because I could go solo fast, but getting others along with me was not something that I had figured out at the time. So it took a while for me to learn, "Oh, gosh, I need to really understand how to work with people," which actually, over time, meant that I need to understand how I think of myself, let loose and begin to focus on others and others' wellbeing, how they think about things and multiply effort across larger teams. I think that was a lesson I learned back in the 2012, 2013, 2014 timeframe. I think that prepared me over time to become a people leader.

Caleb Brown:

I think that's a phenomenal answer and just a really good knowing yourself, understanding yourself probably sets you up not only as a good leader, a better leader, but in a lot of aspects of your life, I think it's helpful. So looking back at your time at companies like eBay and Yahoo, what were some pivotal moments that shaped your leadership philosophy?

Subbu Allamaraju:

I think that my pivotal moment in my career was getting into infrastructure, not knowing infrastructure, anything about infrastructure, getting into it, and then trying to scale it both people and technology, I think was a pivotal moment in my career. I am still thankful to the people that gave me that opportunity and allowed me to make the mistakes to do some work. I think that was a phenomenal pivotal moment for me. And the reason being is that there were smarter people than me in the team that individually they're more competent, they understand the basics, I'm trying to understand and learning things, but I'm more senior and I have more authority over them to send the direction and execute things. And I also had to bring people together like the multiple teams into one single team and I was team lead as an IC, and I didn't know how to lead a large group of people and have decent voices, and different voices, and different ways of doing things.

I struggled with it. And learning through the struggle, making the mistakes, and reflecting on those mistakes, we realize, "Oh, gosh, I need to get better at this." Technically, I'm okay, but I need to really understand people. I need to understand people as they are so that they are willing to partner with me to create outcomes that grew stronger and stronger even to this day. So I tell my direct reports, "Your first job is to build your team, but your second job is to create willingness for others to work with you, that you have to manufacture the consent, that they're willingly coming to you to work with you to create some solid, exciting outcomes. If you can't influence others to work with you, then you can't be effective." I think that mistakes I made back in 2012, 2013 helped me stand in my focus on influence throughout my career.

Caleb Brown:

Yeah. So that actually is a good pivot a little bit into some of the stuff I wanted to focus on now, which is I believe on our initial call, I think it was then that you described leadership as manufacturing willingness. And I wanted to see if you could elaborate on that philosophy a little bit.

Subbu Allamaraju:

To do good work oftentimes requires working across organizational boundaries. Most often, key things that you want to do at work require you to work with your peers across the aisle. You have 50 people reporting to you, but you need something from that other team, and they need something else from some other team. So we are connected in this situation and usual weapon or tool of choice that managers pull is that, "I go to you, you're my peer. Okay, but I need those two individuals from your team to work on this piece of project and can you get it done by end of next week?" And your immediate answer is, "Sorry, I'm committed. My team is committed. Fully booked. We talk about it in the next quarter roadmap." In this process, I haven't actually influenced you, I just asked you for something and you said no. A totally fair answer to give you.

But I haven't had taken the time to influence you, meaning that what is the common objective that you might get excited to support me or even might explain me that, "Subbu, your thing is not that important. My thing is more important." And had we had taken the time to influence each other, we will be partnering on that outcome,, and then you might even say, "Subbu, how can I make your project go faster? Have these two gentlemen ready to help you out, mind I put you on your team." Those things do happen. I've seen that happen. But they only happen rarely, when you take the time to influence other people and understand what they want, understand what you want, understand what is the common good about. It takes time. But once you take the time, once you spend the time to do that, usually things come, go much faster, you don't worry about resources, you worry about initiatives and outcomes, and that to me, that is the manufacturing of consent.

Caleb Brown:

Yeah. So that makes a ton of sense, and obviously something I've seen throughout my entire career is the difference of asking questions versus persuasion. That's very fascinating. And one thing I wanted to talk about because... So X-Team, where I work, 100% remote company, remote-first, and so I'm often curious when chatting with folks like yourself, how do you approach building that trust and influence with peers as team members in a remote environment?

