Jordan Dea-Mattson: Indeed Singapore Product Center Rise, Điều hướng việc sa thải nhân viên công nghệ và chữa lành chấn thương nghề nghiệp – E558
“And the first big responsibility I had was I was put on the team that built the first time Apple changed its processor. Now, Apple’s changed its processor multiple times—the latest being the Apple Silicon we’re all aware of. This was the shift from the Motorola 68K to the PowerPC processor, and I was part of that team. That’s actually how I ended up coming to Singapore, because we were going out and telling developers about this globally. So, first time I came to Singapore was just around the time the North-South Line opened up. That’s when I met my friend Raymond, who for the next—what, almost 20 years—kept saying, ‘Jordan, you should come to Singapore.’ And we stayed in touch. Raymond was a local developer here in Singapore; I supported him over time. And then, from there, things moved in ’99. So I was there, actually, the night Steve Jobs came back in ’96. It was a very interesting and fun event.” - Jordan Dea-Mattson, Veteran Tech Leader
“The most important lesson I ever learned from Steve Jobs—and that’s the power of saying no. Because saying no lets you focus, and focus lets you do great things. When Steve came back, the product line was just this nightmare—hardware products, niches, and everything. And Steve just went and sliced right through it to a model they have today, which is: good, better, best. You look at the product line—there’s always a good, better, best. A very simple approach. And it really makes it easy for people to understand what they should pick.” - Jordan Dea-Mattson, Veteran Tech Leader
“In ’96, Apple was on the ropes. Earlier that year, there had been ‘Death of an American Icon’—the Black Apple cover on Businessweek. And it was scary. Apple was within, I think, 90 days of running out of cash. The technical strategy—there had been this thing called Copeland—there had been all these different strategies, and none of them were yielding fruit. None of them were working. And so the decision was made: Gil Amelio, who had come in as the CEO, and Ellen Hancock, who was the CTO, decided, ‘We’re going to go buy a new operating system.’” - Jordan Dea-Mattson, Veteran Tech Leader
Jordan Dea-Mattson, a veteran tech leader, and Jeremy Au discussed how Jordan built developer tools at Apple and went on to lead engineering teams at Adobe and Indeed. They explored how he witnessed Apple’s transformation under Steve Jobs, the often unseen dynamics behind major tech layoffs, and what it takes to grow and scale high-performing teams in Southeast Asia. Jordan also shared how he led the rapid expansion of Indeed Singapore, navigated its unexpected closure, and helped his team transition. He also opens up about overcoming personal trauma, leading with integrity, and why real bravery means acting in the face of fear.
1. From curious teen to Apple product manager: Jordan fell in love with computers in middle school, studied computer science, and hustled his way into a job at Apple by fixing bugs and thinking like a product owner.
2. Building early developer tools: He managed key tools like ResEdit and Max bug, and worked on making Apple software usable in Japanese, Arabic, and Hebrew—shaping his global product thinking.
3. Seeing Apple with and without Jobs: Jordan lived through Apple's lost years and felt the seismic shift when Steve Jobs returned—cutting the product line, raising the bar, and restoring focus.
4. From Apple to Adobe: At Adobe, Jordan worked on Acrobat's SDK, then led a cross-product team to improve interoperability—laying the groundwork for what became the Adobe Creative Suite.
5. Layoffs, politics, and unintended consequences: He was laid off during Adobe’s merger with Macromedia, learning firsthand how internal politics often decide who stays and who goes.
6. Helping Adobe’s products play nice: His team standardized core components like fonts and color management, turning a “preschool” of incompatible products into a cohesive offering.
7. Building Indeed Singapore from scratch: In 2018, Jordan set up the Indeed product center in Singapore, growing it from 4 to 250 people—emphasizing diversity, speed, and engineering quality.
(00:54) Jeremy Au: Hey Jordan, really excited to have you on the show. We've been friends for at least four years now. I think even longer than (01:00) that. I know time flies. And I just thought that this would just be a great opportunity to hear your story, but you have also some tremendous thoughts on AI and how the different technology waves have happened.
(01:09) So excited to get into this. So Jordan, could you introduce yourself?
(01:13) Jordan Dea-Mattson: So my name is Jordan Dea-Matson. A Singaporean by choice, but American by birth. About 10 years ago I decided to immigrate to Singapore and we actually met because we have a lot of friends in common, like JC who was recently on the podcast with you.
(01:26) And my background, born in the US, grew up in the US, and spent much of my life there. Educated, all of that. I started my career at Apple, in product. So I was actually a product manager and an evangelist first. And then later, moved into a role that had a mix of product and engineering that was at Adobe where I was responsible for the Acrobat SDK. And then worked on product interoperability at Adobe, which also had that same mix, and then later moved into some pure engineering roles.
(01:58) Jordan Dea-Mattson: Back in (02:00) 2015 or so, I took up a request that a friend had made to me, someone I'd met in 1992 in Singapore, one of my dearest friends, Raymond, and Raymond said, "Hey Jordan, you should come to Singapore". He started saying that in 1992. Finally in 2015 2016, there was space for me to do that.
(02:18) And I came over. Ended up first working at TradeGecko, then at Carousell, and finally in 2018, I was asked by Indeed to set up their product delivery center here in Singapore. There were four people when I joined and at the end, we had about 250 people and we were 70% Singaporean. And also I'm really proud of this.
(02:38) We were actually in engineering roles, not product, not design, not QA, but in pure engineering roles. We were about 23% women, which was just incredible,
(02:47) Jeremy Au: So how did you become engineering? Were you like the, I don't know, the geeky guy in school? Like how did you become an engineer in the first place?
