We’re launching Plato
www.platohq.com — We help Engineers become better Engineering Leaders
What is Plato?
We are on a mission to help Engineers become better Engineering Leaders.
Through seamless integration with Slack, we match tech managers to highly experienced engineering leaders from top tech companies, in order to help resolve challenging management situations as they arise, in real-time. We’re easily accessible by being deeply integrated in tools you’re already using. When you have a challenge, just reach out you reach out to the bot Plato in Slack.
We have almost 100 mentors in our community who accepted to share their knowledge and their time. Among our mentors, we’re happy to have the VP Engineering at Lyft, VP Engineering at Segment, CTO/Cofounder of PagerDuty and other Engineering Leaders at Slack, Trello, Facebook, Google, Spotify, Netflix, Kabam, Digital Ocean, Clever, Datto, Box, InVision, Uber, Waymo, PagerDuty… Here is a list: https://www.platohq.com/our_mentors.html
After a few months of private beta testing, we’re very excited to announce our official launch.
How does the platform work?
Engineering managers face both short term and long term problems, and we help with both. For example, they have an employee who recently asked for a raise and is already asking for another one, an employee who is underperforming, a demotivated remote team… All they have to do is reach out to Plato through our Slack bot on direct message. We’ll go back and forth with the user for about 5–10 minutes to further assess the problem. The bot is assisted by a human.
On our end, we’ve extensively interviewed a bench of mentors to know what types of problems they’ve faced in the past. When we bring on a new mentor, we ask them for stories of challenges they’ve faced in their managerial history. Usually, they tell us where they have been particularly good, or where they screwed up but stepped back and learned a lot from this situation. This way, we can match mentors with the exact problems our users are having.
Once we figure out which mentor is best suited to help the user with their problem, we’ll handle scheduling by integrating the calendars of the user and the mentor, and presenting possible times that they can speak, all through Slack. We’ll set up a Zoom call for the user and the mentor in a few clicks in Slack.
Finally, we’ll follow-up and schedule further calls if needed. If it’s a long-term problem, we’ll make sure to coordinate meetings between the user and the mentor for the following weeks and months, as needed. We can also match the users with multiple mentors, depending on the challenge.
How did it begin?
We began as a company named Birdly, building different bots in Slack such as for expense reports or Salesforce. We wanted to leverage the emergence of Slack and figure out the most compelling ways to integrate with the platform. At the time we began, there were only a handful of bots available on Slack. We were a member of the W16 Y Combinator class.
Being young engineers, we had engineering skills, but not management skills. Growing as a manager is very difficult, and we learned a lot the hard way. We screwed up a lot, made lot of mistakes, and lost great developers… Sorry Bryan, Valentin, Joss, Paul: you deserved better :)
Fortunately, we had the guidance of many great mentors from YC and other sources. We learned that this was the most effective way to gain leadership skills — not through books or “executive coaching,” which often can cost $500-$1k an hour.
We decided to leverage our experience with Slack bots, our personal experience, and our knowledge of mentorship to give an affordable, impactful solution for engineering managers.
We started Plato five months ago, and launched a private beta for mostly YC co-founders, CTOs and Engineering Managers who were in our shoes. We’ve already worked with engineering managers from Box, Upwork, Blablacar, Typeform, Scality and other YC Startups.
We interviewed more than 200 engineering managers, participated to hundred of coaching calls between mentors and mentees and feedback have been great so far.
Our launch event on the 15th of May in SF
For our launch, we’re excited to host a kickoff event in San Francisco on the 15th of May with some of the top engineering leaders of Silicon Valley. We have almost 100 amazing mentors on our platform who have gone through an extensive screening process on our end. Each of these mentors has their own incentive for joining the platform. Some want to network, some want to give back or improve their coaching skills, and others just want to be part of our community. The launch event is to celebrate the community we’re building. It will be on May 15th, and will be an occasion for some of our most prestigious mentors to talk about their experience and life as a manager: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/engineering-management-talks-with-plato-tickets-33989841531
- Keynote “My transition from IC to Manager”
Speaker: Shivani Sharma (Senior Engineering Manager @Slack) - Panel ”My worst mistake as a manager”
Speakers: Benjamin de Point (Engineering Director @Datto), Tasneem Minakadis (Engineering Manager @Uber), Brett Huff (Engineering Manager @Trello/ Atlassian)
Moderator: Christian McCarrick(VP Engineering @Telmate) - Panel “How to become a legitimate leader”
Speakers: Richard Sun (Senior Director of Engineering @Kabam), Yi Huang (Engineering Manager @Facebook), Jean Hsu (Engineering Manager @Medium) and Nikhil Pandit (Engineering Manager @Clever)
Moderator: Christian McCarrick (VP Engineering @Telmate) - Keynote “My transition from Manager to Manager of manager”
Speaker: Tido Carriero (VP Engineering @Segment) - Keynote “Building an engineering structure”
Speaker: Luc Vincent (VPE Lyft)
It has been a long journey and it’s only the beginning. I’m very proud of my team, grateful to our investors for their trusts and thankful to Plato mentors for their time and help.