Subbu Allamaraju:

I began working as a remote employee probably in 2009 or 15 years, except for four or five years at Expedia, I've been remote throughout. Then at the time, I approached one distinguished engineer who is senior, who is at Amazon now, I asked him like, "Hey... He works remote. I asked him, "Can you give me some ideas on how to be successful, how to be useful, effective in such situation?" He said, "At the time, Subbu, you need to be more proactive. You need to create content, create ideas, create artifacts so others find you, they know that you exist. But if you're waiting for others to talk to you and ping you, to poke you, then you'll not be as effective because you'll be forgotten and you're not in the corridor." This was before hybrid was popular.

And I still follow that idea to this day. I've given the same suggestion to many other people, and they work remote. So my suggestion to individuals that are in this situation is to be always proactive. Take the time to reach out. Take the time to connect as many occasions as possible. Write down things so that people know where to find you. "Oh, Subbu has that idea. He's written about it, this article or this proposal that he put together, so let's work on it." So promoting that asynchronous collaboration I think was the most useful thing that I do and I learned that over time.

Caleb Brown:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So I did want to talk, we mentioned being remote and having distributed teams and you have a really solid background in that, which is why I wanted to take just a little bit more time to focus on that. So you've been a remote leader for 15 or so years. What are some of just the key principles overall for building very strong distributed teams?

Subbu Allamaraju:

I think, in my team, we make sure we are meeting together often, have a team of on-sites. We spend three, four days every quarter. We have social interactions and team-building activities to know each other. I think that's something I do religious. Number two, I try meet people face-to-face, particularly if I'm meeting new person, I try to be in person, be in front of them. And the third is, of course, the focus on asynchronous communication, create the processes to facilitate that. It become easier now than before with Slack and tools like that, but we use a lot of this asynchronous communication at work. I think that helps bring people together and be available and get to know each other more and more.

Caleb Brown:

Absolutely, And I think X-Team does it quite well because we've been remote for a while. It's interesting though, I still talk to friends and former colleagues and things like that that really, their entire career, they were in the office and are still understanding it and trying to manage it. Interested if there are any specific practices you've implemented to ensure that super effective communication in a remote setting. Obviously, we talked about async communication in the importance of occasionally being in person or just consistent meetings, but just interested more in that effective communication part if there's any practices you can talk about that you've implemented that have helped.

Subbu Allamaraju:

I think communication, for example, I do every two months an all-hands, where we get together, look at what we have done, what we are working on in the coming months, spend maybe half the time of doing all-hands just doing demos so every team comes along, shows what they have done, something interesting. So I think, to me, that's an example of bringing people together in groups more often. It's work to bring people together, but also it's very effective. The lead... say the why and how we are approaching it and some of the interesting lessons we are learning along the way is the next important thing. But one thing I want to add to this remote working, it's easy to get people wrong. It's easy to misunderstand other people in the remote settings.

I've had situations where simple benign conversations on Slack escalate because somebody says something, the body language is not communicated as part of that, you haven't seen the mood of the person and so they escalate each other, and then it required effort to manage those escalations from them. And it has happened in the past. I think one of the thing that I also encourage my managers and team is when you're noticing it, just stop the conversation, reach out in person, reach out on a Zoom call, on the phone, just to understand each other and then try to navigate. So it takes more work. In the office situations, it happens less often because people see the body language and they see how they're reacting. There's a lot of softer connectivity around people in the office setting that's missing in the remote setting. So I think it's watching for emotions, watching for escalation is also extremely important.

Caleb Brown:

Yes, absolutely. And we've been lucky enough to not have too many... But things get misinterpreted via text quite often, just even in personal life, right? And I think that is a really good advice, when something is going that direction, when you get the indicators that it's going that direction, something like hopping on a call, hopping on a Zoom and seeing the body language is really helpful there. I think that's great advice. Talking more specifically about remote work from an engineering perspective, interested how you approach the challenge of mentoring and developing technical team members, when you can't really interact in person all that often, particularly the mentoring part I, think, mentoring essentially async or on some schedule. I'm just interested in your insight there.