(02:55) Jordan Dea-Mattson: You know that kid that, when you watch the TV shows about America and there's that kind of nerdy (03:00) kid who everybody picks on and the jocks harass them and all that stuff —that was me. Actually this, it's interesting because this really has highlighted something about Americans versus Singaporeans. It's cool to be smart in Singapore. It's cool to have esoteric interests. Not in the United States. It really isn't. And it can be really hard and really painful. I don't know what that engenders in terms of social dynamics and what happens to people, but it really is, it's awful.
(03:28) Jordan Dea-Mattson: So I actually got exposed, the first time I got exposed to a computer was in what would've been Sec 2 here in Singapore, so middle school in the US. And I went, "wow, this is really cool," and I started working with it and playing with it, but then we moved away from where we were living because it was at a local community college that I could do that. And so I had basically this four-year break where I didn't have access to computers.
(03:54) And then when I went to university, UC Santa Cruz, they had an open computing policy. Now, to put this in (04:00) perspective, this is before personal computers are widespread. We were on a time shared mini computer system running Unix. So this is where I aged myself, 1981. And we could go in and we could use it and we didn't have to pay for it.
(04:12) And I just fell in love. I actually entered uni as an econ major. And then I switched to Econ and Computer Science. And then finally just Computer Science with minors in Asian Studies and minors in Economics. And it was just, it was great. But let's put this in perspective. That computer, there were 20 of us using that at the time. It had 20 megabytes of hard bus to space and 512k of main memory. It was a PDP 1170. When you compare it to the phone you and I carry, or the watch we wear, it's incredible. I love sometimes to help people understand Moore's law in a very concrete way. That's 1981.
(04:49) Jordan Dea-Mattson: And then fast forward to when I joined Apple in 1986 and the computer they give me then. And how it compares today. And then just how technology has progressed, because this is a big trend (05:00) here. I know you and I, we both love science fiction and this is the kind of epitome or the illustration of what Vernor Vinge talks about in his books about the singularity, the technological singularity, where technology is just moving very quickly. And so I think it's a great illustrator there.
(05:17) Jeremy Au: Yeah. Fantastic. And how did you make the transition?
(05:20) Because, it is one thing to enjoy computers and it's another thing to, for example, getting your first, your job at Apple, right? And you were there for so many years. So what was that transition where you're like, you know what, not this is about using computers, but I'd like to work on them in the engineering space.
(05:34)
(05:34) Jordan Dea-Mattson: So what was interesting is, so 1981 go to university and I started exploring what you could do with these and basically wiring together applications for people. Ended up getting hired by the university as a student programmer, working in the Administrative Information Systems group. And so literally I was going out and I was building kind of these bespoke niche applications for different (06:00) departments. One that I was quite proud of was I built a kind of character terminal-based system that allowed people to do the assignments for housing. So we had 6,000 undergrads, most of which lived in campus housing, campus meal plans and things like that.
(06:17) And they were processing this all on paper. So we actually were able to put it into a system and they were able to track it. And then eventually I actually did the interface from that Unix based system to an IBM rain frame for the billing and put it all together to make that happen. And it was fun but as I looked at it, it was just too hard.
(06:37) It was too difficult to use. And then comes 1984, the Macintosh is introduced. I met my first Macintosh about two months after it was introduced. I did not see the Super Bowl ad because I didn't watch the Super Bowl that year. But I did see it in person about two weeks later. And I went, this is what it's about.
(06:56) It was Steve Jobs goes to Xerox PARC moment. I (07:00) went, that's what I want do. And so for the next two years, while I was in uni, I was working to build things like that as much as I could with the limitations I already had. But I said, that's where I want to go to work. Ended up signing up for the developer program, the Apple Developer program and actually had reached out to Guy Kawasaki and he met with me and talked to me about the program and took me to lunch at the Apple Cafeteria and everything. And I said, you know what? I want to develop for this, but then I really want to work here. Now in my computer science instruction, a lot of what I did was what you would consider tools and systems, so operating system stuff, compilers, all that kind of stuff.
(07:39) So I ended up at Apple first as a contractor doing testing of developer tools, but I started writing bug reports that were more, "it should work this way" rather than, hey, here's a bug. I still had plenty of those, but the product manager in charge of the area I was working liked what he was seeing and said, "Hey, would you like to come and (08:00) work in the developer tools group and be responsible for products?"
(08:03) And I was like, yeah, that sounds great. So I moved over, became a Product Manager; Assistant Product Manager and got some of my own products for people who worked on the Mac in the early days. I was responsible as product manager for Res Edit and for Max Bug. And then I did some work, which is where my sense of passion about international and being global in your products was I did a couple of system software packages that let developers develop both for the Japanese market; product called KanjiTalk, and then for the Arabic interface and the Hebrew interface system. So I learned a lot about kind of, Hey, not everything is asky, seven bit asky. There's a lot of differences, learning about characters in codings, left to right to left, text, vertical text, all that kind early Unicode. So I actually worked very early with Mark Davis, who was one of the guys behind Unicode and got to know him really well. This is all going. So I'm a very technical product (09:00) manager.
(09:00) And then over time, I got pushed into more and more bigger responsibilities and the first big responsibility I had was I was put on the team that built the first time Apple changed its processor. Now Apple's changed its processor multiple times. The latest being the apple silicon we're all aware of. This was the shift from the Motorola 68k to the power PC processor. And I was part of that team and that's actually how I ended up coming to Singapore because we were going out and we were telling developers about this globally. So first time I came to Singapore, '92, just around the time the North South Line opened up and that's when I met my friend Raymond, who for the next, what, 20, almost 20 years, he's saying, "Jordan, you should come to Singapore." and we stay in touch. Raymond was a local developer here in Singapore. I supported him over time and then, from there, things moved in '99. So I was there actually the night Steve Jobs came back in '96. It was a very interesting and fun event.
