Giant Robots Smashing into other Giant Robots Podc 6e716n

Introducing thoughtbot's ongoing maintenance service. Need reliable and maintenance for your software? Look no further. Our expert team handles upgrades, bug fixes, UI adjustments, and new feature development. And the best part? Our maintenance packages start at just 5k per month for companies of all sizes. From Ruby on Rails to Node, React, and, yes, even PHP, we've got you covered. Trust thoughtbot for top-notch and optimized performance. To receive a custom quote, [email protected]. Marc Mar-Yohana is the CEO and Founder of OtisHealth, a personal health application and platform for patient-caregiver engagement, population health, and clinical research. The conversation revolves around the origin and working principles of OtisHealth, a healthcare app designed to consolidate health information. Marc was motivated to start the app following the tragic death of his eight-year-old daughter, Constance, from an undiagnosed brain tumor. Despite being under the care of multiple health providers, the fragmentation of her medical data meant they missed the signs of her condition. Marc has dedicated his life to developing better tools for families and caregivers to manage their loved one's health. He aimed to create a unified system where all health data could be gathered, enabling caregivers, patients, and medical providers to see the whole picture. OtisHealth allows patients to integrate data from different sources, including wearable devices, and capture information outside clinical settings. The initial outreach strategy of OtisHealth through consumer channels was slow to get traction. The company switched to recruiting through organizations with health interests, such as health insurers or "payers," leading to a significant increase in s. Although not everyone uses the app daily, it is a crucial health management tool for those with chronic illnesses or emergencies. The trustworthiness of OtisHealth is demonstrated through accreditation from the Electronic Healthcare Network Accreditation Commission, indicating that their practices meet or exceed federal regulatory requirements and industry guidelines. This, along with community outreach and educational content, helped build trust with s. Marc's diverse corporate background gave him the skill set to lead OtisHealth, emphasizing the importance of team development and collaboration with other organizations, even competitors, to move the mission forward. __ OtisHealth Follow OtisHealth on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, or YouTube Follow Marc Mar-Yohana on LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. And with me today is Marc Mar-Yohana, CEO and Founder of OtisHealth, a personal health application and a platform for patient-caregiver engagement, population health, and clinical research. Marc, thank you for ing me. MARC: Victoria, I'm honored to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me to you on this podcast. VICTORIA: You're welcome. I'm excited to have you. So, why don't you just tell me a little bit about what's going on in your world right now? MARC: Well, OtisHealth is keeping me pretty busy. So, I live in Northern California. My team is mostly in California, a little bit in Illinois. And we're busy every day, both ing our and working with clients. And so, it's exciting times, especially on our advocacy front. We work with organizations across the country to advocate for patient access to their health records and also for individuals themselves to improve their access to quality healthcare wherever they reside in the United States. The advocacy, the work with our clients, and the work with our keeps us super busy. Although I do still try to make time to hike in the beautiful scenery out here. I'm new to California. I'm originally from Illinois, so it's great to just be able to get out every once in a while for a hike in the area. VICTORIA: That's wonderful. Have you made it to any redwood forest out there? MARC: Yeah, Muir Woods, which is just north of us, north of the San Francisco Bay Area. Most of the time, we like to walk the coastline. So just north of Santa Cruz is a great state park known as Wilder State Ranch. And they have amazing views of the coastline, wonderful views of birds, as well as occasionally spotting whales, and dolphins, and sea otters along the coast. VICTORIA: That's so cool. I had a friend, actually, who just went up there and went kayaking with the otters, and I'm very jealous. [laughter] It sounds beautiful. MARC: Yeah, that can be fun. Otters are really cute creatures. And they can be aggressive too. There's a concern right now. There's one female otter that likes to grab people's surfboards. And I saw a video of a sea lion jumping on top of a sea kayak to steal a fish from a fisherman. VICTORIA: I think if a sea otter or a sea lion wanted my vessel, a kayak or surfboard, I mean, you can have it. [laughter] You worked this hard. [laughs] MARC: Yeah, they're pretty aggressive. They're more comfortable in the water than we are, so they [laughs] pretty much are in charge in the environment. VICTORIA: That's right. We're in their house, right? So, I'm, like, okay, [laughs] you can have it. That's great. Oh, wonderful. I'm glad you still have time to get outside and enjoy hiking with your family, even though you're a very busy founder [chuckles] and very active advocate for your community. So, why don't you tell me how everything with OtisHealth got started? MARC: So, it started with a tragedy, a horrible tragedy in my life. My daughter, Constance, who was eight years old at the time and had been previously diagnosed with autism, apraxia of speech, and epilepsy, died from an undiagnosed brain tumor. She had great healthcare. She had a neurologist, a pediatrician. She had therapists that saw her five days a week and, of course, her parents watching over her. Yet, we all missed the symptoms, the major illness that claimed her life. And so, because all of her healthcare providers were on different systems, and as parents, we didn't have a system, there wasn't a place to put our observations together. And everyone attributed their observations of her changing condition to other medical concerns. And so, after she ed, I started to spend a couple of years trying to understand what happened. And I realized a big part of it was the information was in front of us. It was just in different people's hands. And when we put it together, we could have seen the whole picture that would have shown that she had a more serious illness. And so I chose a new mission in my life: to abandon my corporate career and move into this role of developing a better set of tools for families and caregivers to manage their loved one's health. And so, our mission today is to work with families, caregivers, and people with chronic illness to give them better tools to manage their everyday health and the health of their loved ones, and thereby also improving lives in the community. VICTORIA: Well, I love that out of the tragedy, you were able to find direction and purpose to solve this major problem, which I can relate to having moved across the country. Your medical records don't come with you. You have to basically kind of start all over, or they have to go get them from your past patients. It's not unified as a system, as you might think that is. [laughs] MARC: That's absolutely right. Our data is spread out across different clinical sources. Just in the time I moved out here to California from Chicago, I saw five different providers just because I wanted to get some tests done. So, I had to go to a few different locations to do a normal battery of tests. And so, I had at least five different health records created just when I moved out here. And they're all in different systems, and they're not even on the same type of application. So, to bring them together, I had to basically them and put them in files on my desktop computer. With OtisHealth, I'm able to retrieve that data and put it onto one continuous record and watch it. But that's still just our clinical data, meaning data collected in clinical settings. We have more data to share of things that you and I observe as regular people or our families observe. And so, the part that's missing in the record is all the observations in the time that we're not in the physician, in a physician's office, or in the presence of a clinician. We can; with our tools today, such as wearable watches, or blood pressure cuffs that are Bluetooth-connected, we can get a lot more data and share that back into our records so that we have a true baseline, not the once-a-year that I go to see a physician, and they say my blood pressure is high. And the next time I go, it's low. It's because we only have two data points over two years. Where today, with our technology and our capabilities, we can have a baseline of true data continuously throughout the year that will give the physician or care team more insights into how we're doing in of our health. VICTORIA: That's so interesting. And it makes a lot of sense to me why someone would want to use this or why doctors would want to use this. And I'm curious, once you had this idea, how did you get that initial traction to get started with OtisHealth? MARC: Initially, it was a little difficult. And this is kind of part of our lessons learned when we started the company. We started advertising on Facebook. This is after we launched the product. So, we launched in 2021. We had the idea that we were going to make this available to a lot of people. We knew a lot of folks that needed it. It was okay to get the first 100 or so people because there were folks that we knew needed the application or folks that were curious about it and wanted to try it. And we started advertising through consumer channels such as Facebook, and LinkedIn, and other magazines to people that we knew had the need for the app. Yet, it was a very slow uptake. And the part of what we learned and we started applying to our marketing or our hip development or recruitment thesis is that the health records are kind of like an umbrella. We don't think about the umbrella or going out to get an umbrella until it's raining, and for most people, it doesn't rain very often. And so, it's not something that people would use every day. In most cases, they use it only when they have an emergency or when they're managing their chronic illness or the chronic illness of a loved one. And so, we eventually changed the way we were recruiting and started recruiting through other organizations, such as clients where we're able to get thousands of s through the client that has . And then, slowly, over time, teach them the importance of managing their everyday health, and taking their own vitals, and recording that, and they record for themselves and their family. VICTORIA: Right. So, you were able to offer the app for free for daily s because you found another group that was interested in having access to the data and having this app, right? MARC: Yeah. So, anybody today can go to the Apple Store or the Google Play Store and they could the app for free. And they can use the web version also. And they could share it with friends and family, which I always encourage people to do. So, if you have an emergency , invite them to your medical records; at least they have your basic medications, and allergies, and other key information in case of an emergency. What we did in of our change of strategy early on is we started going to organizations that also had an interest in improving the health of their population and, in particular, health insurers or what we call in the industry payers. And so, payer organizations could be Medicaid, Medicare, or it could be employee health plan, one of the big health insurance companies like Blue Cross or UnitedHealthcare. They have an interest in people managing their everyday health. And so, one of our clients right now, everyone that enrolls in one of their plans automatically gets enrolled in a version of OtisHealth specifically for their . And those could still invite people to them on the platform, and those people can get on with OtisHealth. But the nice thing is now this payer has a way to both encourage healthier activity or healthier practices for their population and monitor if there's a problem. So, if somebody is missing medications, or not taking their medications on time, or has vitals that are tracking poorly, this gives the payer an opportunity to reach out and ask them if they need help managing their health. VICTORIA: So, how does that dynamic affect how you measure successful engagement on the platform, like, a successful rate of engagement? MARC: So, for us, most people don't use the app every day. Most of us don't even think about our health [laughs] on a daily basis from a standpoint of our medical health or clinical health. Sometimes those of us that exercise regularly think about it in those or eating healthy. But we don't think about keeping a record or using an app to maintain our health. And so, for us, an active is anybody that's logging in at least once a month to update their information. Our really great s are the ones who are using the reminder features to take supplements or take their medications. And so, I would say of the few thousand s that we have—we're approaching 10,000 right now active s—only a small percentage of those, maybe 10%, are actually using it on a daily basis for themselves or their family. And so, for us, a good engagement and good practice is folks setting reminders on at least a weekly basis to take vitals, weigh themselves—something that would help them track their health over time—and if they're taking medications, to set daily reminders for the medications that they take. And so, we currently have far more people enrolled in OtisHealth and that, you know, 5,000, 6000 I mentioned that are active. But they basically bought the umbrella, and they just put it in their closet. They're waiting for that rainy day that they have to pull it out and start using it. VICTORIA: That makes sense. And I'm already in my head going through the people in my family who would benefit from this where, you know, I have family who have a learning and a physical disability, and tracking everything that they're supposed to be doing to maintain their health is quite difficult. So, I can definitely see the value in that and why people would want to use it. And I think for, you know, healthcare apps, you have to build this high level of trust. You know, people are giving you all this data about their health information. So, how do you go about building a product that people can trust from the beginning? MARC: One of the things we sort early in the life of OtisHealth is an accreditation. An accreditation is not required by law. It's not required by any institution necessarily. It's a third party that reviews our practices and our systems to see if we're actually following good privacy and security standards and practices. And so we went live in November of 2021, and by the end of December of 2021, we already had our full accreditation in what's called a comprehensive level from a national established organization known as The Electronic Healthcare Network Accreditation Commission. And so, that was the first step of making sure that folks understood that we took their privacy and security seriously. That accreditation means that our practices and our technology meets or exceeds federal regulatory requirements and industry guidelines. And that's just the first step. Then after that, it's really a matter of people gain their trust because an accreditation itself doesn't necessarily mean that we trust that brand. That's just a basic starting point for us. After that, we publish articles about maintaining health. We have launched some videos about different aspects of our advocacy, such as with autism for caregivers. And we participate in community activities at the national level to improve patient access and to talk about how important it is to manage our own health and the health of our loved ones. And so, it's a combination of both basic accreditations that show that we made the investment, and we provided a third party to critique us and to review us. And we actively maintain that accreditation is not a one-time stamp. And then, the second part is continuous outreach, and letting the community know what we're working on, what's important to us, so that, over time, they start to look at what we do and start to trust it and invite other people to trust it as well. VICTORIA: That makes a lot of sense. And I'm curious if there were experiences from your corporate career that informed how you acted as a founder and what you prioritized. MARC: I've had an odd corporate career. [laughs] So, I started my career as an engineer in manufacturing operations and in product development and then went down to as a consultant strategy in ops and market management, and then, later, investment management and private equity, and then, later, for a safety science company where I was managing global capital investments in technology and new operations. And so, I've been fortunate that I've had a breadth of experience, from marketing to sales, to product and technology development, and infrastructure management. So, I had some basic skills that helped me understand what...well, the endeavor before I jumped into it because I spent a couple of years thinking about whether or not I even wanted to do something like this. And then, I would say probably the most important part of my previous experience that I apply every day at OtisHealth is developing teams and developing collaboration with different organizations. You know, aside from the team that I have, our own staff, we also work very closely with other organizations, even competitors, to make sure that we're all successful. And so, that collaboration across organizations that don't even have a necessarily contractual relationship is something that I brought over from my previous work and seeing how working across the industry, we can help each other and serve the mission. So, I think that was probably the most important part of my previous work experience that I apply today is this: building a team and building a coalition of organizations that want to move forward together. VICTORIA: That's great. And I'm wondering if there was anything that surprised you in that early phase of building collaboration with other companies and understanding your s that changed the strategic direction you were going with in the app. MARC: So, one of the things that I was really just in awe of was how willing people in the healthcare industry were to jump in and help out when we started talking. And so, many