# The 2 Things You Ask Your Team When You Pass $1B w/ Hippo’s VP of Engineering | Dev Interrupted Powered by LinearB

> Mike Gordon, VP of Eng at Hippo, tells us the 2 most important questions he wants answered: "What are we working on & when will it be done?"

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The 2 Things You Ask Your Team When You Pass $1B w/ Hippo’s VP of Engineering

# The 2 Things You Ask Your Team When You Pass $1B w/ Hippo’s VP of Engineering

By Mike Gordon

|

June 6, 2022

![Mike_Gordon_Podcast_Card_f678e161bb](https://assets.linearb.io/image/upload/c_limit,w_3840/f_auto/q_auto/v1/Mike_Gordon_Podcast_Card_f678e161bb?_a=BAVMn6ID0)

When you think of a billion-dollar tech company, you probably imagine rooms full of monitors with dashboards and non-stop data streams.

Well, after talking to Hippo - a certified unicorn and newly minted giant in the insurance industry - we realized this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Mike Gordon, VP of Engineering at [Hippo](https://www.hippo.com/), sat down with [Dev Interrupted](https://devinterrupted.com/podcasts/) to chat about what it’s actually like to run the dev teams powering a company that just passed a $1 billion valuation.

His insights about what actually matters to him were amazing for how simple, focused and – brilliant – they are.

A great conversation on what’s important to a company re-writing the rules of insurance, Mike Gordon is by far one of the most thoughtful-yet-pragmatic minds we’ve had on yet.

### Episode Highlights Include:

* (1:56) From West Point to VP of Engineering
* (5:22) Best thing about metrics is "Retiring dumb stuff"
* (14:32) Reducing 'extreme face time'
* (19:23) Burnup charts vs Burndown charts
* (23:56) The two most important questions
* (35:24) Mike's four 'Golden Metrics'

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