(09:59) Jordan Dea-Mattson: And then (10:00) in '99 I ended up getting approached by Adobe Systems and they said, "Listen, we have this job we think is a really good mix for you. It will play to your technical strengths but also your product strengths." And I was like, that sounds interesting. And this was being responsible for developer support for the Acrobat SDK. Because a lot of what was happening is people were building solutions on top of Acrobat. And so I got to be part of that, and that was a great transition. Though I do love to joke that it was the best personal growth decision I ever made in my life and the worst economic decision, because if I'd stayed another five years at Apple and then put that stock in the bank, this would be a different conversation. I came the summer after he (Steve Jobs) left. So he left in '85. I came in '86 but then I was there when he came back and I actually had a great opportunity.
(10:48) My next story actually starts shortly after the next launches because as the developer tools group, we were the people who did the competitive analysis of the next cube. So as part of the (11:00) settlement, there was a lawsuit when Steve left and rated staff to go do next. And part of the settlement was that Apple got two next cubes to review for intellectual property violations. One went to the system software guys, and the other went to us in developer tools. And so I got to be exposed to Objective C, Interface Builder, Project Builder; all the things that became like code, later.
(11:24) Jeremy Au: Okay. You were there when Steve Jobs was not there, and there was a time when Steve Jobs was there and had come back and obviously, Steve Jobs was like a Messiah figure. I think California's gonna name him a hero. Yes. "Hero of the Revolution". So I think a lot of people are like, who was he like as a boss or CEO of the company and you also saw the transition.
(11:44) Jordan Dea-Mattson: So I, I did not know Steve. I heard a lot of Steve's stories from people because I ended up becoming friends with people who worked very closely with Steve. One friend that was a good friend even to this day, he's a guy named Chris Espinosa. Chris (12:00) was employee number eight. He started working for Apple when he was 13 14 in the garage, literally when they were in the garage. And Chris is actually still at Apple oh many decades later. And so I heard a lot of Steve's stories and you'd hear Steve's stories and some you would go, "Yeah, but how do you have that story because you weren't here when Steve was here," so you had to filter them and take 'em with grain of salt.
(12:22) In '96 Apple was on the ropes. Earlier that year there had been, death of American icon, the black Apple cover on business week. And it was scary. Apple was within, I think it was 90 days of running out of cash. And the technical strategy, there had been this thing called Copeland. There had been all these different technical strategies and none of them were yielding fruit. None of them were looking. And so the decision was made. Gil Amelio, who had come in as the CEO and Ellen Hancock, who was the CTO decided we're gonna go buy a new operating system. And there were two contenders. There was BOS from Jean-Louis Gassée's company, Be Computing. (13:00) Jean Louis had an interesting inside track and that he had been head of Apple products for a number of years. And then this interesting story happened. This guy named Wiley Hodges sent an email to Ellen Hancock and said, "Hey, have you looked at NeXT?" while he worked at NeXT and that started a whole process of evaluating NeXT, and very quickly things went from NeXT being acquired and the deal was announced right before we went on Christmas leave in 1996.
(13:28) And we came back and we were in the process of acquiring NeXT. I worked in this whole area of developer evangelism and developer tools, which kind of put me right at that Nexus. So I very early on started meeting the NeXT people, both before the deal was consummated. So I was going up to Redwood City to NeXT HQ and hanging out and meeting people and then later when the deal was consummated and they joined. And so it was very interesting 'cause then I started hearing a lot of Steve's stories, but from people who really had worked for Steve for years and you knew (14:00) they'd worked for years. And he, like all people, he was a complex, complicated man. Clearly a genius. He had an ability to look at technology and understand its implications and understand how far you could push it, but also knew when to get out of the way and let the technical people do the technical stuff. And, so you just look at the people that have over the years driven things at Apple since the acquisition. You have, of course Avie Tevanian, who was head of software engineering. Then you have people like Scott Forstall who gave us the iPhone. You have people that are still there, like Ali Ozer driving the frameworks and everything. Just a wide range, currently Craig Federighi, who's the big guy. He came out of the NeXT mafia also.
(14:44) Jeremy Au: Great. And from that perspective, Steve Jobs being a complicated complex person. How was he complicated and complex from your perspective?
(14:54) Jordan Dea-Mattson: I think that Steve, one of the things had is that he had things (15:00) needed to be a certain way, and if they deviated from that they didn't work, but he could be gracious and kind and everything. I remember it would've been '97 WWDC so he was going to give the keynote address and I had been asked to be standing by because I was supporting some other stuff in the keynote. So I was in the audience sitting on the front chair, and just waiting. I was in the worldwide developer relations group, WWDR, which was under a guy named Guerrino De Luca. And so Guerrino owned basically WWDC. So he was there and Steve, and they were talking about the keynote that Steve was going to do. And I was sitting there in the front row and I had brought the latest issue of Wired Magazine with me. And this was the issue of Wired that had basically an Apple logo with a crown of thorns on it. And it said "pray". People think of Apple as this juggernaut, this inevitable. And we were on the ropes. Yeah, we were literally on the ropes. And someone saw that and they (16:00) said, "Jordan you need to show that to Steve because he needs to talk to that in the keynote." So I got guerrino knew who I was. I got his attention and he come on up. And I go, but I said, Guerrino, somebody says, you really need to see this. And he looks at it and it just come out. So literally like the day before, it hadn't yet worked its way, this was not the day of everything on the internet. And everybody knew everything at the same time.
(16:21) And then he says, SJ needs to see this. And so he walked over and he showed it to Steve, and Steve was looking at it and says, thank you. That's good. Can I have this? And I'm like yeah, of course you can have this. So I lost that issue of Wired Magazine to Steve Jobs. He ended up referring to it in the keynote address, touching on it. And he was just, he was very gracious and kind at the same time. I'd hear stories about where Steve would just rip people. One, because they hadn't delivered, they weren't doing what they needed to do. He felt they were bullshitting him from people who at the same time were incredibly loyal to him. Because I (17:00) think the thing that Steve achieved, and you look at early Apple, whether it's the original Apple with Was and Jobs, or later the Macintosh, or you go to Pixar or NeXT or Apple post his return, Steve just set a really high bar and ask people to meet that bar. And people who wanted to be great, who wanted to do great stuff, really appreciated that people who didn't, bitch and moan.