of the organizations that we work with, the founders or the senior staff within the nonprofits we work with, all have a story of why they're doing what they're doing. Many are brilliant people who could have taken their careers in many different directions, not in healthcare. And they chose to move forward in healthcare because of some personal experience in their life. And so, as I learned about the people I was working with, I was surprised how quickly they just took me under their wing and said, "Hey, let's get you started marketing. Let's move OtisHealth forward." And so, we have organizations like Onyx and Invitae [SP] that are giving us in data access. There's another organization that I can't mention yet; that's another private entity that has offered their , and we hope to launch with them in the next couple of weeks. And so, we're forming these data access bridges to help get patients more access to their data, their loved ones' data. And then, there's the nonprofits in the advocacy and standards organizations we work with, such as HL7, which is an international health technology standards organization, and DirectTrust, which is an organization that establishes trust networks in ecosystems, as well as the technology infrastructure behind how those systems communicate. And we work also with EHNAC, the accreditation commission. So, we not only are using the accreditation from EHNAC, we're on committees to advise them on future criteria for accreditation. VICTORIA: That's really cool. I love that there's that collaboration and just openness and willingness to try to make things better and to invest in solutions together. Mid-Roll Ad: VICTORIA: Introducing thoughtbot's ongoing maintenance service. Need reliable and maintenance for your software? Look no further. Our expert team handles upgrades, bug fixes, UI adjustments, and new feature development. And the best part? Our maintenance packages start at just 5K per month for companies of all sizes. From Ruby on Rails to Node, React, and, yes, even PHP, we've got you covered. Trust thoughtbot for top-notch and optimized performance. To receive a custom quote, [email protected]. VICTORIA: And with me here, I have Richard Newman, who is the Development Director on our Boost Team, to talk to me a little bit more about what maintenance actually looks like once you've built your software application, right? RICHARD: Hi, Victoria. VICTORIA: Hi, Richard. You have experience building applications. I wonder if you could describe to a founder who's considering to build an application, like, what should they consider for their long-term maintenance? RICHARD: Well, like you said earlier, part of what you're going for with that long-term maintenance is making sure the health of your project, of your application, is always there. And you don't want to be surprised as you're continuing to work with your s and so forth. And so, a number of things that we pay attention to in maintenance are, we're paying attention to keeping the application secure, providing security updates. We want to make sure that the ecosystem, basically, all of the tools and third-party services that are tied to your application that, we're responding to those sorts of changes as we go along. And then part of it is, occasionally, you're going to find some smaller issues or bugs or so forth as your group continues to grow or as needs continue to change. You want to be able to respond to those quickly as well. And so, a lot of what goes into maintenance is making sure that you're paying attention and you're ahead of those things before they surprise you. VICTORIA: Because what can happen? Like, what are the consequences if you don't do that ongoing maintenance? RICHARD: Well, the security updates those happen across gems and in the platform sort of tools that are there. And so, if you're not keeping those up to date, your exposure, your vulnerability to being hacked, or having a bad actor come into your application start growing on you if you're not doing the maintenance. The other ones that can come up is there's new interfaces that these third-party services...they may be updating their APIs. They may be updating how you're supposed to work with their tool. And so, those can occasionally break if you're not paying attention to what's going on or you're suddenly surprised by an upgrade that you have to make. And then, finally, there's this long-term sort of code change that just builds up over time if you're not keeping it refactored for the changes that are in a language or the gems that you work with. And then, suddenly, after a while, it suddenly gets to the point where you have a lot of work that you might have to do to rehabilitate the application to take on some of the newer features that are being released. And so, that makes it that much more difficult, that much more friction about being able to deliver updates for your s or to be able to respond to changes that are happening out there in your application. VICTORIA: Right. So, if you don't have that ongoing maintenance, you could run into a situation where, suddenly, you need to make a very large investment and fixing whatever is broken. RICHARD: Absolutely. It's going to be very tough to plan for if you weren't keeping up all the way along and, yes, absolutely ends up being much slower if you have to remediate it. VICTORIA: That makes sense. I wonder if you have any examples of a project you've walked into and said, "Wow, I wish we had been doing a little bit more maintenance." [laughs] And maybe you can share some details. RICHARD: Yeah. We had a fairly large application that involved a number of clinic services. So, we had an application that s were going in every day and counting on our fast response. And, over time, we've got surprised by a database upgrade that had to happen. Basically, the database was going to be changed by our third-party hosting service, and that hadn't been tested. There hadn't been procedures in place when we discovered this need. And there was a very hard date that that change had to be done or else the entire application was going to go down. And it came at a very inconvenient time, at the end of the year around Christmas, that we had to respond to all of that. And had we been in front of it and just updated it every quarter and staying current with it, it wouldn't have been nearly the lift that it turned out to be. We were facing a pretty hard deadline [laughs] there to keep things going. It was very, very stressful and disruptive for the team and potentially for the clinics. VICTORIA: Right. And it always happens around a big holiday or something like that, right? When it all comes to a head. So... [laughter] RICHARD: Absolutely. You want to be in control of the timeframe and not have the timeframe be in control of you. VICTORIA: Right. And if you have a team like thoughtbot ing you, you can go on your vacation with a little bit more knowledge that if something breaks, there's someone there who can respond and fix things, and you don't have to interrupt your very valuable time off. So... RICHARD: [chuckles] Absolutely. VICTORIA: Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Richard, for ing me today. I appreciate you coming here to talk with us. And we'll talk to you again soon. RICHARD: Yeah, it was a pleasure. Thank you. VICTORIA: You mentioned advocacy. And I'm curious if you could say more about what advocacy are you doing or how does that blend into your business model and what you're doing with OtisHealth? MARC: I'll give you an example. One of the organizations we belong to and I participate in personally is the Health Information Management System Society. And so, this is a professional society of healthcare IT professionals. And in Northern California, there's an advocacy committee that works directly with the state legislature to promote legislation that will improve the quality of healthcare for people in California. We actively talk to of the legislature to tell them what bills we think are important. The ones we focus on and the ones I personally focus on are the ones that improve access to our data and also improve our privacy. So, there's a legislation in California, as an example, that will prohibit access to people's healthcare data without proper legal warrant. So, it's basically extending HIPAA protections across any health app launched in California. And we, of course, are already HIPAA-compliant, so that's very easy for us. There's also advocacy specific to certain health conditions. So, my daughter had autism. I work with the Autism Society here in California and also Achieve Tahoe, which is an organization that teaches skiing and other skills to people with disabilities in particular. This past season was my first season. I work primarily with children and young adults with autism and other developmental disorders. And then we also partner with organizations when we think that they're aligned with some of our mission. And so we work with the Caregiver Action Network. We also will work with AARP and other organizations regarding caregiver rights and also teaching caregivers how to access the healthcare data of their loved ones and how to take care of themselves personally. VICTORIA: That's wonderful. And I guess it's not really a question, but I saw that autism service dogs are a thing, and I just thought that was really cool. [laughs] MARC: Yeah, OtisHealth is named after Constance's autism service dog, Otis. And so, service dogs are extraordinary animals. They're highly trained. Otis had been trained for two years before we received him. He was trained specifically for Constance's needs, and he kept her safe. And that was the primary interest in Otis is observing things that she...because of her cognitive limitations, wasn't always aware of her surroundings and wasn't always safe. And so, the dog maintained her safety and her boundaries and kept her focused, as well as just basically blocked her if she was going to do something that was unsafe. So, there are many different kinds of service dogs, and I'm talking specifically about ADA, the Americans with Disability Act type service dogs. These aren't, like, companion dogs or therapy dogs. These are truly highly trained animals that are focused on specific tasks to help an individual be safer, more free, or have more abilities than their disabilities may allow. VICTORIA: Well, I love that. And I like that the app is named after her dog as well. That's just very sweet. And I love that that's how that worked. And I'm curious, what's on the horizon? What are you most excited about for OtisHealth in the next year? MARC: Like all startups, we have [laughs] a lot of plans. And we've been invited to speak at some conferences. I spoke at two already this year. And I have another one coming up in Washington, D.C., where we're going to advocate, again, for patient access. And this is primarily talking to the health systems themselves in adopting technology that makes it easier for patients to securely access their health records. And so, we're excited about that movement in the industry to recognize and start to act on that need for patients to be able to access their health records. And we work with our partners to promote that and also with the federal government. We work with the health and human services to promote this access. And we were published in a report earlier this year because of our technology demonstration with health and human services. And it sounds like it's finally getting some real traction in hospital systems. And of the Federal Congress are also saying that this is something we need to move forward with in a more aggressive manner. On a more direct path, we're excited our hip's growing. We've had tens of thousands of people to use the app, with thousands actively using it today. We're working on some new programs right now for payers and for providers that will improve health outcomes and within their populations, as well as bring on hundreds of thousands of other people on the app. We're really excited to know that we're getting both recognized for the work that we're doing and that people are starting to understand the importance of managing everyday health, whether it's with OtisHealth or another application. VICTORIA: Well, I love being excited for these opportunities to advocate for your product and for the mission behind the product. I'm not going to recommend being excited about going to D.C. during the summer. [laughs] Last time I was there when I landed at 9:00 p.m., it was 90 degrees outside [chuckles] and humid, like, 90% humidity. But it's great to have access to people who care and are trying to make things better and have that voice. I'm excited to see you grow. And then, it's been two years since you started the app. I wonder, if you could go back in time to when you first were getting started, what advice would you give yourself? MARC: So, this is a really hard thing for anybody to look back and say that they'd like to change a few things. There are things I would change. I have a lot of experience managing large, sophisticated programs. Because in the past I had large budgets, it was really easy to maintain strict discipline around the implementation. And I think I was too loose in the implementation process at the onset of OtisHealth. I would have been more disciplined around my program management and the ability that I had to developers I was using. As a startup, I didn't have a large development team in-house. I needed to use external parties. And I should have been a little more closely on top of that process. The other things that we experienced were primarily a result of pivots. We were constantly pivoting as we were learning. I think having a team to review our process and pivot more quickly is really critical. You don't want to pivot 20 times a week. You need to stay focused for a while, but also having friends or advisors or of your team that can help you assess when a pivot is necessary, or a new opportunity presents itself, I think, is critical. And so, we all know, as founders, the team is key. And I think the earlier you engage a team and not be bashful by asking for advice, the better. VICTORIA: I love that. And I'm curious if you have any advice from your program or from your startup career now on choosing the right development teams. And how do you find those right partners to actually build the app and have that ability? MARC: So, I would say the number one thing that I've learned, that I knew previously, but I really appreciate it more now as a founder of a small company, is you need mission alignment, not just company to company, but person to person. And I took my time picking advisors to us, and I took my time getting people on board to OtisHealth. We pick folks that we believe understand what we're doing, and we take our time and make sure that they appreciate it and that we're comfortable with them. Our startup is too small to make a bad hire or to have the wrong perspective because somebody has other motives, such as just making money. If I was providing advice in of picking teams or picking vendors to work with, I would say take it slow. Don't rush, even though you may be in a rush, or we may be in a rush to get moving, either for financial reasons or personal reasons. It's important just to feel comfortable. Get to know folks. Meet them in person if you can and spend a few hours with them at a time [laughs], just to make sure that they believe in you, and you believe in them, and that you have a common vision. Because when things get rough or tough, financially or otherwise, you need people that are going to be able to stick through it and work with you. VICTORIA: That makes a lot of sense. There's a lot of pivots happening. You want everyone to be on the same page. And you don't want to have to be corralling everyone all the time if they have competing priorities, so that makes a lot of sense. MARC: Absolutely. Just to be clearer on that, we all run into challenges. So, in some cases, we had to make some financial sacrifices, and everyone did it together. You really need people that are that committed that say, "Okay, I understand where we are, and so, I'm willing to take a pay cut for a while or not get paid for a while until we can get this spec started again." Even vendors I work with today that are strategic vendors understand that and have helped us financially when we need some time to get more revenue in. VICTORIA: Great. And so, when you were building a healthcare app, was there people you needed to have on your team who had that exact specialty in either patient care, or medical records, or something like that? MARC: Yes, yeah, you need experts. So, I'm a quick read. I mean, I spent a couple of years learning the industry and understanding the technology. But the person that's our IT director he has over 25 years of experience in healthcare IT systems, so he is the expert in-house. We also have advisors on our team that are experts in payer services and payer systems, launching healthcare apps, managing standards, and managing SaaS services. We have a data and an AI expert, and a clinical research specialist. We also have physicians we refer to. [laughs] So, we have a pretty big entourage of individuals that we go to for very specific advice and work. VICTORIA: That makes a lot of sense. Let's see, what question should I be asking that I haven't asked yet? MARC: You know, I think most of the people listening to this podcast are technical founders. And it was surprising to me, and I had some founders me, asked for some free advice, which I'm happy to do, but they didn't seem sincere in their interest in being in healthcare. And one thing I told them, and I would say to anybody that's interested in being a healthcare technology developer, is you have to have a reason to do it besides the money. It will be a really hard battle to move forward with a technology if the only motivation is a financial opportunity. That isn't going to sustain the pivots or the development. You'll run into a lot of walls, primarily because everyone will see it. Everyone in the industry sees those players come in that just have a financial interest, and the consumers see it, and they don't like it. So, my advice to anybody that wants to develop technology in healthcare is you have to be a little sincere about it and have a real reason to do it beyond just making money, and I think you'll find it more rewarding. There's so much need for healthcare technology and better technology out there. So, I welcome folks to the fight, the battle, or the opportunities. But I would say that just come in with the idea that you're helping people, not just making money. VICTORIA: I think that rings true for any business you're in, right? But