Subbu Allamaraju:

I spend my time mentoring and coaching people within the company and outside the company. I have built out some network of individuals that approach me and we talk about things when maybe it's a conversation that's not going well at work or something not happening and we talk through things. I think, that, I found very useful for me to be connected and for me to give my time to other people, but also we have an effective mentoring programs at work where leaders are encouraged to mentor other people and I participate in those things to spend the time with other individuals to figure out what's happening in their careers, is there something that I can help unlock or how to think about career growth, transitions, and so on and so forth. I think having some procedures, like mentoring programs, is quite effective work. Again, it takes time away from other things, but it's time well spent because you are developing the leadership bench around you. And that comes in very handy, you just don't know how, but it's going to come in handy for you.

Caleb Brown:

Yeah, I couldn't agree more that having those established programs in place, really helpful. And you're right, these things do take work for sure, but there's a reason we do them and a reason we implement them. Again, I think it was on our prep call, you mentioned creating grassroots motivation to drive change. Interested if you could share an example of when you've done this successfully.

Subbu Allamaraju:

Absolutely. This is back in Expedia. This is 2016, '17. And there was a mandate to... "Let's go to the cloud. Let's take everything that Expedia has on-prem to the cloud." But the company was structured in a very metric situation. We had a lot of leaders, a lot of domain teams working on different things, and architecture is fairly decentralized and distributed. It's difficult to put together on a single diagram just how the company is structured and architecture is structured. And I struggled personally. I did not know how to actually infleueunce a lot of people at the time.

One thing that worked well is building a coalition of engineers that are working on different domains and get them excited about, "Oh, this actually a cool project that I want to be part of and because I can modernize my stuff and I can do CI/CD and I can have all the AWS resource at my fingertips and I can learn all the things, my resume gets better." That inspiration at the bottom up was quite helpful. One thing we did at the time, fortunately this was also not my idea, it was another engineer's idea, we started this conference. We used to have a conference that we used to bring a lot of senior engineers into the company, around 100 people, into one location every six months. And we talk about technical problems like, "Hey, imagine we are there, and then imagine we can do all these good benefits," and then have an external speaker come and talk about some of those things.

Then that actually kept creating a momentum around that willing to... Like, "I want to be part of this project and I want to do this because it's good for me, my resume, my company benefits. It's a win-win situation. I want to do it," creating that excitement through these programs where you have conferences and we had a blog, internal blog, external blog, we expanded speakers and internally we actually used to coach them to speak in the conference. So doing all this work allowed the project to go on for about three years where we moved really bulk of Expedia's footprint to the cloud. I think bringing people along, creating the mechanics was really helpful to create that grassroots influence.

Caleb Brown:

Yeah. How do you navigate the political dynamics while keeping a team focused on technical excellence, just moving forward with their work, but navigating these things that I think every company deals with on some level?

Subbu Allamaraju:

Yep. I think it is an unfortunate nature of who we are as individuals. We have psychological needs and we have aspirations, and sometimes they don't match up. I try to deal with politics in open mind and I try to make sure I'm not playing the politics. And I do that by, first of all, listening to others, trying to understand what they want, what is their motivation. Figuring that out usually dissipates some of the sense of politics. Once I understand what Caleb wants, "Oh, that's what he's trying to do. He's not playing politics, he wants to do that. Maybe that's the right thing to do," that understanding is number one, quite helpful. And the second thing is, as a leader, my job is to create influencing others to do work, to work on good outcome, the common good for the company, for the team, whatever.