(17:27) Jeremy Au: And what's interesting is that from your perspective it's Steve was not an icon, but he was a leader. And you gotta see two very different management styles, right? One you said, while Steve was away, and when Steve was back, did you feel like there's a difference as an employee?
(17:40) Jordan Dea-Mattson: There was. There is a seminal, shift, seismic shift between when Steve returns. It took time, but there was just an incredible shift. I think about, so I have this talk I've given in the past, which is the most important, like lesson I ever learned From Steve Jobs. And that's the power of saying (18:00) no. Because saying no lets you focus, and focus lets you do great things. And when Steve came back, the product line was just this nightmare of hardware products, niches and everything. And Steve just went and sliced right through it to a model they have today, which is good, better, best. You look at the product line, there's always a good, better, best. Look at the iPhone 16. You have the iPhone 16 and the new 16e that's the good, then you have the better, which is the iPhone pro. And then you have the pro max good, better, best. A very simple approach and it really makes it easy for people to understand what they should pick, what they should buy. This overly convoluted and baroque product line that we had literally dozens and dozens of products. Apple took a write down on inventory at one point of I think a hundred million dollars, which back then was real big money. And that simplicity, the discipline the leaks started (19:00) drying up. People weren't leaking. Part of that was because people leaked were identified and they were fired. It was interesting though because it became, I had reveled in the apple where I could know everything that was happening. And between the company getting bigger and kind of things becoming more compartmentalized, that was no longer possible, right? You didn't know everything that was coming and what was going on. All of a sudden your badge would not let you into that building or that room.
(19:25) Jeremy Au: And when you joined the company, how many people were there versus when you left?
(19:29) Jordan Dea-Mattson: I was badge, my badge number, my employee number is 9335. Now, there were not 9,335 people. That's how many badges or badge numbers had been identified. They'd actually burned through a bunch of badges, I think a couple of thousand because they had system issues and syncing them up and everything. I think that we were about 3400, 3200 when I joined globally. We definitely were, we were punching above our weight. And it's interesting because you think about the other big (20:00) hitter in, in tech, which is Microsoft. And Microsoft was the small fry for many years, then caught up with Apple and then moved beyond Apple. So it was small. Now they've got a couple a hundred thousand plus, especially if you include all the retail people. So it's a huge difference. It's a huge world. You could have put everybody that worked at Apple everywhere in the world in the current campus that they have in Cupertino and that's just one campus. There are ancillary facilities across Silicon Valley, and across the world.
(20:33) Jeremy Au: And from there in Apple you moved to Adobe then Yahoo.
(20:37) Jordan Dea-Mattson: Actually so the progression is I went to Adobe and I was at Adobe up until they bought Macromedia. And then I was laid off as part of that layoff because one of the things Bruce Chizen was doing in that layoff was he was trying to reinvigorate Adobe. He felt that it wasn't what it could be, what it should be. So there was actually a bias against (21:00) Adobe people when there were overlaps it was like we'll pick the Macromedia pro sypnosis. I later found out that I was actually not on the layoff list until the Thursday before, and turned out Macromedia employee who had been sent to India to help set up Macromedia in India who needed to be repatriated. And part of what they had to do was give him a job. And the easiest thing was to give, essentially give him, basically eliminate my job and give him half my team. That was the way to do it.
(21:26) I later heard this and learned this. And what's interesting though is, this is a great example of what happens unintendedly in organizations because there were, within Adobe, there was a spectrum of people from people who were like, "I'm just here for my job." To people who were, keep it as static as possible to people who were trying to drive the innovation and the change. And literally in that period, the kind of organizational antibodies knew that there was gonna be a lot more of this, "let's drive change" coming in from Macromedia. And if you look at the layoff list. (22:00) It is the people who were driving change. So the organization basically said, "Nope, we're gonna stop that." and I think there's a key lesson there because Bruce had a great idea. He was trying to do great things. But at the same time, his ability to drive that down into the organization was hampered by this. I had a great run at Adobe. I loved it, seven years. Started off Acrobat developer support. Then later I was asked to take on a role doing product interoperability. I like to call this, we joke that this was Adobe preschool because the products did not play well with each other. There was no interoperability, differences around, all kinds of things. And so what we did is the team I had was a team that was made up of people who were actually domain experts.
(22:47) So there was one person on my team who literally had done his masters in color management. We had an ink under her fingernails, former print person. So very interesting combination of people there. And we would go in and (23:00) we'd look at a particular piece that cut across products, font handling, PDF, color management, transparency, and then we would figure out how to drive that. This work literally laid the foundation for what was called "The collections." And the collections were literally where they just threw the CDs in the box, and then later the creative suite, because the goal there was to get Adobe a bigger share of wallet because right back then everybody was buying Photoshop. Everybody has always bought Photoshop. But were they buying Illustrator? No. They were buying Freehand. Were they buying PageMaker? No, they weren't buying PageMaker, they were, QuarkXpress. And the idea was to get this so that people would buy it as a collection, as a suite. And that's what you see now. Yeah. And as you see, you look at the pieces and how they're put together, very much kind of goes back to that work we did in terms of achieving interoperability among the products.
(23:54) Jeremy Au: Yeah. Amazing. And from there, you went on to work at Yeah. Who as was other startups in (24:00) Silicon Valley. So what was that experience like?
(24:02) Jordan Dea-Mattson: So what happened is, I come out of Adobe. It was actually, this was a pretty brutal time economically in the us. And so it took me about six months to find a job. I ended up at a medical device company working on quality and process engineering.