especially in healthcare because it is this big target. Even in consulting, if you're doing business development and you're thinking of working on health IT projects, there's just a huge market that you have to narrow down and figure out where you're going to be. So, if you don't have that intrinsic motivation, it can be overwhelming and scattered, and then people won't connect with you, right? Because everybody is going after the same thing. MARC: That's exactly right. One of the conferences I went to earlier this year, a speaker got up and said, "People invest in people, or people make deals with other people." We talk about companies g a deal with another company, but it's really one person trusting another person. Whether it's in healthcare or another industry, obviously, that trust needs to happen. At some point, if I don't trust the individual I'm talking to, I'm less likely to have a deal with that company. VICTORIA: Right. It's like; I don't know how, you know, it doesn't really matter how impressive your credentials are. If there's not a basic level of trust, you might not move forward with it, so that makes a lot of sense to me. MARC: Yeah, that's absolutely right, Victoria. VICTORIA: Absolutely. Is there anything else that you'd like to promote at the end of this podcast? MARC: I'd love for folks to try OtisHealth. If you have family that have chronic medical needs or need help managing their medical information, please OtisHealth, help them . There are videos on YouTube that explain how to use it if you need some guidance, but we believe most of it is self-explanatory. We are continuously adding data access points. We're going to be launching this week new versions of OtisHealth that have access privileges for people in New York and Nevada and parts of California and Colorado. And so that means that with the app, once you're ID-proofed on the app, you can use it to get your medical records from different sources without having to to all these different patient portals. So please try it. Use it for yourself but especially use it for your family or anybody who you care for. We'd love to get your as you use the app too. VICTORIA: That's great. And I'm actually already thinking about...next week; I'm going to be going to The San Diego Annual Veterans Stand Down, where anyone who is experiencing homelessness can come in and get access to all the services that they might need, whether it's legal, or healthcare, or dentistry, showers, food, all of these things. And I'm curious if that organization might benefit from having a tool like that for their s. So, I'll be talking about it. [laughs] MARC: Oh, thank you so much. That'd be wonderful. Thank you. VICTORIA: That's great. Well, thank you so much, Marc, for ing us. MARC: My pleasure. Thank you, Victoria, for having me on the show. VICTORIA: Excellent. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at [email protected]. And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thank you for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Special Guest: Marc Mar-Yohana. Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Introducing thoughtbot's ongoing maintenance service. Need reliable and maintenance for your software? Look no further. Our expert team handles upgrades, bug fixes, UI adjustments, and new feature development. And the best part? Our maintenance packages start at just 5k per month for companies of all sizes. From Ruby on Rails to Node, React, and, yes, even PHP, we've got you covered. Trust thoughtbot for top-notch and optimized performance. To receive a custom quote, [email protected]. __ Simon Ritchie, the founder and CEO of Blox, discusses his background and journey leading up to starting the company. He began his career in finance but discovered his ion for technology and finance systems. He worked at Anaplan, a successful finance planning and analysis software company, but saw the limitations of rigid systems when COVID-19 hit. He realized there was a need for a more flexible and accessible financial modeling and planning tool, especially for small businesses and charities. Blox aims to fill this gap by providing a powerful yet easy-to-use modeling, calculation, and planning engine that sits between spreadsheets and complex enterprise software. The company is about a year old, has raised venture funding, and launched a free tier of its product. They prioritize building a compelling product, iterating quickly, and engaging with s to understand their needs. Simon acknowledges that building the product has been enjoyable, leveraging his background in product management. However, sales, marketing, and customer traction have proven challenging. Nonetheless, he remains optimistic about Blox's progress and is committed to providing a valuable solution to help businesses make informed decisions and achieve their financial goals. Blox Follow Blox on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, or TikTok Follow Simon Ritchie on LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. WILL: And I'm your other host, Will Larry. And with me today is Simon Ritchie, Founder and CEO of Blox, which provides pre-built planning models to help business leaders escape the tyranny of complex, clunky, and error-prone spreadsheets, giving you visibility into and confidence in the reality of your business. Simon, thank you for ing us. How are you doing today? SIMON: Hey, guys. Yeah, I'm very good today. VICTORIA: So, Simon, where are you ing us from today? SIMON: So, I'm ing from the UK. I live in a city called Brighton on the South Coast of the UK, where it's a lovely day today. It's nice and sunny. VICTORIA: Oh, that's where our thoughtbot summit has been the last two years, in Brighton, actually. SIMON: Fantastic. Yeah, it's a wonderful place. VICTORIA: And a great place to be in the summer right now, right? Do you get out in the water very often? SIMON: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Like many others, we have a paddle board. So, I go out with my family. I have four kids, so we go out and have fun at the beach. Brighton's got a stony beach. So we are, as Brightoners, we're very proud of the stones. You know, if you have sand, you get sand everywhere, stones are...it's much cleaner. [laughter] It does hurt your feet, though. There you go. [laughter] WILL: Yeah, that was the first time I've ever seen that, and I was like, that's very interesting. SIMON: Yeah. [laughs] WILL: I probably will like it because I don't like the sand getting everywhere, so... SIMON: Yeah, absolutely. WILL: So, yeah, I probably could trade that in. [laughs] SIMON: Yeah, yeah. You just have to wear shoes if you want to go run around. We're proud. We're proud of it. VICTORIA: I didn't think about that either. It makes a lot more sense. I don't really like the sand [laughter]. Rocks make more sense. But in California here, we're surfing, so having too many rocks on the beach would be a problem [laughs] for those of us who can't control ourselves. [laughter] SIMON: Yes. Yeah, Victoria, I thought you lived in Wales when I first looked at your profile -- VICTORIA: Oh, right. SIMON: On LinkedIn. And I thought, oh -- VICTORIA: That's...yeah. SIMON: A Welsh girl. That's -- VICTORIA: My family is actually Welsh on my mother's side. SIMON: Oh really? VICTORIA: Yeah. SIMON: Okay. VICTORIA: And Cardiff...California is named after Cardiff, Wales. SIMON: Okay, oh. VICTORIA: But yeah, so that's where it came from. So, I thought that was very cute, too. SIMON: [laughs] Very cool. VICTORIA: But, you know, Cardiff-by-the Sea is its own little beach town here. SIMON: It's not Wales. [laughs] VICTORIA: Not Wales. [laughs] Pretty different. But I do hear Wales is beautiful. SIMON: Oh, it is. Yeah, absolutely. VICTORIA: Awesome. Well, let's talk about Blox a little bit. So, why don't you tell us maybe a little bit about your background and how you came around to starting it? SIMON: Yeah, great. So, and just in of me and my background, so I started my career in finance, actually. I didn't really know what to go and study, so I thought, you know, studying numbers was probably a good thing. So, I did an ing finance degree. And I got into the world of work in finance roles very quickly realized that finance wasn't for me. I just didn't really want to be a CFO. I just didn't feel the ion for it. But I was the techie guy always in the finance team. I was the guy people turned to and originally for, you know, Excel and spreadsheet modeling. And behind Excel, you've got VBA. So, you've got this little, you know, it was my first exposure to programming and some, you know, and what coding was. And so, I sort of just realized, actually, I love the technology side. And so, I followed my ion more into the finance systems arena. And my ion has always been...the focus of my career has been helping leaders understand what's going on in the business by getting hold of those numbers, the data that they have, and analyzing it, summarizing it, trying to draw insights from it so they can make decisions. And so, in the early days, it was lots of Excel spreadsheet modeling. And, in some businesses, there's still tons of spreadsheet modeling going on. And then the next phase of my career was actually working in...there are a number of software options that help you with planning, modeling, reporting, et cetera. So, I ed...well, I did some consulting for a while and then ed a company called Anaplan. And was an early employee, the company was still very early in their journey. They were just launching a European office, so I ed as one of the early European employees. And Anaplan went on, over the course of nearly eight years that I was there, to be [inaudible 04:31], absolute rocket ship, grew up to 2,000 people, and we floated on the New York Stock Exchange and then IPO in 2018. It was acquired last year for a very big number. So really fantastic time there. But to just talk about Blox, so I left Anaplan two years ago. The observations that I made that led to Blox ultimately were there were sort of three main aspects. Like, when COVID happened, the world changed radically. And what I saw...I was working in Anaplan. For anyone who doesn't know, Anaplan they focus on selling to large enterprise. So, you may not be familiar with the company if you're not a CFO or a finance person in a very large company. And they sell very expensive product. It's very, very powerful modeling, calculation, FP&A, finance planning, and analysis software. And so, companies...we were working with companies like Procter & Gamble, HP, Cisco, Google, and others. What I observed was when COVID kicked in, the FP&A system was too rigid. So, Anaplan, you know, these models that people had built up, spent a lot of time and energy building up, it was too rigid. The world changed so much that they couldn't really use their typical budgeting systems or these FP&A solutions. They couldn't use Anaplan. So, everybody just jumped back into a spreadsheet to figure out, you know, do I still have a business? How am I going to survive this if I just had to shut all my retail stores or if I had to send everybody home? You know, so everyone was using spreadsheets, basically. And so my observation there was that the tools that are available at that point are still way too hard to use. They're not flexible enough. You can't mold them quickly enough to really handle some of those scenarios that you want to throw at it as a leader. So, when you're trying to make big decisions about new revenue streams, new offices that you would want to launch, restructuring your team, investing in more people, those things they're really hard to model in the tools that are available. You need real specialist experience and expertise. That's very expensive, et cetera. So that was one part. And then the other thing that happened was I've worked most of my career in larger companies. And I'd worked in, yeah, in finance, in businesses. And also, I'm a chartered management ant. It's all about helping with managing a business with your numbers. And I hadn't really worked with many very small companies. I ended up volunteering. When the lockdowns were happening, there were lots of people that were sheltering in place and they were staying at home. And so, a local charity had organized to put together food parcels, and then they found drivers to drive them around. And so I had volunteered through a friend of a friend, and somewhere my name got put in. So, I ended up driving these food deliveries around for the summer, and I loved it. Every Thursday, I'd take a couple of hours to just drive around and drop some food on people's doorsteps and then maybe have a quick conversation with them from a distance. I got connected with the charity. It is a local charity that runs on the South Coast in England here. And they found out I was an ant, and I worked in software technology. They were like, [gasps], please, you can be our new best friend. We need some help. So, I ended up helping them a bit in their back office with some of the reporting that they do. And to cut a long story short, they're a charity. They live on grant funding that they get. So, they apply for grants, and then the grant providers want them to report back on the progress that they've made, the services that they've offered, the people they've helped. So, I went and helped them, and they needed these reports and some plans for grants that they were trying to get. What seemed really easy to me, like, they were showing me that they had to this data from a system. And they needed to filter it and then count how many people they had been helping. And they basically were just, you know, with different needs and in different categories and cohorts. So, they would basically the data, open it in a spreadsheet, put a filter on, select some filters, and then they would count the number of rows that had that criteria. And then, they would type the number into an email. And I just showed them some very simple things, like, when you do a filter or if you select the cells, you can see a countdown at the bottom-right in Excel, and I showed them that. And they almost fell off their chair because [laughs] they were like, "Oh, you know, why did we not see that sooner?" But I suppose through that, and, you know, through the various times that I helped them...and I just helped them with initially some spreadsheets and just some help with that. But it just showed me that there are a lot of businesses, a lot of charities in this case, but a lot of businesses where the leaders are not finance savvy, and they are not ants. They're not MBAs, but they still need help running their business. They need to do reporting. They need to do planning, you know, manage their business, control the finances. So, I just thought, you know, just started thinking a lot more about what does a small business need? What does a leader in a business need to make great decisions, run the business? And how could we get them a tool or some software that doesn't cost hundreds of grand every year but is accessible, a nice, low price point, and really easy for them to use? And that's the problem that I thought about for a long time. And ultimately, that's what we're trying to work on with Blox. WILL: That's amazing. I used to work at a nonprofit. And I those days of, like, because I wasn't an MBA, like you said, MBA finance and just trying to figure out numbers. I don't even the software we used. SIMON: [laughs] WILL: But it was old and very hard to maneuver. [laughter] SIMON: Oh yeah. WILL: It was harder to maneuver than spreadsheets. And I was like, ahh, this is a nightmare. So, this is amazing that you're doing that. Can you tell us more about how Blox solves that issue? Because it sounds like it is a tween of big software that's for enterprise companies and spreadsheets. So, it's kind of in the middle; it sounds like. SIMON: So, spreadsheets are great. They're really easy. They're easy to start with. You'll often find that your spreadsheet will just kind of reach its natural end. It becomes too complex. And that normally happens when you've got, like, you're planning for lots of people, or lots of products, or lots of different projects. And so, you end up sort of having to figure out how to scale the model, you know, across lots of different columns or rows, or you start copying. And how you'll have three identical tabs or ten identical tabs. And, at that point, you've basically outgrown Excel, and trying to keep that spreadsheet running and working it becomes a real nightmare. And so, that's the point where Blox comes in. You could use Blox right from the very beginning. We've started with a focus on making really nice, simple models that you can just pick up and use. So, our earliest customers are startups doing a financial model for a brand-new idea. So, you can use Blox from the beginning, but you could probably use a spreadsheet, too. Where you would want to use Blox is where it becomes more complex, and you've got a lot more going on. You might have lots of different months, and you've got loads of time. You might want to connect it to your actual ing system or a CRM system. And so, when you want to pull in actual data and do some reporting and maybe have different scenarios, different versions of a plan or of a report, that's where you've basically outgrown a spreadsheet, and it just becomes complex and unwieldy. And that's where you would want to move into a system. That's what we're building with Blox is basically a powerful modeling calculation planning engine that scales really easily. So, you can build up your dimensions, products, countries, time, et cetera, and you can build up those dimensions. You can build up your logic. You can add your own KPIs. You can add your own projection logic, et cetera. You can build out a model. We've got lots of template models that you can start with because you shouldn't have to start from scratch every time. You can get going. You can load up your own data very quickly at the beginning. For a lot of models, it's just assumptions. You're just trying to work out, okay, like, we've got some service businesses that use Blox. To get a basic model together, what you need to know is how many people do you have roughly? How much do you pay them? And then, how many people do you plan to hire at certain times? And how long does it take to ramp a new hire? Because, normally, there's some sort of ramp time. And if it's a service business and you're selling time, then you kind of have an average number of hours billable or often called utilization. So, with a few quick assumptions, you could throw them in. You could build out a multi-year plan for your business. And you could use that to think about, okay, how can I grow this business? I