The Data Chief | Episode 96

How seizing the (GenAI) moment has driven effective change

Prashanth Chandrasekar

CEO

Stack Overflow

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Episode Overview

When Generative AI first took the world by storm, some thought it might threaten the very existence of Stack Overflow. In this episode, hear from the company’s CEO, Prashanth Chandrasekar, who shares how he embraced change in a time of uncertainty to drive his business forward.

Key Moments:

  • A journey from intern to CEO (05:10)
  • Encouraging a harmonized relationship between humans and AI (09:58)
  • Why embracing stress can drive urgency and effective change (17:18)
  • Generative AI’s impact on the skills landscape (30:39)
  • Fostering a data-driven company culture (36:41)
  • Embrace change, and quickly (40:25)

Key Quotes: 

AI does amazing things, like summarizations and semantic search. Humans do amazing things like curation of knowledge, making sure it's accurate, connecting the dots, and creating relationships. So bringing the power of humans-in-the loop, especially given a broader trust deficit, felt like the right thing to do at this point in time.

I think ultimately what guides us is we want to be useful to our users and our customers. That's the guiding light. Because why do we exist as an organization or a community? We should all just go home. If we don't actually have a mission and purpose that adds value, then we don't have a purpose. So the question is, what is that? What is the highest purpose?

When you think about the future of software development, there’s a lot of doomsdayers about job losses. I think it's going to be the opposite. I think AI reduces the barrier to entry. I think a lot of people will be “developers”, even though they may be doing very different things.

Mentions: 

Bio: 

Prashanth Chandrasekar is Chief Executive Officer of Stack Overflow and is responsible for driving Stack Overflow’s overall strategic direction and results.Prashanth is a proven technology executive with extensive experience leading and scaling high-growth global organizations. Previously, he served as Senior Vice President & General Manager of Rackspace’s Cloud & Infrastructure Services portfolio of businesses, including the Managed Public Clouds, Private Clouds, Colocation and Managed Security businesses. Before that, Prashanth held a range of senior leadership roles at Rackspace including Senior Vice President & General Manager of Rackspace’s high growth, global business focused on the world’s leading Public Clouds including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Alibaba Cloud, which became the fastest growing business in Rackspace’s history. Prior to joining Rackspace, Prashanth was a Vice President at Barclays Investment Bank, focused on providing Strategic and Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) advice for clients in the Technology, Media and Telecom (TMT) industries.