(24:17) And, this was a totally different world for me because all, this is regulated, everything is documented, you change one thing and you've got it documented out. Let me tell you, FDA audits are scary and that're good scary because you know that things are being addressed and being looked at
(24:35) very carefully.
(24:36) So I spent about two years there and then I got approached to go and be an early employee at a video platform. So this is, remember this is around 80 2008. It's, yeah, it was early 2008. Went over and joined this company called Uala. Yeah, and y has this video platform founded by three people who came outta Google.
(24:58) And the idea was white (25:00) label video platform for you. Eventually we ended up with customers like Yahoo, Japan ESPN Disney using this plat, this white label, so we did everything from transcoding
(25:11) all the way to delivery. We did your analytics, all of that and made it happen. So I was there for about four years, And then got approached to join a company that I think was one of the more exciting companies in Silicon Valley at the time called Menta. Menta was founded by Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinski. They did the Palm Pilot. They did the Handspring Trio. But Jeff had a passion about the human Mind since he was very young, and so he had actually taken some of that money out of from. Palm and handsprings, both of those companies going public and invested it in a organization, the Redwood Neurosciences Institute, which literally studied the structure of the human brain. So they, slices of the neocortex, looking at them, understanding them, looking at how they worked together.
(25:58) And Jeff said, (26:00) got all of that and then said, let's work to replicate this in software. So I firmly, I actually firmly believe that if we get Gen ai, it's not gonna come out of LLMs, it's gonna come out of this kind of approach. We will basically replicate the structures of what's going on in the human brain.
(26:19) And we'll have machine intelligence that mirrors human intelligence is just gonna be running a lot faster. And they developed was called hierarchical temporal memory. 'cause it turns out that's how the mind works. And so it was a fascinating time. And then after that they pivoted out of what they were doing.
(26:37) Didn't need someone to do the work I was doing. And from there I ended up going to Yahoo, where I got to work on doing the largest chef. So Chef was a, was software for infrastructure management. It basically let you make sure that your servers were in a determined state at all times. And we did the largest chef implementation at the time at Yahoo, (27:00) over 300,000 nodes.
(27:01) And I remember the CTO telling me, he said, okay, I have one instruction to you guys. Don't fuck anything up. And we did it. We deployed without fucking any note up. And so I think that at that time, then from there, was about the time that I ended up coming to Singapore and, first worked at Trade Gecko.
(27:23) Trade Gecko was an interesting company doing some interesting thing. They hired me as a VP of engineering. They did not need a VP of engineering. And so I, due to some personal health issues plus constitu, I said, listen, you don't need me. These two people I was running product and engineering.
(27:38) It's these two people can be your leads in this area. And they went on to be very successful and trade. Geico got acquired by Intuit. And then from there went to Carousel got to work the homegrown darling here for a while. And then got approached by Indeed about, Hey, we're building this center.
(27:54) Do you want to come do that for us? And it was great because this was an opportunity to (28:00) build something in Singapore from the ground up. I'd been doing a lot of stuff in the ecosystem and in the community. And, one of the things I'd, I kept hearing again and again was, oh, you can't hire Singaporeans in tech.
(28:10) And I'm like, I don't think that's true. And we proved it not to be true. I remember a big fight I had with one of the, there, there were two recruiters I was working with initially. And one of them, he just insisted. You can't hire tech talent in Singapore. Don't even ask me to look for tech talent.
(28:25) I'm just going to find people in India and bring them here. And I'm like, no, I think you can. And just basically, said, no he would not do that. The other person, I said, listen, I think we can hire these people. This is how we're gonna do it. And she worked with me and what's interesting is he ended up not getting his quota. Not hitting his quota, she ended up just blowing her quota outta the water quarter after quarter as we built the center out. And so it was great because I got to proof, yeah, you can hire tech talent.
(28:54) Jordan Dea-Mattson: I also indeed had a way of hiring and performance management (29:00) that I still think is amazing. It's a model that I think having been in a lot of companies and been involved in a lot of hiring and performance management systems is the gold standard. And, I try to evangelize this approach. in fact, back in 2019, I met the head of OGP open government products.
(29:18) And at that point they were trying to build their base culture and everything. And I got permission to share everything and OGP, if you go to OGP and you look at it now. How they hire, how they performance manage all their career ladders. You can clearly say built on that indeed foundation.
(29:36) And I think this is why they have an incredible talent pool at OGP.
(29:40) Jeremy Au: Yeah, I think what's interesting about Indeed is, you start, it is new built effectively, right? From very small and then it became larger. And then that was a massive lay off. So it was like an interesting arc.
(29:51) Jordan Dea-Mattson: Very interesting arc.
(29:52) Jeremy Au: Planned on being on. So maybe you could share like that, those two stories, right? Like the growth side and what you learned from that, but also (30:00) from the layoffs and the closure of the Indeed Delivery Center.
(30:02) Jordan Dea-Mattson: Yeah, the product delivery center. So we went in and we were told, Hey, let's make this happen.
(30:08) And it was very interesting because at my second quarterly review, my boss at the time, he literally said, "We expected to be here two years in because we were moving at speed." Some of that is luck. A lot of times it's just luck. So I had talked with recruiters and actually been placed in front of companies.
(30:26) When I was looking at Indeed, I also had an offer from Standard Charter to go in and be a Senior Technical Leader there at Standard Charter. Ended up going with Indeed, and there's an interesting story there about that I can't tell you.
(30:38) Jordan Dea-Mattson: And, but what happened is one of those recruiters came to me and said, "Hey Jordan, this company Quantcast just closed in Singapore facility.
(30:46) All of their people are available and they'd like to stay together. We flew down interviewers from Tokyo and we set up three-day interviews and literally we interviewed every person. At the end of the day, we would (31:00) debrief each person and make a decision on whether to hire or not.