kind of talk about it as a financial roap that you could create. So, you know, often in the product world, we talk about product roaps. I like to talk about, you know, a business roap or financial roap. And that's really what we are working on; Blox and Blox will help you with this financial roap that you can build out. You know, I'd like to get my business to this point to, you know, 2 million in revenue, or 10 million in revenue, or maybe there are some financial or non-financial goals that you're trying to get to. And, with a model, you can help try and kind of work out what the assumptions and drivers and what those things need to look like. And then, as a manager of the business, you can start working on, okay, how do I increase my headcount? Or how do I decrease this particular cost per unit or various things like that? So yeah, that's a very high level on what we're doing with Blox. VICTORIA: Thank you for that. And I certainly can relate to that, having worked for several different consulting services companies and how difficult it can be to get software [laughs] to project that -- SIMON: [laughs] VICTORIA: Far into the future, like, to think about how you're going to hire, all the things that go into it. So, I'm curious about your own plan for Blox. Like, how would you describe where you are in your plan for the company? SIMON: We are a year old, actually just celebrated our one-year anniversary. In the last year, we've formed, hired an early team. We've fundraised successfully. So, we raised venture finance to fund the business. It's a complex product to build. We're trying to replace a spreadsheet, which has got tons and tons of features. They've been developing that for a long time. So, for someone to come across, it needs to be a relatively mature product. So, we raised venture funds from investors. We're busy investing that to build up the product and take that to market. It's been a fantastic year. And this is my first time as a founder. I've worked in leadership roles in technology businesses, in customer success, and in product as well. Yeah, I definitely would say working as a founder in a brand-new startup is very different to working in product, in a scale-up. You know, some of the lessons that I learned back there have been useful. You know, you learn how to juggle chaos, how to juggle...how to spin lots of plates. But yeah, I'm really delighted with our progress so far. We've fundraised. We ran a beta of our product last year with some early customers. We graduated from that. Our approach has always been to try and get the product out, so really embrace agile. It's kind of you don't see it so often in enterprise software. What you see is companies that like to just put "Book a demo" on the website. And they don't like to show their software until they've already kind of sold the value, and they've pitched, you know, positioned their pricing, and qualified their leads, et cetera. Our approach has always been let's build a fantastic product. Let's build something which is super compelling, super easy to use. Let's get people into the product as quickly as possible so they can experience it, see if it's going to be valuable for them. We launched a free tier of our product, the first sort of MVP, as a free tier, so not paid, not with some of the features that we plan to add to the product. And so, we've got that out there, and it's been fantastic. We've got s from all over the world using it in all sorts of different ways. And that's the other thing that is really great for us. Because it's such a flexible product, it can be used in lots of places. So, we've got all sorts of different applications being used by it. People jump in; they use it. They can try different templates that we've got. And then, if they need something different...every business is slightly different. So, if they need something slightly different, they can just chat to us in the product. We absolutely love chatting to people. And then, you know, we'll often spin up a custom template for them. And when we've done a few of those, then we'll build a standard template for a new industry. That's a little bit about where we're at. We're a small team based between here and India, where most of our developers are. It's good fun. Some of the learning...so I would say maybe it's just because of my background. So, I moved into product, and I was a product manager and then product leader for the last six years. So, for me, I've found building the product has been the easier part, probably because it's my background and that's where my ion is. So, I absolutely love anytime I get to spend in the product and spend with the team. The original founding team is myself as founder and CEO. And I don't get too much time on the product. I have a product manager and a designer. And so, that was the first...the early team, the founding team. And then we've added marketing and some other roles and software development. And so that's the team. I've found building the product has been really fun, and that's been a bit easier. Trying to work out how to do fundraising was a real challenge, so that took a lot of energy. We've been pretty successful so far in that. Still, always more to go, always more fundraising needed definitely. The really hard thing, especially in the market that we're in right now, it's hard, you know, getting early customer traction and selling. And that's really hard trying to get your name out there, build a brand, find early customers. That's really hard. So yeah, that's definitely an observation for me that the product has been really fun and a bit easier than I thought. But yeah, trying to do sales, marketing, figure that out...and probably as well because it's not my background or my kind of natural area of interest, so I've been learning. That's always tough, isn't it? Mid-Roll Ad: VICTORIA: Introducing thoughtbot's ongoing maintenance service. Need reliable and maintenance for your software? Look no further. Our expert team handles upgrades, bug fixes, UI adjustments, and new feature development. And the best part? Our maintenance packages start at just 5K per month for companies of all sizes. From Ruby on Rails to Node, React, and, yes, even PHP, we've got you covered. Trust thoughtbot for top-notch and optimized performance. To receive a custom quote, [email protected]. VICTORIA: And with me here, I have Richard Newman, who is the Development Director on our Boost Team, to talk to me a little bit more about what maintenance actually looks like once you've built your software application, right? RICHARD: Hi, Victoria. VICTORIA: Hi, Richard. You have experience building applications. I wonder if you could describe to a founder who's considering to build an application, like, what should they consider for their long-term maintenance? RICHARD: Well, like you said earlier, part of what you're going for with that long-term maintenance is making sure the health of your project, of your application, is always there. And you don't want to be surprised as you're continuing to work with your s and so forth. And so, a number of things that we pay attention to in maintenance are, we're paying attention to keeping the application secure, providing security updates. We want to make sure that the ecosystem, basically, all of the tools and third-party services that are tied to your application that, we're responding to those sorts of changes as we go along. And then part of it is, occasionally, you're going to find some smaller issues or bugs or so forth as your group continues to grow or as needs continue to change. You want to be able to respond to those quickly as well. And so, a lot of what goes into maintenance is making sure that you're paying attention and you're ahead of those things before they surprise you. VICTORIA: Because what can happen? Like, what are the consequences if you don't do that ongoing maintenance? RICHARD: Well, the security updates those happen across gems and in the platform sort of tools that are there. And so, if you're not keeping those up to date, your exposure, your vulnerability to being hacked, or having a bad actor come into your application start growing on you if you're not doing the maintenance. The other ones that can come up is there's new interfaces that these third-party services...they may be updating their APIs. They may be updating how you're supposed to work with their tool. And so, those can occasionally break if you're not paying attention to what's going on or you're suddenly surprised by an upgrade that you have to make. And then, finally, there's this long-term sort of code change that just builds up over time if you're not keeping it refactored for the changes that are in a language or the gems that you work with. And then, suddenly, after a while, it suddenly gets to the point where you have a lot of work that you might have to do to rehabilitate the application to take on some of the newer features that are being released. And so, that makes it that much more difficult, that much more friction about being able to deliver updates for your s or to be able to respond to changes that are happening out there in your application. VICTORIA: Right. So, if you don't have that ongoing maintenance, you could run into a situation where, suddenly, you need to make a very large investment and fixing whatever is broken. RICHARD: Absolutely. It's going to be very tough to plan for if you weren't keeping up all the way along and, yes, absolutely ends up being much slower if you have to remediate it. VICTORIA: That makes sense. I wonder if you have any examples of a project you've walked into and said, "Wow, I wish we had been doing a little bit more maintenance." [laughs] And maybe you can share some details. RICHARD: Yeah. We had a fairly large application that involved a number of clinic services. So, we had an application that s were going in every day and counting on our fast response. And, over time, we've got surprised by a database upgrade that had to happen. Basically, the database was going to be changed by our third-party hosting service, and that hadn't been tested. There hadn't been procedures in place when we discovered this need. And there was a very hard date that that change had to be done or else the entire application was going to go down. And it came at a very inconvenient time, at the end of the year around Christmas, that we had to respond to all of that. And had we been in front of it and just updated it every quarter and staying current with it, it wouldn't have been nearly the lift that it turned out to be. We were facing a pretty hard deadline [laughs] there to keep things going. It was very, very stressful and disruptive for the team and potentially for the clinics. VICTORIA: Right. And it always happens around a big holiday or something like that, right? When it all comes to a head. So... [laughter] RICHARD: Absolutely. You want to be in control of the timeframe and not have the timeframe be in control of you. VICTORIA: Right. And if you have a team like thoughtbot ing you, you can go on your vacation with a little bit more knowledge that if something breaks, there's someone there who can respond and fix things, and you don't have to interrupt your very valuable time off. So... RICHARD: [chuckles] Absolutely. VICTORIA: Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Richard, for ing me today. I appreciate you coming here to talk with us. And we'll talk to you again soon. RICHARD: Yeah, it was a pleasure. Thank you. WILL: You mentioned getting your product out there how challenging it can be. So, what has been some other wins and some challenges that you've had as a first-time founder? SIMON: So, my approach to things as a leader is I basically like to bring silliness and games to help motivate and energize the team. So, as a human, I have quite a lot of energy. I roll around with lots of energy. And I take loads of photos of what I'm doing, and I share those. So, we have a Friday wrap-up with the team, and so I'll often share a lot of the pictures of, you know, what I've been up to this week. So, yeah, there's been some really fantastic moments launching a product. We launched our MVP in three months. So, we basically set off...I actually funded the first season of the business, a couple of software developers, a couple of early employees. I funded the first season. We hadn't raised money. And I just spoke to my wife, and I said, "Look, now's the time. I really want to do this." You know, I've been saving up if you like, I had this, like, one day I'll do a startup fund. Some people would probably call that their long-term savings or like, you know, some...and I kind of called it my one day I'll do a startup fund. So, I'd been building up this fund because I knew that at some point, I'll probably go do this. The timing was way earlier than I thought. I thought I'd still do another four or five years in a career in a corporate role to try and get a few more notches in my belts to make fundraising easier, et cetera. The timing came. The team was perfect. And everything just felt right, so we went for it. But yeah, we basically set out. We didn't know where we were going to get funding from. The market was in a real state, so this was middle of 2022. The Ukraine war had kicked in; valuations had dropped by 90% for a lot of tech companies. The post-COVID bubble had burst. It was hard. So, we sat down, and we were like, okay, we could spend all of our runway trying to fundraise now, or we could crack on and try and build the first MVP. But we'd already done a lot of the market research, the testing, early prototypes, et cetera. And that's a bit of a long story. But we had done that in the company that the founding team had worked at, and then we were actually a spin-out. So that happened. And we were sitting here thinking, okay, you know, we could spend all of our runway fundraising, or we could just crack on and build a product as quick as we can in the next three months. And so, we had this really hard conversation where we descoped so much stuff. And we just figured out what's the core piece that will really show the value of what we're trying to build, that we'd give to a , that we could give to an early customer that they could use and get value from? And so, we came up with that scope. And we cracked on, and we built it. Within two and a half months, we had a working version. We played with it. Within three months, we kind of launched into this beta and got early s onto. So that was, you know, fantastic. So, we did that in the first three months, and then off the success of having an MVP, and just being able to show the product, and start getting some early , initial was, you know, we took into very quickly and improved. And just having that, you know, you basically start building momentum. Every step is still really hard, but you do build momentum. So, we got this product. We launched it. We went to a couple of events, and we talked about that, and then we did some fundraising. And we landed some funding, so that was fantastic. And then, you know, and then we've just gone sort of step by step from there. So, it's really fantastic what we've been able to achieve so far. The challenges there's been loads of them, especially when you're building a startup. It's really exciting. So, you can get people excited quite easily about the future potential. And you can kind of talk about what this can be. I've got a printed picture of a unicorn on my whiteboard in my office right here as a sort of a statement of, you know, where we're going. It's really hard as a founder or a leader trying to persuade people to leave a stable job, take a pay cut, and come and work with you and give them some equity, which you hope will be worth a ton, and you kind of paint the picture. But also, you don't know how long you can keep them because you're on runway. You're on runway. You haven't got infinite cash if it's not a profitable business. So, you know, there are some real challenges. And, as a founder, you go through ups and downs. Ben Horowitz talks about it in his great book, The Hard Things About Hard Things, as the struggle. I definitely understand that a lot more now because there is an up and down to this. You do build momentum, but you also...you're creating the momentum, you know, one hard push at a time. So that's that early customers come on. You kind of pitch the dream of what the product will do, and then it will fall over as soon as they touch it. But I absolutely love it. What I love is the chance to create and how quickly you can move in the early days of a startup or a new product, where you don't have masses of technical debt. You don't have hundreds of customers. You don't have all this, you know, you don't have a massive team where everyone's got their point of view on what you should do. So, you can move really fast, and that's fantastic [inaudible 30:14] creative season. So yeah, lots of ups and downs, but it's really fun. VICTORIA: That's so interesting and particularly interesting that you're trying to make something that's easier to use than Excel. So, I'm curious how you're testing to make sure that it's actually easy. And what might be...I'm sure there's some interesting you got about that. SIMON: Yeah, so we're making Blox easier than Excel. But it's got to be powerful enough to be able to handle the data and the modeling that you need for a business. If you're doing projections for multiple years if you've got lots of products or teams, then it can be complex, so it needs to be powerful enough to handle that. It needs to be flexible enough because you can take a template, but every business has got its own unique quirks. So, it needs to be flexible enough that it can be tailored easy for a unique business. And then, crucially, and this is also important, it needs to be easy enough to use so that the person who understands the business can change the model to kind of suit their business. That's the bit that most of the other players, you know, the enterprise software that's available today, just that they haven't figured out how to make it easy enough so that a businessperson that, you know, doesn't have database experience, can't write SQL, not going to write Python, you know, doesn't do complex scripting or any of this stuff. It's got to be easy enough that they can, you know, tailor, reflect the way that their business works, the way that they make money, the way that their cost structure works, so they can figure out what drives the business. And so, if they're projecting revenue, they can work out the costs associated. So, one of our founding team is a UX designer, a really, really fantastic designer, very experienced. He's been in the game for 25 years since, way before it was called