And so my job is to help out. My job is to get things done. Whereas my job is not to aquire an empire. The empire is a consequence to me. My pay, my compensation, my team size, all those things are consequence of doing good work. And if I fail, that's okay, that having that loose attitude towards what you want to get out of these situations are helpful for me. And in fact, that attitude of, "I want to be useful," relaxes me quite a lot because I don't stress out at work anymore. I used to stress out because I used... Now I don't stress out because I'm here to help out. And so I'm not here to take something away from you or take your stuff. When people see you helping out, the sense of politics usually dies. When I'm hiding things from you, then we have a mistrust. But if I'm trusting you, if I'm asking questions to you, if I'm being transparent about what I want to get done, then there is much less chance of politics.

And I think the third thing is also, we as leaders, we don't spend enough time with each other, with my peers for example. So spending more time with my peers, at least something my manager has done very well in my current job is that helps figure out, "Oh, that person operates... That person is dealing with those constraints. That person is trying to get that started." Now I have better understanding of what that person is seeking, and then I can find what is a common ground between us to be partners. If we don't spend enough time, there's a lot of mistrust, "Oh, that person's trying to force me to do this thing," and then I started telling my own stories in my head and she has her story in her mind, her stories about me, and then we start playing politics. Letting that out and spending more time together is also very helpful.

Caleb Brown:

I want to focus a little bit on technical leadership. And this is a question I think... I don't think there's any universal right or wrong answers. Every situation is different. But interested how you evaluate when to build internal tools versus adopting the external solution.

Subbu Allamaraju:

I don't have a good formula. I don't think there are times when I've encouraged my team to build internally. There are times when I said, "Let's go up and get the tool." It's very situational. I'll give you an example. In one situation, my team has built in the past certain tools and they were excited about it. They were seen as innovation. They're seen as we have to... making things better for a lot of people, and I encourage them to build something new along the same lines, even though there are probably half a dozen startups trying to build the same exact thing and trying to get adoption.

Yet I encourage them to build something internally because that experience of building software and trying to innovate comes in handy in other areas. So it's builds that culture, but there are cases where I said, "No, let's not build it. Let's just write," and that was also okay, I think it was what culture you to promote] then I think what I focused on. Being pragmatic but also where there's opportunity to sponsor the innovation, sponsor the creative thinking, I think I would just do that.

Caleb Brown:

Yeah, absolutely. Curious about being a technical leader and having a solid technical background, of course, like we said, being individual contributor and everything, your approach, and we've also talked about your continued education and things like that, but interested in your approach of maintaining technical credibility, I guess, if you will, while focusing on leadership responsibilities, just the responsibility there, I think, there's a lot, to keep up with technical on the technical side, but also focus on leadership. And I think that, from our conversation, you've done it and you've found a balance there, but that's why I think it'd be good to ask you about how you've done that and any takeaways from that, because I think that there's probably a lot of technical leaders, especially just getting into leadership, finding themselves in a situation like this.

Subbu Allamaraju:

I think experience is quite helpful. In the industry, the longer you are, they see the patterns of different problems, different... So you get practice asking good questions. I think, even today, I don't consider myself a strong technical leader, as strong as I used to be five to ten years ago, it's just naturally because I needed to give up some of my edge for others to lead. I should be humble enough to say, "You're the expert, I'm the dumb guy in this room. So tell us what you think we should do." I should be humble enough to admit that, to be able to lead and get other senior individual contributors in my team to step up and do things.

But my job is to ask good questions. And, actually, not good questions. Ask questions. Doesn't matter what they are. They could be silly questions. But keep asking questions. I think, to me, being a technology leader is about staying curious and never stop asking questions. And that, to me, is actually a good habit that leaders must develop. But, of course, you have to do your research. You have to be... don't worry about being right all the time. Just keep on asking questions and learning from other people.

Caleb Brown:

100%. So stay curious is something that you said that I really like and I think you naturally find that in folks that have gravitated towards the technical side anyway, even how they ended up as an individual contributor. How do you see the role of engineering leadership evolving with the rise... Popular to talk about AI now, but I think for understandable reasons, so how do you see engineering leadership evolving with the rise of AI, and other emerging technologies, but I'd say specifically AI?