(31:04) And at the end of that, we had just made offers to 10 people. We blew, our first quarter numbers completely outta the water in terms of getting that. As we looked to scale, one of the issues we saw was hiring is a tremendous demand on people.
(31:18) It takes a lot of energy and particularly indeed because there's a whole process of developing people as inter viewers so that they're calibrated so that the signals you're getting on candidates are consistent across interviewers. So we juggling this, so we're quickly growing people up as interviewers.
(31:34) We even sent people up to Tokyo and they interviewed in Tokyo and learned and came back as certified so we accelerated everything. But one of the key things we did is we literally looked at it as a machine and we said, okay what if we were just to say, listen, everybody, if you're involved in interviewing, just clear your calendar on Wednesdays.
(31:53) We'll bring people in and we'll go through up to five candidates and we'll debrief them. And the thing that (32:00) happened was, is as a company we would bring people in, we'd interview them, we would make a decision and we'd tell them. So we had cases where we had identified a candidate to go into that Wednesday interview on a Friday and said, they're going in.
(32:14) And they had an offer in hand the following Friday, which is just unheard of in Singapore. And people were just like shocked. The other thing we did that was very different is if people wanted, I would agree to have a call with a candidate afterwards and share with them where were the places that they weren't meeting the bar.
(32:31) And give them advice on how they could grow and develop. And so we had some candidates that went through three times. We basically tell 'em, you missed wait a year. So we had someone at very early on we interviewed, they missed, we gave them feedback. They came again a year later, and then finally, another year later and we hired them.
(32:47) Again, this was unheard of. We had this incredible partnership between product leadership, engineering, and the TA talent organization, and the HR organization. And from this comes (33:00) a saying I have, hiring is to important to be left to HR. And if you want to hire the best, if you wanna hire great talent, then you need to roll up your sleeves as a leader and make it part of what you do day in day out.
(33:13) Jordan Dea-Mattson: And this all goes around the background of we all know early 2020 we get hit with Covid. And Singapore was the first facility hit with Covid. And we literally sent people home.
(33:24) We came back. So we had started hearing about Covid and that it was coming. We were hearing what was coming in from China and we had some people who had gone back home to China for CNY and we scrambled to come up over a weekend. What were we gonna do? What were we gonna ask people to do?
(33:42) And we asked people in line with what MOH was asking to self isolate at home for 14 days. And so we did that. And then, right after CNY that Thursday we had an exposure of one of our employees was exposed and the decision was made. We taken out of (34:00) our hands at this point and taken to a global thing, shut down.
(34:03) What's interesting is in this time when we were having this debate about CNY, the message we were getting back from corporate was, you guys are just being really alarmist. This is not a big thing, little do we know that, it's gonna blow up in our face. We continued to grow through this period, we were the first Indeed office to go work from home.
(34:20) We were one of the first Singaporean companies to go fully work from home. And we did all of that and through that we all kept growing.
(34:26) Jordan Dea-Mattson: And that is where the layoff comes in because a lot of the tech companies, like all of the big tech multinationals. There was significant over hiring during Covid, and everybody came out of that with more people, on their bench than they needed. What made things very interesting for us here in Singapore, and indeed Singapore had a huge presence in Japan. Because Indeed is owned by a Japanese company. Part of the reason they bought Indeed was to help them learn how to build software.
(34:54) Their first international development center was in Japan and it had grown very big. (35:00) And the thing is, Japanese employment law, you can't lay people off. If it's a money losing division you can lay 'em off or if you could get rid of the function, you can lay 'em, otherwise you can't. So Indeed decided it was gonna do a 15% across the board layoff, but there were 1500 people that could not be laid off in Japan.
(35:17) So the end result was, wow, that's about 250 people. Singapore employment law, we're just gonna close this center. It wasn't anything we did and I spent a lot of time assuring people. What I hear again and again from leadership is they love the quality of the work that we did.
(35:33) They love the volume of work we did. Because even though they'd gotten incentives from the government and support from the government, and I've talked to a lot of my friends in government and they agree this is a problem, and they're like we've gotta figure out how to solve this for the future, is that because Indeed was a knowledge company. They could shut down and walk away unlike in the days of Shell or Micron where you have a huge capital investment. Shell's not gonna shut down its (36:00) refinery and walk away. They might sell it to someone, but they're not gonna walk away. And so I think one of the things as a country and as a society that we're having to grow in this day of knowledge workers, when we give incentives to companies that are capital light, how do we ensure that they just don't walk away at the back end?
(36:18) And I know people at EDB. Are thinking about this and wrestling with this. I think they heard it loud and clear, and that's one of the things I've always loved about conversations with folks in the government. They hear it, they understand it, and then great things happen.
(36:34) Now, I remember giving feedback on the PEP for people who are in my bucket and that, hey, you want me to come here and you want me to do things like maybe lecture, but if I read the terms of the PEP explicitly, I can't do that. Because I can't sign any kind of agreement. I can only have one job. I can't do work outside of that unless I go to MOM and they approve it and it's like a three-month thing. So if (37:00) someone said, "Hey, we want you to come lecture or we want you to advise us." I couldn't do any of that stuff.
(37:06) So I gave the feedback on that. And a few years later we saw the tech dot pass, which addressed a number of those issues. And I was, I think I was like number 20 on the Tech.Pass. And then got the Tech.Pass and started seeing the issues with it and fed those back. And about 18 months later, they roll out the one pass, which addressed all the issues that we saw with Tech.Pass.
(37:28) And again, I was like number 20, 25. So I think we have a good thing here in that. I don't know, in the country of my birth, I don't know how I would be able to talk to someone who could influence things to make them better. And that's part of the advantage of being a small country, of being at a small scale and having the kind of civil service that we have.
(37:48) Jeremy Au: Yeah.