UX. And started doing graphic design, and then has done lots of branding and branding for some really fantastic, large companies, did lots of consulting. And then got into UX and how, you know, the art of wireframing and helping to make products easily usable. I call him my secret weapon. I've worked with some fantastic designers in the past, so, as a founder, I think I appreciate and understand the value of a really good design and a really good UX designer. So, Mike, our UX designer, has just been fantastic at that. He's very good at wireframing and very good at testing. And he's not a finance planning expert. That's why I call him my secret weapon because, you know, I understand planning really well, but sometimes I understand it too well. When I describe what a is trying to do or, you know, what I expect a screen will look like, I'm just probably subconsciously replacing or recreating something that I've seen or used before, whereas he's coming at it brand new. He's not worked in planning or data modeling, or many of these things. He's worked in lots of different businesses. So, he comes at it with a mobile-first perspective. Normally, he's thinking about, okay, how could this be used by a busy leader on their phone and they're running around? And so, he's been really fantastic at helping to keep it simple and easy and to rethink and to create a product, which is just so different to what other tools in the space are doing. And that's some of the we get. It looks so different. It works so different. But yeah, the hard thing is that spreadsheets are the most sticky tool, I think. They're just so useful for, you know, for everything where you need to get a list of things. You just start throwing it into a spreadsheet, and then you can, you know, organize it and improve structure over time. But yeah, it's a really sticky tool. And we train people how to use spreadsheets from early days from school. My 12-year-old daughter she already has been taught how to use a spreadsheet in school. So, what we're trying to do is create something which is easier. But there's also, you know, you want there to be some familiarity in there so that people will...to avoid some of the friction of the people who have it. No one really signs up to learn a new tool if they can avoid it. We're lazy. [laughs] VICTORIA: It makes sense that design would be a big priority for your product because that was your intention from the beginning, right? Is to make something that's easy to use, so you prioritize that as an investment. SIMON: That's right. That's absolutely right. Yeah. VICTORIA: What's on the horizon? What are you the most excited about for Blox in the coming months? SIMON: So, yeah, we've got some really exciting elements of our roap coming. So, yeah, really excited to see these things come to life. Like anyone working in building products, whether you're deg, doing product, sort of overseeing, or actually developing, it's so great to see these things come to life. You spend a long time thinking and chatting about them, imagining, ideating about how they could look. The thing that I'm just most excited about is—and that's probably why I love product—is, you know, you're building a product, and then you can...then you're talking to somebody about how they would use this. Or before that, you're talking about their day-to-day right now and what their problems are, and how you could help them save time, save money, et cetera. And so, you know, I absolutely love chatting to more and more different types of companies, leaders in different parts of the business. And, you know, especially in our space, it's mostly about, okay, how can I help? You know, how could we improve this planning process that we've got, whether it's, you know, planning for the cost of running a big project or trying to figure out how can I scale my business to reach my objectives? So, I just love chatting to lots of different leaders globally. So, I love going to events, chatting to people, fact-finding about how they run their business, how they think about finances, et cetera. In of the product roap, we're working on some exciting new scenario capabilities, so you can easily look at different scenarios around a decision. So, you might be trying to decide, you know, should I be aggressive with my investments and hiring, or should I be pessimistic? Or is there a middle ground? So, we're adding, like, scenario capabilities where you can build out different versions of that, and then easily compare and contrast, and then decide which one to do. We're working on some really...really enjoying working on some intelligent capabilities. So, again, in the search of making it really easy to use for a busy leader, for a busy businessperson, or a busy finance person, making it really easy to use. So, we've invested a lot in AI technology and been deg, developing POCs around how AI could help to onboard customers faster, how we could help to personalize models for businesses automagically. So, as soon as we understand the website of a , what sort of industry they're in, we can automagically personalize the template for them, add their own KPIs, like, industry-specific KPIs, into the model, and throw in benchmark data and all these things. So, we've got some fantastic AI capabilities coming through the pipe and some data integrations. As we get out more and more, we're connecting to different data sources. So, yeah, exciting times ahead for the roap. And as we add more features, then we'll add different pricing tiers, you know, so we can try and offer a nice, affordable entry-level offering for Blox, but then we will, you know, as you get more and more different features, you'll pay at the appropriate level. So that's a little bit about what our future looks like. WILL: That's neat some of the things you have coming up. You mentioned AI and how you're kind of embracing that. Can you expound on that? Like, kind of I know you said some data models automagically is going to do it. But, like, where can you see the benefit for a customer to use that? Because I know AI can be scary and stuff like that. But, like, just kind of taking the fear out of it and talking about how beneficial it can be. SIMON: Yeah. So, there's lots of different places where AI can help. So, the typical model today for finance planning is you'd have a leader who's responsible for the business, and they're responsible for an advertising budget. You know, they just intuitively know, you know, where should I spend money, what's good return on my investment, what's, you know, what works. But when it comes to actually trying to model that, so how to put that into a financial model or some other model that you can understand the relationships between these things, put in the KPIs, have the formulas, calculating things in the right way at the right level, what you often find is that the leader is not the system's expert. So, you'll often have, especially in bigger businesses, you've got this expert data analyst or FP&A finance planning person that will do the modeling. So, we really believe that AI can be like a digital business coach to digitize that business advisory piece. So, the leader can be sitting down. They can be looking to try and improve some part of their business or understand some part of their spend and trying to work out, like, what would life look like if I increased my spend on this particular channel by X? And so, you know, we are looking at AI to help with lots of different areas around this. Initially, it's helping a new to get onboarded with Blox. So, it's taking a template and helping to personalize it for their business. What we basically try and do is fetch as much data about a new and a new company as possible. So, if their team is on their website, then we'll pull in their team. If their products are listed on their website, we'll pull in a list of their products and try and throw that into the model and take out a lot of the friction that you have. As a in the new system, you have to type in everything normally. If you're trying to model a business, you used to type it all in or copy and paste it from a spreadsheet. So, we're looking at lots of options to help onboard new s. That has a good value add for us because we can increase the speed of adoption and help get s to value faster, which is great for us. And also, s are, you know, they're busy. They're impatient, and they want to understand what value they're going to get before they spend lots more of their time. So that's going to be useful for us and them. And yeah, helping to interpret the data. So, they'll connect us to their source systems. We'll be able to interpret what's going on, help them to understand different options and scenarios about how things might play out in the future. Basically, AI will help us to draw our insights that we can present to the , will help explain what the is looking at when they're looking at the model, so we can summarize some of the key insights so that they can use that. We're expecting to have all sorts of s, but we're really focusing on really busy leaders who may have a good understanding of spreadsheets and data, but they're just too busy, and so they don't have time. So, they want something which is quick and easy. Or leaders who don't have that expertise, so those are the ones that we really cater for. We try and keep it really simple and help guide them through the process, et cetera. So that's where AI is going to be, like, that digital business AI...We kind of kind of talk about this AI business coach concept. And, over time, we'll build up more and more elements to that coach capability. We call him Anton in our team when we talk. We'll add more and more capabilities to him. But we've built a number of different POCs. And we've launched a couple of those with some customers. We've been out to events and showing off these new capabilities to basically test them out, understand what's working, what's not. What more do we need to think about to productionize this proof of concept? So that's, yeah, it's a very exciting time to be working on those things. VICTORIA: I love hearing about that. That's super interesting to see where it's going to go. So, my last question for you today is, is there anything else that you would like to promote? SIMON: I think I would just say, yeah, if you're a leader running a business or maybe it's a service business, and you're trying to think about, you know, when hiring business planning, financial planning, anything like that, then I'd love for you to come over to Blox, and you can jump straight into the product from our website. You can sign up. I absolutely love chatting to people about their businesses and what they're trying to do with their finances. So, if you want to do that, you can sign up. You can chat to us. I actually take a lot of time to respond to people in there, so yeah, if you want to do that. Or, if you can, also find me on LinkedIn. You can search me there. Just strike up a conversation and say, "Hey, Simon, I'd love to chat about financial roapping or finance planning." Yeah, I absolutely just love to speak to different leaders that work right across the business in different roles and see how we can help them to build a business that really unlock the potential that they have in their business through a great understanding of finances. So, yeah, if I can be of help, I would love that. VICTORIA: Wonderful. And we'll have all those links in the show notes so our audience can go and take a look. WILL: You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at [email protected]. You can find me on Twitter @will23larry. VICTORIA: And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Special Guest: Simon Ritchie. Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Introducing thoughtbot's ongoing maintenance service. Need reliable and maintenance for your software? Look no further. Our expert team handles upgrades, bug fixes, UI adjustments, and new feature development. And the best part? Our maintenance packages start at just 5k per month for companies of all sizes. From Ruby on Rails to Node, React, and, yes, even PHP, we've got you covered. Trust thoughtbot for top-notch and optimized performance. To receive a custom quote, [email protected]. __ Maggie Bachenberg, CEO, and Trisha Ballakur, CTO, are the co-founders of Pointz, a mobile mapping app that helps navigate bike and scooter riders through safe routes in cities. Victoria talks to Maggie and Trisha about their cycling backgrounds, how they met and became co-founders, and what they feel is the differentiator for their app versus what was/is already on the market for biking-related apps. Pointz Follow Pointz on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, or TikTok Follow Maggie Bachenberg on LinkedIn. Follow Trisha Ballakur on LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. With me today is Maggie Bachenberg, CEO and Co-Founder of Pointz, and Trisha Ballakur, CTO and Co-Founder of Pointz, a mobile mapping app that helps navigate bike and scooter riders through safe routes in cities. Just to get us started here, are you both cyclists? And if so, where do you do that at? What's your city? Where do you bike around? MAGGIE: Yeah, we both bike. So I live in Providence, Rhode Island, along with Trisha, and use my bike primarily as a transportation device. So I'm riding around from my house to work, to get groceries, to my friend's house, kind of all different types of purposes. TRISHA: Yeah, and I grew up biking but kind of stopped after age, like, six or seven. And it was only when I got to college at Brown, where I met Maggie, that I got back into it and felt more confident to get back on the bike. And that was completely actually because of Pointz. VICTORIA: Oh, that's nice. Yeah, speaking of confidence, I am not confident on a bicycle. I actually only learned after college. [laughs] And there's a video out there of my college friends helping me learn how to ride a bike. It's very cute. But still not my expertise. So I'm excited to learn more about it and learn about how Pointz could give you that confidence. So, whoever who'd like to start, why don't you tell me about what caused you to want to create Pointz? MAGGIE: Pointz was originally kind of my idea. And I got into biking in 2017 when I did a long-distance bike trip. I biked from Virginia to California. And it was my first time doing long-distance cycling, and I just kind of fell in love with it. But I realized that when I was riding, it was pretty scary to navigate cities in particular. And so, a lot of locals would redirect me onto different routes that were safer. And I was confused why this wasn't captured in a mapping app already. And so, that's kind of where the idea was seeded. But I didn't start working on it until I got to college and met Trisha. VICTORIA: Great. So you got to college, and you saw that there was a need to have easier access to biking and biking information in an area, right? MAGGIE: Yeah, exactly. VICTORIA: Very cool. What was that initial process like? It was just the two of you, and you started building stuff? How did you really get the traction going early on? MAGGIE: It started with doing some customer discovery interviews with local cyclists. And so we interviewed over 100 initially and just asked kind of what their biggest barrier was to start riding. And we kept hearing this recurring theme of people not feeling safe enough to go on different routes. And so we brainstormed a bunch of different ideas in a class that Trisha and I were in together. But we ended up landing on the one that we're working on today, which is, like, you know, the rating system, and then also putting the rating system of bike friendliness into a routing algorithm where people could actually find routes. VICTORIA: That's very cool. And was there anything that really surprised you in that customer discovery process? MAGGIE: Just maybe the consistency around people's fear and, like, I guess, being nervous on a bike because we were interviewing people of all types of backgrounds and experiences. And even people that were more experienced had this fear of getting hit by a car because of lack of infrastructure and that sort of thing. TRISHA: Doing customer discovery and chatting with so many different types of riders...and we call them riders, bike riders, rather than cyclists for the distinction that, you know, in the bike riding community, there's a lot of very avid fitness-geared cyclists, maybe who want to go on their bikes to burn calories and challenge themselves. A lot of people they would call themselves someone who rides a bike. And it's to those types of people where safety is really critical, especially in allowing new people to go and try to ride a bike for the first time or the first time in many years. And so, that's something else that we noticed from those customer discovery interviews is identifying the different types of riders. VICTORIA: Thank you. That clears it up for me because I never know to call someone a cyclist or a rider, but it makes sense that cyclist is more, like, the athletic pursuit versus riding and, you know, just trying to get about your day. [laughs] And it also makes me feel better that even people who are really experienced riders have fear of being unsafe or getting hit by a car because that's certainly what I'm thinking about when I'm [laughs] venturing out there. So, what was your initial build like for the app solving this problem? TRISHA: Initially, we had a couple of different Brown University interns or students working on it together one summer and myself included. And that evolved to me and this one other student who was working with us figuring out how to transition the app from, like, an iOS Swift native app to React Native so it could be cross-platform. And we had to teach ourselves React Native for that. So our intern at the time he had done an internship during the summer at this one startup where they taught him React Native. So he had done a couple of projects there. And I had a little bit of experience writing in JavaScript but really not as much as him. And so, together, we worked on coding the app from what we had in iOS in Swift, which was pretty limiting. But, at the time, it wasn't very much. But we were able to replicate that in React Native during; I think it was my junior...Maggie in my junior winter break. That became the start of our MVP, which had many, many more iterations to get all the features in and was a little bit slow to build until when we released it out, which was our senior year in about March or so. VICTORIA: So that's really exciting. So, like, how long did it take you to really get to that initial MVP with the team that you have? TRISHA: It took quite a