Subbu Allamaraju:

I think broadly I want to go to the talent angle. Because I think, as a leader, I'm not necessarily the person innovating and creating the next best AI-based solution or incorporate AI into my team and into my products, but my job is to make sure I'm continuously bringing the right people into the team. Every opportunity I have, I'm changing the talent profile of my team so that we are able to bring in newer and newer ideas, whether it's AI tomorrow, today and something else tomorrow, that this constant cycle of individuals coming into the organization and moving things around.

I think, to me, I focus more on that. For example, I run infrastructure here at Bill, but I've been hiring a lot of the software developers for my team for the last few years. And some of them are doing great work already. They're creating new tools, they're bringing different thought processes into the team, and one of them is building a chatbot here. So I think bringing the talent is something I focus a lot on so that they are the ones driving innovation. They think differently, they're building systems differently. That is something that I value a lot.

Caleb Brown:

Absolutely. And what skills do you think will be pretty crucial for that next generation of technical leaders?

Subbu Allamaraju:

I don't think the basic needs for technical leadership have changed in the last many decades.

Caleb Brown:

Yeah.

Subbu Allamaraju:

I talked about the three skills model earlier in the podcast, which is you have the technical competencies, you have the human competencies, and then you have the strategic competencies. The specific technical aspects change over time. Every generation, every 10 years, there's a new set of things coming in, but the other two competencies are not changing. We have to work with each other. Human competencies have to be there and creating that vision and strategy are essential for anyone. So two-thirds of our tool just hasn't changed. It's not going to change within the next even 50 years. Technical, how you adapt, what tools you bring in is changing, but how you work with people, how you create strategies isn't changing. And so those competencies still need to develop. And so I'm not super worried about some new technology taking my job away because I'm focusing on the trifecta of competencies, and I encourage even people coming into technology leadership to focus on building these too, the human and strategic concept, the competencies, in addition to technical competencies.

Caleb Brown:

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a really good response. Last question actually that I have for you, which is one that I typically, in some way, shape or form, ask every guest at the end, just catered to their own experience. But if you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about technical leadership culture, I guess you could say, what do you think that would be? What would you change?

Subbu Allamaraju:

Learn about leadership and business early in your career. Just don't keep on coding. At least just learn about softer subjects including business early in your career. Don't wait because those become really handy over time, and that's the investment I wish I had made earlier in my career.

Caleb Brown:

I mean, that's good advice for me and that is why we do this podcast because there are a lot of folks early in that stage, even a lot of individual contributors that have their sights on that next step. Do listen to the podcast and that is why I ask those questions and I think that's an awesome response. So, Subbu, thank you so much for joining. This was really interesting, a conversation I learned a lot. I really dig your approach to a lot of things. You have a fascinating background and there was a lot to learn today. So thank you so much.

Subbu Allamaraju:

Caleb, thank you for having me, it was a pleasure, and giving me the opportunity to share about myself and how I think about things. I had fun.

Caleb Brown:

What a great conversation with Subbu about leading with intention, scaling with empathy, and building engineering teams that are set up to thrive. One of the most powerful takeaways for me was Subbu's idea of leadership as manufacturing willingness. It's not about forcing alignment, it's about building trust, creating shared goals and taking the time to influence thoughtfully across organizational boundaries. I also appreciated his clarity on what never changes in technical leadership. The tools and technologies may evolve, but the need for strong human and strategic competencies is consistent. Subbu's reminder to invest early in understanding people and business, not just code, is something that every aspiring leader should take to heart. Thank you, Subbu, for sharing your journey and insights, and thank you to our listeners for being part of this conversation. It's stories like these that remind us why we keep moving forward. Join us next time for more insightful conversations with tech leaders who inspire us to grow, lead, and innovate. Find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube Music, and don't forget to share this episode if it resonated with you. Until next time.