(37:48) Jordan Dea-Mattson: So this is what was interesting. We were completely blindsided. Yeah. Literally a week before in a large group setting. Chris Hymes had said, "No layoffs are coming." Yeah. I don't (38:00) know the backstory there. I don't know what happened, how things unfolded. I've heard rumors. I'm not gonna spread or speculate those rumors. But this kind of, this flowed out.
(38:09) How I found out about it is I was up late actually working on something and an email popped up and it said, basically it was the email announcing that there was going to be a layoff. And it said, within 30 minutes you'll receive an email that will either say your job is impacted or your job is not impacted.
(38:25) So the email layoff. I got the "your job is impacted". Here I am, I'm the site lead for this site. I have no insight into who was hit with this, that you've shut down the center. So I have people coming and asking me, and I start connecting the dots. And the thing is they basically announced this and they said, tomorrow there will be a communication meeting to deal with this.
(38:45) We were already in tomorrow. And people have questions and things, and quickly we start to put together a picture of what's happening and, it becomes clear that, it looks like it's pretty much everybody. We then learned that it (39:00) is everybody. And this hits me because I've poured five years of my life into this.
(39:04) I literally, it was February 2018, this is march 20, 2020, three boom, five years of my life, gone. I'm very proud of what we built. But I went into this mode which was, that I had three priorities. First, was to ensure that my people were treated fairly in this layoff.
(39:25) There were things that were done that were not in accordance with Singaporean Law or Singaporean practice, and spent a lot of time and energy raising that. Normally, in the US when they do a layoff like this, they're like, "okay, here's your severance. It's equivalent to three months."
(39:42) We have people who are on eps. If you give them three months of salary, they still have to leave the country in 30 days. So explaining the concept of Garden Leave and why you would want to do Garden Leave. I remember having one conversation because our medical stopped on the end of March.
(39:57) And having a conversation with an (40:00) HR person. Oh but you have government healthcare in Singapore. And I was just kinda like gobsmacked because I'm like, we have public hospitals, but first off, only citizens and PRs can access them. People who are on EP, which was still 30% of our population, can't, and it's not free.
(40:17) You still have to pay for it. And so they ended up doing that similar. They basically top people up with enough cash that they could self-fund their health insurance. So there was a lot of, "let's make sure that our people are taken care of."
(40:29) we worked as hard as we would work any day: writing proposals, putting decks together, evaluating people, figuring out who was open to it, who wasn't. It was a huge exercise. And I remember myself and Lynette, with Lynette just driving this incredible and just made this incredible thing happen.
(40:48) And I considered Lynette one of my best hires ever. And it was interesting because that recommendation for Lynette, one of the people who recommended her to me for associate site lead was actually JC. I'd (41:00) actually put out this, I have this position who, you know, to my network of Singaporean friends. And I literally got back from five people within a half day. Talked to Lynette Tan, and she's just amazing
(41:11) and she was great. And then finally was, okay, how about for me, what's my next step? And I did a short thing as a Smart Nation fellow, looking at people and culture in Govtech, I did more advisory, more fractional work. Fortunately I'm on the one pass, so I have flexibility in what I can do.
(41:28) But as I recently posted on LinkedIn, I'm looking for my next thing. And so I decided finally, hey, I'm gonna crowdsource this job search and see what I can get from people. It was hard because you built this thing. Every day you started thinking about, how are we going to create a great organization?
(41:46) The other thing was, site director was half my job. The other was, I was responsible for engineering for the international business unit. And we had done some great stuff there too, and it was just like, "Hey, this team I built in (42:00) India, I'm not gonna be part of it anymore. This team that I helped build in Japan,
(42:04) I'm not gonna be part of it anymore. I'm not gonna see these initiatives to the end." The team that I built in the us, I'm not gonna see that to the end. And so that was hard because you're on a path and then that path's cut off. And that is a really hard transition to make whenever it happens.
(42:20) And, it's happened to me a number of times. it happened at Humata. It happened, here at Indeed, this kind of cutoff. And that is a hard thing to do and to work through.
(42:29) Jeremy Au: And I think, you mentioned something that's interesting, right?
(42:31) Which is that, you've been laid off three times, right? And most people are like dealing with their first ever layoff. And so at some extent, do you feel like you get more experienced at it over time? But of course, like you said, the first time is like yourself getting laid off.
(42:42) Jordan Dea-Mattson: Yeah.
(42:43) Jeremy Au: Thing you've built for five years being laid off.
(42:45) Jordan Dea-Mattson: it's a whole different thing because I think it depends on how you approach leadership. Right. It really depends on how you approach leadership. If people are disposable and fungible, yeah, it doesn't matter.
(42:55) You're just out for yourself. You're not gonna try to get the best deal for them. You're (43:00) not going to try to softland them. You're just gonna be jumping on your next gig. And what I really loved was the culture we had built, and that we had also nurtured even more in Singapore of, "Hey, let's do this."
(43:12) In a sense, it gets easier because you know what the tools are and the things you have to do. But every time it happens, this environment in which this layoff went is probably one of the worst hiring environments I've seen in my career.
(43:25) And I'm going back to, I've seen this arc of so many quote revolutions so it was the personal computer, and then it was the internet, and each one of these revolutions ends up with a kind of a blowout at the end.
(43:38) Because people get too excited. There's a famous quote that, " We underestimate what happens in the long term, the change that will happen in the long term, while we overestimate what will happen in the short term." And I think that's, so people get, they're in a short term thinking and so they're not sizing the resources correctly and building it and then, (44:00) oh, we got a problem, we gotta deal with it.
(44:02) I think I would love to see some different models. I'd love to see, hey, if you're trying to cut X number of dollars, you're laying off 15% of your workforce and that's X percentage why don't you ask people if they'll take a 15% pay cut. Sometimes, and I've seen this adobe had essentially a layoff every year. They would over hire, invest in the wrong areas, and need to cut back. So over the six years that I was there, I participated in six layoffs. And the fact is a lot of times managers would use that as an excuse not to deal with a performance issue.