bit longer than expected, as with all sorts of technology when you're building it for the first time. So what was important to us throughout the process was making sure that all the features we put out there were really well tested, and were useful, and were actually solving the problem of providing safer routing. And to get to that stage, at first, we, you know, we had an app in Swift. Then we wanted to make it cross-platformed, and we needed to have the routing algorithm actually take those different weights, the different bike friendliness ratings of the roads into . And that took a lot of researching and talking to mentors. So there were quite a few really hard challenges to get to the MVP, which is why it spanned about a year to get to that point. But throughout it all, we worked with other students at Brown. Then we pulled in some front-end contractors from online, like contractor sites, who were awesome. And we were just focused on being really scrappy to get it out in March of 2022. VICTORIA: That's great. And maybe it felt like a long time, but I feel like a year for a really solid MVP is pretty good, [laughs] especially when you have those safety concerns, and the quality of your data, and what you're giving out is super important. So now you've got the MVP, and I believe you just raised your round of seed funding last year. What was that process like for you? MAGGIE: Yes, so the round of funding that we did, we raised the first initial amount actually going into our senior year, and that was from a firm called Rogue Venture Partners. And we also got a little bit of it from their Women's Fund. And, yeah, that was the kind of piece of funding that got us started and allowed us to really, you know, add additional resources to the product to get it out there, at least the MVP. And then, after that, we got a little bit more funding from them. And then we raised money from Techstars as well because we got into their accelerator at The Roux Institute. That's kind of in association with Northeastern, and that was out of Portland, Maine. I guess it wasn't really necessarily, like, a cohesive round. It was, like, a couple of different checks that all kind of went into, like, our early funding for Pointz. And I would say it was very much so based on, you know, our relationship that we had with our initial venture firm that were working with Rogue. They actually mentored us for quite a few months before they invested in us. So they started mentoring us our junior year when we were in school. And then we got the deal together September of 2021. VICTORIA: That's awesome. Well, congratulations. And I'm glad you were able to find the right partnerships, and mentors, and funding that you needed. What did you find was really the differentiator for your app versus what was already on the market for biking-related apps? MAGGIE: There are a couple of different types of competitors, so there are the biking-related apps that you just mentioned, and then there are the general kind of use case apps like Google Maps or Apple Maps. And so, for the bike-related apps, the main thing that's different about Pointz is that we're more focused on, like, bike riders in general, so people that are riding around for transportation and recreation, not so much the cyclist type of a person that Trisha described earlier. So, you know, a lot of our features are geared towards people that are getting around the city or maybe are exploring a city or a neighborhood. It doesn't necessarily have to be a city, but that's kind of the focus. Whereas for other cycling-specific apps, like Komoot or Ride with GPS, it's focused a lot on, like, the fitness side of things and the recreation fitness side of riders. And so, at least the Ride with GPS and a few other of, like, the technologies that are available to more hardcore cyclists tend to have a more sharp learning curve. And ours was built more as, like, a general use case in navigating and exploring. VICTORIA: That makes sense. So it's more for people like me who are trying to go the most scenic [laughs] or the flattest and the safest way, not necessarily the fastest or the more fitness-focused aspect of cycling and biking. MAGGIE: Yeah, exactly. And, you know, we actually built this for people like us. Granted, I did do that long-distance bike trip. But, generally, I don't consider myself that hardcore of a rider, I mean, in my daily life. So it's for people who don't really identify as a cyclist and are more just, like, riding their bike around and, honestly, for people who are new to riding in general. Because a lot of our riders have recently gotten into biking or have recently moved to a new area, and so, they're just trying to figure out, you know, where are the good places to ride? Where do I feel safe? And, you know, how can I get more comfortable on my bike? VICTORIA: I'm loving this idea because I have a bike that's been sitting in my patio for over a year. [laughs] I haven't used...my partner is like, "Can we get rid of it? Because you don't use it." But I'm like, "I will. I will use it." I know my neighborhood problem is that there are giant hills if we leave our street here. So getting out is fine. But getting back in [laughs], it's like you need an electric bike. So that's very exciting. So, tell me more about now that you've graduated and you're taking this up full time; what does the future look like? What's on your horizon? MAGGIE: I mean, we've been working a lot with one of our advisors on, you know, getting to the point where people really love the product, and that's been kind of happening over the last year. We met Anuj Adhiya from Lenny's Newsletter. We've been working with him to really hone in on what the thing is that people really love about Pointz and make that experience better. And then also figure out what exactly the persona is so we can target them eventually with marketing, which is kind of the stage that we're at right now. So we were seeing our retention curves really evening out in especially a couple of cities that we're targeting. And so, this summer, we're focusing on getting our base up in Los Angeles and then trying to figure out how, like, a playbook for scaling up a base in a specific geography. Right now, a lot of our s are distributed throughout the United States. And there are clusters, but there's not, like, a huge spike in one city. And so, that's what we're working on right now is figuring out how to get a geographic kind of density to happen. VICTORIA: That makes sense. And it sounded like the app also uses a lot of -generated data for safety ratings and things like that. Am I getting that accurately? TRISHA: Yep, that's correct. And what we do is we have a bunch of different layers of our data that we pull from. We have a base layer of data that comes from OpenStreetMap, and then we build on top of that. We rate all roads on a one through five bike friendliness scale. And building on top of that, we pull from city-specific data sets from cities, and towns, and municipalities. And then, we layer on the crowdsourcing similar to how Waze does at the top. VICTORIA: Got it. So taking advantage of that open data, the open city data, and what other data the city is putting out there. Are you finding that you're using whether or not a city has open data to inform if you're going to expand into that location? MAGGIE: Kind of as a focus point. So, the way it works right now is Pointz is available actually anywhere in the U.S. So; it doesn't matter if you're in a city or a rural area, you can use Pointz. And you can use it for routing and navigation and all the features that are available. However, we only have visualized the ratings in all 350 or so urban areas in the U.S., and so those are all visualized, but not all of them have the supplemental city-data. And so, the way we decide when we pull in city data is based on gaps in, like, the base layer. So, if we're seeing that there are a lot of accuracy issues in a specific city, we'll go, and we'll look and see if there's a more accurate map that the city has put out or that an advocacy group has put out. And so, we've done this recently in Chicago, Minneapolis, Portland, Oregon, just to supplement the base layer of data, and it has helped a lot in of accuracy. And s or our riders really like it. VICTORIA: That's great. And what is your current level of usage in the app? How well have you been adopted? MAGGIE: Are you talking in of, like, numbers or just, like, our engagement levels? VICTORIA: Yeah, whatever you're using to measure your level of engagement or number of s on the app. Like, what are your stats looking like? MAGGIE: Yeah, so, we use...we have our overall s. And then we have a subcategory of, like, active and engaged s. And so, for our overall s, we're at just over 9,000 total s since we launched the MVP, and we haven't marketed it at all kind of until right now, where we're trying to push it out in LA a bit more. And then, in of our engaged cohort, I'd have to pull up the exact number. But last I checked, it was around 1,800 monthly active s. We kind of look at that cohort, and then we break it down into, you know, who's even more engaged in that? Who's coming back every week, every day? Mid-Roll Ad: VICTORIA: Introducing thoughtbot's ongoing maintenance service. Need reliable and maintenance for your software? Look no further. Our expert team handles upgrades, bug fixes, UI adjustments, and new feature development. And the best part? Our maintenance packages start at just 5K per month for companies of all sizes. From Ruby on Rails to Node, React, and, yes, even PHP, we've got you covered. Trust thoughtbot for top-notch and optimized performance. To receive a custom quote, [email protected]. VICTORIA: And with me here, I have Richard Newman, who is the Development Director on our Boost Team, to talk to me a little bit more about what maintenance actually looks like once you've built your software application, right? RICHARD: Hi, Victoria. VICTORIA: Hi, Richard. You have experience building applications. I wonder if you could describe to a founder who's considering to build an application, like, what should they consider for their long-term maintenance? RICHARD: Well, like you said earlier, part of what you're going for with that long-term maintenance is making sure the health of your project, of your application, is always there. And you don't want to be surprised as you're continuing to work with your s and so forth. And so, a number of things that we pay attention to in maintenance are, we're paying attention to keeping the application secure, providing security updates. We want to make sure that the ecosystem, basically, all of the tools and third-party services that are tied to your application that, we're responding to those sorts of changes as we go along. And then part of it is, occasionally, you're going to find some smaller issues or bugs or so forth as your group continues to grow or as needs continue to change. You want to be able to respond to those quickly as well. And so, a lot of what goes into maintenance is making sure that you're paying attention and you're ahead of those things before they surprise you. VICTORIA: Because what can happen? Like, what are the consequences if you don't do that ongoing maintenance? RICHARD: Well, the security updates those happen across gems and in the platform sort of tools that are there. And so, if you're not keeping those up to date, your exposure, your vulnerability to being hacked, or having a bad actor come into your application start growing on you if you're not doing the maintenance. The other ones that can come up is there's new interfaces that these third-party services...they may be updating their APIs. They may be updating how you're supposed to work with their tool. And so, those can occasionally break if you're not paying attention to what's going on or you're suddenly surprised by an upgrade that you have to make. And then, finally, there's this long-term sort of code change that just builds up over time if you're not keeping it refactored for the changes that are in a language or the gems that you work with. And then, suddenly, after a while, it suddenly gets to the point where you have a lot of work that you might have to do to rehabilitate the application to take on some of the newer features that are being released. And so, that makes it that much more difficult, that much more friction about being able to deliver updates for your s or to be able to respond to changes that are happening out there in your application. VICTORIA: Right. So, if you don't have that ongoing maintenance, you could run into a situation where, suddenly, you need to make a very large investment and fixing whatever is broken. RICHARD: Absolutely. It's going to be very tough to plan for if you weren't keeping up all the way along and, yes, absolutely ends up being much slower if you have to remediate it. VICTORIA: That makes sense. I wonder if you have any examples of a project you've walked into and said, "Wow, I wish we had been doing a little bit more maintenance." [laughs] And maybe you can share some details. RICHARD: Yeah. We had a fairly large application that involved a number of clinic services. So, we had an application that s were going in every day and counting on our fast response. And, over time, we've got surprised by a database upgrade that had to happen. Basically, the database was going to be changed by our third-party hosting service, and that hadn't been tested. There hadn't been procedures in place when we discovered this need. And there was a very hard date that that change had to be done or else the entire application was going to go down. And it came at a very inconvenient time, at the end of the year around Christmas, that we had to respond to all of that. And had we been in front of it and just updated it every quarter and staying current with it, it wouldn't have been nearly the lift that it turned out to be. We were facing a pretty hard deadline [laughs] there to keep things going. It was very, very stressful and disruptive for the team and potentially for the clinics. VICTORIA: Right. And it always happens around a big holiday or something like that, right? When it all comes to a head. So... [laughter] RICHARD: Absolutely. You want to be in control of the timeframe and not have the timeframe be in control of you. VICTORIA: Right. And if you have a team like thoughtbot ing you, you can go on your vacation with a little bit more knowledge that if something breaks, there's someone there who can respond and fix things, and you don't have to interrupt your very valuable time off. So... RICHARD: [chuckles] Absolutely. VICTORIA: Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Richard, for ing me today. I appreciate you coming here to talk with us. And we'll talk to you again soon. RICHARD: Yeah, it was a pleasure. Thank you. VICTORIA: I'm wondering if you have any incentives built into the app for s who are, like, contributing data back, or maybe they're writing every single day. Are there any little challenges or achievements that you could unlock within the app right now? MAGGIE: We do have some gamification, yes. And so, the way that people can earn points on the app...we call them points with a Z because of the name. The way that they can earn those points are a couple of ways. So, one is through riding their bike and using Pointz as a navigation tool or as a tool to record their ride. And so, for that, you get one point for every mile. And then the second way is by contributing to the map, so either crowdsourcing an amenity like a bike parking that isn't on the map already or by adding information about a hazard that might be on the map, like, for example, a car parked in the bike lane. And for each of those, you know, you get one point. And so, yeah, we have that gamification system built out and a couple of...like, we have a leaderboard. And then, also, we have, like, a way for you to kind of go up in your avatar on the app. But besides that, we do monthly contests. And so, this past month, we partnered up with a company called Po Campo, which makes stylish bike bags that can be taken off your bike and then worn as, like, a purse or a handbag. And so, they sponsored the prize, which is one of their bags, and whoever kind of gave the highest quality and quantity of crowdsourcing reviews and miles ridden they're the winner of the contest for this month of June. VICTORIA: That's very cool. I love to see that and hear about what strategies people have for engaging with their s within the app. I'm curious to go back to, you know when you two first met, how did you know that you were going to be good partners to work on this project together? TRISHA: One of the ways that we knew that was because we had first been introduced to each other from our mutual friend who is a close friend of both of ours, and she had been telling the other person about each other. And it was one day where we just met up, and we really clicked. But, at that point, Maggie was looking for someone who could work on the mobile development, and I didn't have any experience with that. However, I ed a club, which Maggie was leading, which was called The Women's Entrepreneurship Group. And we got a chance to work together and plan out many events, including a large conference right before COVID hit. Like, we saw how we'd worked together. We really enjoyed it. And we had very similar aspirations and motivations towards entrepreneurship. When I had the chance to basically what Maggie was already working on with Pointz in the summer of 2020, I knew that that was going to be a great opportunity. And we decided to become co-founders by the end of the summer. VICTORIA: That's very cool. And I know how important it is to have the right team together to work on a project like this and to start something up from scratch. So, were there other big turning points? And you mentioned COVID, so I'm curious how that affected the growth and progress of this effort. MAGGIE: Yeah, to be honest, in the heart of COVID, like 2020, we weren't really built yet. So, it didn't quite affect us a whole lot, just because the product didn't get launched until the spring of 2020 to actually, you know, kind of publicly. But there were a couple of other turning points in our company, one of them was Techstars and kind of the progress we made during Techstars. We ed the accelerator, and we were having a bit of a hard time getting tech kind of pushed out really quickly. It was taking us a long time to build the features. And so, Trisha and I kind of evaluated why that was happening. And we came up with a process that worked a lot better, which we still use today. And speaking of team, we got a couple of really awesome teammates that made a huge difference on how quickly we could turn around features and bug fixes. And so, that was a really big turning point because we were able to iterate much more quickly and get from our riders a lot faster. So that happened November, December of last year, of 2022. The other big turning point, I would say, is the slider that we released in March of this past year of 2023. And so we were having a hard time retaining s and getting them to really like the routing because people who bike tend to be very opinionated. And if the route isn't exactly kind of how they wanted it, they would be upset. And so, we'd fix it for one group of s, and then we would upset another group that didn't want that, you know, added to the routing. What we ended up doing was releasing this safety slider, which has the fastest routes on the left side of the slider and then the safest or the longest routes on the right side of the slider. And that really helped people get a wide variety of routes that fit their use case. And it's helped a ton with retention. And also, the we were getting from s really changed from, like, really honing in on a very specific issue with routes that they were getting to general about how we could enhance the app and keep people coming back more consistently. TRISHA: I just want to emphasize again that, yeah, the team is really critical. And, like, on our team, we have really awesome people who are 10xers and just great. Also, have someone who worked at MapQuest and has...I think our combined mapping experience is around 20-plus years. So it's really awesome to have that sort of a team together. VICTORIA: Yes. And, you know, talking about it now on the podcast, in retrospect, I'm sure it all seems like it came together, and it was kismet, and everything just worked. But was that how it really felt? Or were there moments where you doubted it and thought, maybe this isn't going to come together? MAGGIE: Yeah, definitely. There were moments of that feeling. One thing that gave us a lot of confidence was getting to the point where we felt like we could really iterate quickly and release features at a consistent and predictable cadence. So that gave us confidence that you know, there is a process for this, and there's a process of gathering and rider , and then translating that into features, or bug fixes, or UI fixes. I think that gave me a lot of confidence that we could solve it. But, of course, it always takes a lot longer than you expect. And our advisor, Anuj, always says that 80% of what you're going to do won't work and 20% of it will. And it's all about how quickly you can iterate and figure out what works. And sometimes you get lucky, and it happens quicker. Or maybe you have unique insight into the problem, and you can guess, and it works out quicker. But I don't know; I definitely think it's been a learning process for everyone on our team. VICTORIA: That's great advice. And now that you've got your velocity up and you have your confidence, what's on the horizon? Are there new features that you all are working on that you're excited about? TRISHA: Yeah, so we're really excited about leaning into the whole generative AI trends that are happening, especially with ChatGPT and others. One thing that we've been hearing from most of our riders, people who use Pointz, is that using the app to create routes, which will allow them to explore new places, go to a new coffee shop that they've been hoping to go to but just don't know how to actually get there is critical. And most of our riders on Pointz are people who are new to a city. Maybe they've only lived there for a max of one year or less. So, exploring the area around them is really important to them, and that's why they use Pointz. And so, leaning into that, we're going to be releasing, in the next couple of weeks, a new explore feature where someone can go and, you know, describe to Pointz what type of route or...not even route, what type of things they want to see in a city, and Pointz will come up with that. It'll learn their preferences and continue to suggest really awesome places to get to, which they can do car-free, basically, through bikes, because they can be safe and, you know, they can rely on this app to get them through the city safely. VICTORIA: That's really exciting. And I'm excited to try it out myself [laughs] once you have that feature launched. Maybe you can tell me how that feature plays into...or what your success really looks like for Pointz in the next six months. MAGGIE: Yeah, so I think that feature is something that will be, I mean, of course, we got to test it, but I think that it will help people kind of use Pointz as an exploration tool more effectively. People are already using it for that, but it's not specifically built for exploration. Right now, it's built more for, I guess, routing to, you know, new places but not specifically, like, oh, let's go on a route that takes me through all these tourist destinations in the city I'm visiting. But this new feature will allow people to use it for that more. And I think, overall, you know, our mission at Pointz is to help people feel comfortable riding bikes so that they can drive less and feel like they can get around in a sustainable fashion, rather than having to rely on their car so often. And this feature is tied to that in the sense of, like, people can use it as a tool to help them, you know, find the safe route or a route they're comfortable with, and then use it to explore an area but maybe a bit more geared towards, like, tourists or, you know, more recreational-type use cases. VICTORIA: That's very cool. Thank you so much for sharing that. And what is your biggest challenge to achieving that success? MAGGIE: I think biking is a first step in that process of helping people feel like they can be more car-light or car-free, you know, use their car less. There are obviously a ton of other factors that go into whether or not you're driving, or you're taking a bike, or you're taking public transportation. And, you know, our next steps after we have really nailed this product are to explore those opportunities and build tools that help people choose alternative transportation more often. That's what we're excited about going into the future. You know, there's a ton happening in cities all across the U.S., not only for biking but also investments in transit, infrastructure, and whatnot. So, you know, young people and people of all ages...I think a lot of people feel comfortable and that they don't want to be sitting in traffic a whole lot [laughs] because that's not fun for anyone. And, you know, traffic and congestion is always frustrating. So, as much as we can reduce that, I think that's the mission of our company. And, of course, it takes a ton of scale. But it's a big goal, but we're going after it. VICTORIA: That's great. You know, I heard about a town in the U.S. that actually had banned cars and was pedestrians only for the whole town. It's like, what a great idea. [laughs] But I love it. I love that you're working on it. And I wonder now, you know, you're a couple of years into it. If you could go back in time and give advice to yourself when you first started this project, what advice would you give yourself? MAGGIE: For me, I would say to get a minimal viable product more minimal, [chuckles] so reduce it to, like, a single feature, get it out quickly, and start getting more quickly from, like, a very practical, you know, piece of advice. And then, like, an overall piece of advice would be just to be more confident earlier on. It took a long time for me to gain the confidence of, like, being a thought leader in the space. And, you know, I felt like I was young, so there were all these people that knew more than me. But I think everyone has a really unique perspective, and if you really lean into that and share that with the world, it can inspire a lot of people. And you just have to be confident enough to do that. TRISHA: Yeah, I definitely second what Maggie just said. I think also from the tech perspective, if you're someone who is maybe more inexperienced, like, I just got out of college and did this, and I have never worked a full-time job before anywhere except this. And so I think there was a lot of doubt that I had of being able to lead the technical side because I didn't have 20 years experience working somewhere. But, actually, at the end of the day, that doesn't matter. It just matters that you're able to be in touch with what it takes to build certain features and talk to the s, or your riders, or whoever because they're the ones who are going to be dictating whether this is a success or not based on what you build. It's really not good if you're building and wasting a lot of resources and time on features which nobody wants or nobody uses. And so, that's been core to why I think I've gotten a lot of confidence in being able to be, like, the tech leader in this app and in this space. VICTORIA: Yeah, I'm curious to hear more about that. You touched on this really being your first full-time job. So, how do you build your personal brand as an executive leader in this company that you're building? TRISHA: For anyone who does startups, they'll know that it's a lot of figuring it out as you go, and things that you're taught in school don't necessarily translate well to the startup world because, like, I did, like, a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. I did operating systems. I built a whole bunch of random stuff in school, and I studied for hours and hours. Of a lot of that, the most important thing, which actually translates to working in my field, is the perseverance to, like, keep going and working really hard. Otherwise, none of that stuff which I learned honestly translates. I had to learn everything myself with regards to building mobile apps. And I think the foundations were really critical from school but not really much of the hours of studying. I don't think that that's necessary, but I think it's necessary to build that sort of perseverance mindset. VICTORIA: That makes sense sort of to reflect that back a little bit, just having the perseverance to keep pushing, and keep learning, and keep understanding what is it going to take to build the features that you want? And that's really the core of being a CTO, right? TRISHA: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. VICTORIA: And, Maggie, I wonder about you as well, like, what resources are you drawing on to really perform as a CEO for this company? TRISHA: One thing that I read a lot is...it's more product-focused, actually, but it's product and growth-focused. It's Lenny's Newsletter, which I mentioned earlier. I use that as a resource a lot. I listen to their podcasts, and I read their articles. And then secondly, I interact a lot with other CEOs and founders because I think that's one of the best ways you can learn is from other people who are in it right now, maybe are a couple of steps ahead of you, or who have done it before. And so, I lean into that quite a bit. And just, you know, try to get advice from people, take what makes sense, and apply it to what we're working on. VICTORIA: That sounds great, yeah. I can relate to that; just building your personal network with people who are in similar roles helps you stay in touch and understand what other challenges people are facing and what you might face someday, right? [laughs] That's really cool. I love that you have all that set up. And is there anything else that you all would like to promote today? MAGGIE: I would just say to anybody who's interested in biking or maybe is, like, a beginner rider, we'd love to have you try out the app and then explore your area and give it a try one weekend when you have some time and see if you feel more confident, you know, given the routes that are on more green and protected roads. VICTORIA: I'm really excited to be talking to you because I am that person. I need this app. [laughs] I'm excited to try it out. Thank you, Maggie and Trisha, for ing us today. [laughs] It was a really great conversation, and I'm excited to follow along and see what happens with Pointz in the coming years. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at [email protected]. And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thank you for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Special Guests: Maggie Bachenberg and Trisha Ballakur. Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Introducing thoughtbot's ongoing maintenance service. Need reliable and maintenance for your software? Look no further. Our expert team handles upgrades, bug fixes, UI adjustments, and new feature development. And the best part? Our maintenance packages start at just 5k per month for companies of all sizes. From Ruby on Rails to Node, React, and, yes, even PHP, we've got you covered. Trust thoughtbot for top-notch and optimized performance. To receive a custom quote, [email protected]. -- Brittany Martin is an Engineering Manager at Shogun, where she manages a team of Ruby and React engineers and is the Co-host of The Ruby on Rails Podcast. Victoria and Will talk to Brittany about the multitude of stuff she's interested in, including Roller Derby, and gives the story of how she found herself co-hosting the show. She says knowing what your brand is and what listeners should expect from listening to you is super important, and she gives her opinion on what it means to be in the Ruby on Rails Community. Shogun The Ruby on Rails Podcast Follow Brittany Martin on LinkedIn or Twitter, or visit her website. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. WILL: And I'm your other host, Will Larry. And with us today is Brittany Martin, an Engineering Manager at Shogun, where she manages a team of Ruby and React engineers. She is the Co-host of The Ruby on Rails Podcast, almost five years running. And she plays roller derby for Steel City Roller Derby under the pseudonym, catch this, Merge Conflict. She is based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Brittany, thank you for ing us. BRITTANY: I am so thrilled to be on here. I have been listening to Giant Robots for years. So it's an absolute honor to be on the show today. VICTORIA: Yes, thank you so much for ing us. And I met you at RailsConf this year. And, at the time, you had a boot on your foot. So, I have to ask you, are you healed? Are you recovered? Are you walking around again? BRITTANY: This is such a good question. When I was between jobs in March, I was, you know, having these two weeks, I had a whole list of things that I was going to be doing. You know, I was going to train, like, running and whatnot. And I had roller derby practice that first week, and I broke my ankle. And, you know, going into it, I had no idea what a blocker it was going to be. I was like, oh, this is minor. It'll just take a couple of weeks to heal. No, it's been a long process. But I can gleefully tell the listeners that I am out of the boot. I am walking. I am hopefully getting into a sports program next week that will train me up to get back into CrossFit, running, and skating. Though the really funny part is that I currently have another injury which is golfer's elbow. [laughs] WILL: Oh, wow. BRITTANY: Yeah. So I have that from overusing my arms. So I'm a little bit of a mess, but, you know, getting myself back together physically so I can get back on my skates. WILL: So I know it's called golfer's elbow. But did you actually hurt it doing golf, or was it another sport you were playing? BRITTANY: It's so funny that you ask that, Will, because whenever people ask me how I broke my ankle, I can be glamorous and be like, "Oh, it was roller derby." WILL: [laughs] BRITTANY: Like, it's a sexy injury, you know. I have a friend who just broke their ankle because they were dancing down the stairs and broke it, not as glamorous of a story, right? WILL: [laughs] BRITTANY: Golfer's elbow. I literally have no idea how this happened. I've never golfed a day in my life. So [laughter] it's my non-glamorous injury at this point. WILL: Yeah, that's my background, sports medicine. BRITTANY: Oh, great. WILL: So it's interesting. Yeah, golfer's elbow, and I'm like, it's usually not golf that does it. So...[laughs] BRITTANY: Yeah. So I said something to my PT. I was like, "Am I the first person to ever get golfer's elbow from, like, you know, fixing another injury?" And she's like, "Yes. Yes, you are." [laughs] And I was like, oh. [laughter] I really was expecting to get some reassurance that it wasn't me. But hey, what are you going to do? WILL: There you go. BRITTANY: I love the fact that you do love my roller derby name. As you can imagine, it is a beacon for finding the other programmers out on the track because they find it very funny. Nobody else finds it funny whatsoever. And people call me Merge for short, and some people think it's Marge. And I just allow it at this point. [laughter] My number is 200, and its status code okay. When you hit me, I get up okay until, apparently, I break my ankle. So...