(44:36) Oh. So they just go, you know what, there'll be a layoff, it's October, must be layoff time. I can deal with my performance problems instead of engaging with it. And, if you wanna be in leadership, you want to be a manager, then you need to be able to have hard difficult conversations all the time.
(44:53) And not put it off to the system to solve it for you. Yeah. And I think in some ways, (45:00) some of the behavior in large tech multinationals and just in large multinationals, comes from managers who are not willing to have the courage to have those conversations.
(45:09) Jeremy Au: And I'm just curious do you have any personal stories about time that you've been brave?
(45:14) Jordan Dea-Mattson: Oh gosh. I tend to break the rules, so I'm gonna let ask you if you'll let me break the rules here. Go ahead and do two stories
(45:20) Jeremy Au: Wow. Okay. Exceeding,
(45:21) Jordan Dea-Mattson: Okay. Thank you. I hope people hear that. And so for me, I remember in secondary middle school, junior high in the US secondary here a teacher who we had studied something that touched on bravery and courage, and she just hammered this point home because I think there were a lot of people in the class who thought, being brave is just not being afraid.
(45:43) And she says, "No. Being brave is doing something that scares the daylights out of you because there's a reason to do it." And as I've looked at my own life ,I've always tried to keep that in mind. I'm gonna be scared, that's when I need to be brave, when I need to have courage.
(45:57) And then I've identified over time that there (46:00) are two strains of being scared. There's fear rooted in trauma, something horrible that happened to you, and then there's fear that's rooted in, this is new, this is different, I don't know how to navigate this.
(46:13) Jordan Dea-Mattson: The first for me, the trauma is when I was young, eight, nine,
(46:17) we lived in a neighborhood and there were a group of kids who were bullies. If you'll remember I'm that kid who always gets beat up. One day, I had gone out to play or walk or whatever, and these guys grabbed me. There was this old abandoned car sitting on this abandoned lot. They threw the trunk open, stuffed me in there, closed it, and tied it closed.
(46:36) I'm in the dark. It's hot. It's a small space. I don't think I had claustrophobia before that, but that is where I developed claustrophobia. I've always been very careful about triggering the claustrophobia. I love to scuba dive. But for the longest time, I'm always careful.
(46:53) Can I, do I have a weight to the surface? Is there something above my house? a couple years ago back in (47:00) 2022, went on a dive trip with a friend to the Maldives, we were buddied up and there was a dive that was a cave. So it was penetrating a cave going down through a path.
(47:09) Many people do it. And I just like, you know what, I'm not gonna do that. I'm, that's too scary. They finish it up and I'm talking to her afterwards, she says, oh, it was amazing, Jordan. I know it would've been hard for you, but you really should have tried it. And I'm like, maybe I should have.
(47:21) A couple of days later, we had a wreck dive where we were gonna penetrate the wreck. And my first reaction was, that's scary, I don't want to do that. But I talked to the dive master. I said, I really want to do this. Scare the heck out of me. I need you to be gentle with me, but let's do it.
(47:39) And so we did it and it was successful, and I've got this picture of us, preparing to penetrate. And it was wonderful, I loved it. But that was rooted in trauma. That trauma and the trauma might be that, your parents belittled you, or a teacher told you were never gonna cut it or whatever, and you need to overcome that trauma and you need to face that (48:00) trauma.
(48:00) Jeremy Au: Yeah. And I think, do you have any advice for people getting over their past trauma?
(48:05) Jordan Dea-Mattson: So therapy is not a bad thing. I think one of the things that we, as you know, individuals have these traumas, we don't know what to do with them. And the thing is the trauma has shaped our understanding of reality. And I think one of the roles that a good therapist plays is they become someone who basically you share with them and they say, that doesn't reflect reality.
(48:26) In this case, nobody is gonna come and grab you and throw you in a trunk again and tie it. Shut. Part of me it was identifying, where did this claustrophobia come from? And then, that's not ever gonna happen again.
(48:36) I'm never gonna be stuck in there. It was like six, seven hours. Some adults heard me pounding on it. They let me out. That's not gonna happen. And so I think therapy and therapists bring in a whole range of tools that they could do it.
(48:48) I would say having watched a lot of therapy- Instagram, avoid that. Go talk to a person who's trained, who's tailoring it to you not to get (49:00) engagement and make their pages perform.
(49:02) Jeremy Au: Yes. So thank you so much for sharing. I think that's really great advice.
(49:05) Jeremy Au: I love to summarize the three big takeaways from the conversation.
(49:08) First of all, thanks so much for sharing about, I think your early career, right? What brought you into computers your first university job, like working on micro computers programming, and what was it like to go to your dream job at Apple and also see the difference between what it was like to be led without Steve Jobs and to be led by Steve Jobs.
(49:29) So there's a lot of fascinating stories there. Second, thanks so much for sharing about, I think the second half of your career about how you've been able to grow teams. And most recently built out that Indeed site. Also go through, I think, the layout process from a manager role perspective by taking care of the people.
(49:46) And also be someone who's going through your third layout personally. Yes. And so it's an interesting color and I think there's a lot of empathy and good advice for people who obviously have to do the reality at technology industry is very sexy but also has (50:00) the most number of layoffs.
(50:01) Through the boom and bus cycles repeatedly. Which was good advice for you and asking you so much for sharing about your personal life. I think some of your own wisdom that you learned along the way as well as how you've also overcome some past traumas. So on that note, thank you so much for sharing experience.
(50:16) Jordan Dea-Mattson: It was wonderful. And hopefully we'll get a chance to talk again in the future about some other bigger issues.
(50:21) Jeremy Au: Definitely. On that note, thank you so much.
(50:23) Jordan Dea-Mattson: Thank you so much. Take care.