[laughter] WILL: I love it. Because if you're a programmer, you're like, oh, she means business. BRITTANY: Exactly. WILL: Because merge conflicts...yeah, never fun. BRITTANY: Exactly. VICTORIA: I love that. I love finding other people who work in tech in other random activities. Like, I've recruited people from the climbing gym. [laughs] I'm like, oh, we're climbing together, and, oh, you're an engineer. That's interesting. [laughs] So it's great to, like, be with your community in different settings, so... And you're just so involved in the Ruby on Rails Community. And I'm curious what really got you started into podcasting. BRITTANY: Yeah, that's a really good question. So I'm a former product manager former MBA. So I didn't know how to code. I moved out to San Francisco because I thought that's what everyone did. If you wanted to be in tech, you moved out to San Francisco, and so I did that. And I realized very quickly that it was going to be hard for me to be a product manager without knowing how to code. And so I went to a bootcamp at night, and I became a Ruby on Rails developer. So I wish I had, like, just a really cool story for why I chose Rails. It's literally the framework that was being taught by the bootcamp. WILL: [laughs] BRITTANY: But I'm so glad that it was because I love this community so much. But, you know, when I moved out to San Francisco, I just had my current partner at the time and my dog. I didn't have any friends. And so it was really the perfect time to learn how to code just because I was really able to focus. And I ended up having a lot of long walks at night, like, getting to the train, getting to the bus, and that's really when I got into listening to podcasts. I'm not a huge music person, which is kind of weird. I really...I deeply love podcasts. And so I just kind of glommed on to a bunch of podcasts like Giant Robots, CodeNewbie, Bike Shed. I figured if I listened to all the things that I wanted to be, like, osmosis would just happen, and I would just start learning the things because I was actively learning about how to code. And I thought just listening to those concepts would really help. And really what ended up happening is those people that I was listening to, like, to me, they became celebrities to me. Like, I don't care about regular celebrities. [laughter] I care about people within these communities that I care so much about. And so, you know, a couple of years into that, I was still very much devoted to listening to podcasts. I trained for my first marathon listening to podcasts. And I was listening to The Ruby on Rails Podcast, and, at the time, Kyle Daigle had taken over the show. And he had decided, in order to spice things up on the show, he was going to bring co-hosts on that he was going to rotate through. So, every couple of weeks, you would come on as a co-host, and you would drive the conversation with things that were going on in your life. And, at the time, you know, there wasn't a lot of women, female representation in podcasts. I felt that I was doing interesting things. I was working at a non-profit doing ticketing for the Broadway Symphony and opera, like, in Rails. So I felt like I was always working in Rails, and I thought I could provide some useful insight. So I reached out to Kyle. I must have been very ambitious that day because I reached out and I said, "Hey, how about bringing me on as a co-host?" And he said, "Yeah, absolutely. Like, that would be great." And so I came on as one of the regular co-hosts on The Ruby on Rails Podcast, which I should have been flying high, right? Like, this is exactly what I wanted. I got to become like one of my own celebrities, right? Well, Kyle got really busy. At the time, I believe it's when Microsoft was acquiring GitHub. And Kyle still works at GitHub today. Kyle is amazing. He's their COO now. But the podcast kind of went dormant for a couple of months. It was my big opportunity. I really loved, you know, being on a podcast. I had done a couple of episodes. So I reached out to Kyle and said, "Hey, is there any chance you would give me the podcast?" And he said, "Absolutely." And he signed over everything to me, [laughter] which was really scary because I was taking over a podcast that had been around, at that time, it had been around for at least ten years, hundreds of episodes deep. It was on its own network. It was on the 5by5 Network at the time. So it had sponsors and expectations. And so, really, I had to learn everything from the get-go. Like, I made up my own episode plans. I made up my own questions, like, how to do ad reads, how to edit, how to to the hosting platform like; that was entirely on me. And, you know, we can talk more about how the podcast has evolved over those years. But yeah, long story now made short, that is how I got my start in podcasting. WILL: That's actually really amazing that that's how it got started and everything. Let's go back to when you first started. What was your feelings like? You say it was a lot to take on. Can you dig deeper in that and tell us more about that? Because I think I felt the same way. I think we've been doing this for about a year now. It's scary, let's be honest. It's scary jumping on a podcast and sharing who you are and what you're doing. So, can you tell us more about that? BRITTANY: Absolutely. I think one thing is just knowing what is your brand and, you know, what listeners should expect from listening to you because this is a podcast that had been around for ten years. You know, it had changed formats several times. It was an interview-style podcast at one point. At one point, it was a bunch of co-hosts that would just meet every week to talk out what was going on. And so I really needed to take a moment and kind of look over the metrics of the episodes. Like, I have that marketing background. I have that product background. So I wanted to know, like, what's actually working? Like, what do listeners want to listen to? And I also, like, kind of pored through all the reviews of the podcast. I'm like, did people even notice that this podcast went offline? Like, what's the current ecosystem? How many podcasts are out there in the Ruby and Rails space? And so what I started doing is I wanted to create, like, a safe environment in order to start the podcast over again. So what I did is I did interview-style podcasts with my friends, people that would tolerate me, you know, making mistakes, knowing that I was probably...I am a terrible editor. And so bringing those people on to have just genuine conversations with. And then really just tried to pick up the listenership of the podcast because I'm basically waving my arms saying, "Hey, folks. Like, The Ruby on Rails Podcast is back. I'm here as your host. And, like, we are here to stay. Like, I want this to be a mainstay in the community." VICTORIA: That's great. So you started to apply those concepts from your product background. And I'm curious what you found in how the business of the podcast really works. BRITTANY: Yeah, I learned a lot, and we can talk about the transition. So, when I came on to the 5by5 Ruby on Rails Podcast, at the time, this was back in 2018. The podcast was being managed by 5by5, which is, like, a long-standing podcast network. They're still around, but they're much smaller than they used to be. So, like, all of the sponsorship and the episode management was being handled by them. And so I didn't have a lot of insight into that part of the podcast. What I did have insight into is, like, what content is performing well? And what is the audience reaction to what we're putting out there? Like, how is the listenership coming back and whatnot? Now, one thing that did happen over the course of me managing The Ruby on Rails Podcast is we decided to take the podcast independent at one point, you know, 5by5 was starting to wind down. And so, back in 2021, I reached out to 5by5 and said, "Hey, I genuinely really love this podcast. I want to be able to take it to a different platform, you know, have it go independent. But it's really important to me that I'm able to hold on to the current subscribers that I have." I think we all know that, like, if you rebrand something and it's a totally different RSS feed, it's really hard to get people to move over, especially if they're using something that makes podcast listening really easy like Apple Podcasts, you know, you subscribe. You get new episodes, and you just hit play. And so they were extremely willing to work with me. And so, we ended up taking the podcast independent. 5by5 created the hosting platform Fireside. And so we moved the podcast over to Fireside, and that was, like, a very seamless transition. But it was a moment in time where, you know, I was kind of questioning. We're no longer 5by5. It was the 5by5 Ruby on Rails Podcast. What do we call it? And so I genuinely had that moment where I was like, I could be really clever with the name. But then I stepped back, and I was like, no, everyone already refers to it as The Ruby on Rails Podcast. I'm just going to go with it. And so I think that ended up being a good decision. We did change the logo of the show. We kept the same feed. And we had, like, the first episode on the new...we're not even on a network now; we're independent. The first episode of, like, the V2 of The Ruby on Rails Podcast is really what we called it. We just kind of explained the whole move. And I'm just deeply grateful all of our listeners just kind of followed along. And I will say the biggest boon to us moving is that we did get a professional editor. And so, like, the quality of the episodes went up, which is the best money that you can spend. Get yourself a professional editor. I cannot stress that enough. Or you get really good at it yourself. But I know my own skills, and it was never going to be that way. And so we took it independent. And I also decided to do a format change as well because it was a lot to do years of a podcast by myself. It was a lot. So I'm really glad Victoria and Will that you have each other. I think it's really great to have co-hosts. So I ended up moving the podcast. I now have a producing partner, and that's Mirror Placement. They do recruiting for Ruby on Rails, and they are wonderful partners. But I also have three co-hosts that rotate through. I have Brian Mariani, who's a recruiter and founder of Mirror Placement. I have Jemma Issroff, who works on Ruby at Shopify. And I have Nick Schwaderer, who works on Rails infrastructure at Shopify. And that's been great because I rotate through those co-hosts. And I always have fresh content from them. But I also do the interview-style episodes as well, which Victoria was on recently. VICTORIA: Yes. I agree 100%. Having a co-host like Will makes it so much more fun. And I cannot appreciate our editor Mandy Moore enough. And I agree on that advice. And I actually would add when people ask me if they should start a podcast, recommend having at least one other person [laughs] who you want to talk with about that topic for every week. But I wonder, if someone's thinking about starting a podcast, what would you have them consider as to whether or not it's worth it for them? BRITTANY: I recently ed the podcasting subreddit on Reddit just because I was interested to see what kind of questions there were out there. Because when I got into podcasting, I was, like, oh, you just need to have a microphone and a way to record, and you just put it out there, and people are going to listen. It feels very much...like, you when, you know, the iPhone came out, and the App Store was empty? And then any app that you made was, like, amazing. Everybody would it because there was nothing to . We're now getting to a point with podcasts; there's just a lot out there. My first bit of advice is, something that I said earlier, is make sure that you have an identity around your podcasts. Like, make sure that you are targeting a niche. It's fine if there are other people doing it, but do something that is uniquely you and do something that brings you joy. I really love talking to people in the Ruby on Rails Community. I have a special affinity for people who have never been on a podcast before. It's a lot of work. So it's definitely worth it. I've gotten to meet a lot of my programming heroes because of it. And there are times where I've been very tempted to take a break and be able to step away from it. But, as of right now, it has been a good experience. And what I often say whenever I open up my conference talks is the Ruby on Rails Community is my community contribution because I'm not someone who regularly contributes to open source. And so this is kind of, like, how I give back, and I get to meet a lot of amazing people. Mid-Roll Ad: VICTORIA: Introducing thoughtbot's ongoing maintenance service. Need reliable and maintenance for your software? Look no further. Our expert team handles upgrades, bug fixes, UI adjustments, and new feature development. And the best part? Our maintenance packages start at just 5k per month for companies of all sizes. From Ruby on Rails to Node, React, and, yes, even PHP, we've got you covered. Trust thoughtbot for top-notch and optimized performance. To receive a custom quote, [email protected]. VICTORIA: And with me here, I have Richard Newman, who's the Development Director on our Boost Team, to talk to me a little bit more about what maintenance actually looks like once you've built your software application, right? RICHARD: Hi, Victoria. VICTORIA: Hi, Richard. You have experience building applications. I wonder if you could describe to a founder who's considering to build an application, like, what should they consider for their long-term maintenance? RICHARD: Well, like you said earlier, part of what you're going for with that long-term maintenance is making sure the health of your project, of your application, is always there. And you don't want to be surprised as you're continuing to work with your s and so forth. And so a number of things that we pay attention to in maintenance are we're paying attention to keeping the application secure, providing security updates. We want to make sure that the ecosystem, basically, all of the tools and third-party services that are tied to your application, we're responding to those sorts of changes as we go along. And then part of it is, occasionally, you're going to find some smaller issues or bugs or so forth as your group continues to grow or as needs continue to change. You want to be able to respond to those quickly as well. And so a lot of what goes into maintenance is making sure that you're paying attention and you're ahead of those things before they surprise you. VICTORIA: Because what can happen? Like, what are the consequences if you don't do that ongoing maintenance? RICHARD: Well, the security updates those happen across gems and in the platform sort of tools that are there. And so, if you're not keeping those up to date, your exposure, your vulnerability to being hacked, or having a bad actor come into your application start growing on you if you're not doing the maintenance. The other ones that can come up is there's new interfaces that these third-party services...they may be updating their APIs. They may be updating how you're supposed to work with their tool. And so those can occasionally break if you're not paying attention to what's going on or you're suddenly surprised by an upgrade that you have to make. And then, finally, there's this long-term sort of code change that just builds up over time if you're not keeping it refactored for the changes that are in a language or the gems that you work with. And then, suddenly, after a while, it suddenly gets to the point where you have a lot of work that you might have to do to rehabilitate the application to take on some of the newer features that are being released. And so that makes it that much more difficult, that much more friction about being able to deliver updates for your s or to be able to respond to changes that are happening out there in your application. VICTORIA: Right. So, if you don't have that ongoing maintenance, you could run into a situation where suddenly, you need to make a very large investment and fixing whatever is broken. RICHARD: Absolutely. It's going to be very tough to plan for if you weren't keeping up all the way along and, yes, absolutely ends up being much slower if you have to remediate it. VICTORIA: That makes sense. I wonder if you have any examples of a project you've walked into and said, "Wow, I wish we had been doing a little bit more maintenance." [laughs] And maybe you can share some details. RICHARD: Yeah. We had a fairly large application that involved a number of clinic services. So we had an application that s were going in every day and counting on our fast response. And, over time, we've got surprised by a database upgrade that had to happen. Basically, the database was going to be changed by our third-party hosting service, and that hadn't been tested. There hadn't been procedures in place when we discovered this need. And there was a very hard date that that change had to be done or else the entire application was going to go down. And it came at a very inconvenient time, at the end of the year around Christmas, that we had to respond to all of that. And had we been in front of it and just updated it every quarter and staying current with it, it wouldn't have been nearly the lift that it turned out to be. We were facing a pretty hard deadline [laughs] there to keep things going. It was very, very stressful and disruptive for the team and potentially for the clinics. VICTORIA: Right. And it always happens around a big holiday or something like that, right? When it all comes to a head. [laughter] RICHARD: Absolutely. You want to be in control of the timeframe and not have the timeframe be in control of you. VICTORIA: Right. And if you have a team like thoughtbot ing you, you can go on your vacation with a little bit more knowledge that if something breaks, there's someone there who can respond and fix things, and you don't have to interrupt your very valuable time off. So... RICHARD: [chuckles] Absolutely. VICTORIA: Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Richard, for ing me today. I appreciate you coming here to talk with us. And we'll talk to you again soon. RICHARD: Yeah, it was a pleasure. Thank you. WILL: I have a question around your listeners. I just want to take a second and just thank everyone who listens to the podcast. We really appreciate you so much, so just thank you, thank you, thank you. Because if you don't have listeners, you don't have a podcast, like you said a second ago. And you went through so many changes. What's been your biggest win, and how do you continue winning with your listeners? And how do you engage with them? BRITTANY: This is a fun answer because, actually, thoughtbot comes into play there. They did not pay me to say this. But one thing that The Bike Shed used to do is they used to go to RailsConf and RubyConf, and they would record episodes during the conference with various Ruby heroes in the community. This is going back to me seeing these people as celebrities. I just thought that was, like, the coolest thing. And, at the time, I couldn't afford to go to conferences like that. So being able to listen to those podcasts and get to hear that kind of content was really important to me. And so, you know, eventually, that stopped being a thing at RubyConf and RailsConf. And two years ago, I reached out and said, "Hey, I really love those kinds of sessions. Is there any way that I could take the lead on bringing those sessions back?" And we did. So it took in the form of a podcast at these different conferences where we would bring in different podcasts in the community. And we would have a . We would answer listener questions. It was genuinely a lot of fun. So that is a proud moment for me. But it's a proud moment for me because it gave me the opportunity to reach out to podcasts in the community and say, "Hey, we're not competing here. We're friends. I want to record content with you. Like, please be part of my podcast community." And we have never been tighter. So, like, we guest on each other's podcasts. We promote each other's podcasts on like Mastodon and Twitter. And it is just the most lovely thing ever because now we say things like, oh, yeah, like, this podcast, like, that's our, like, sister podcast, or that's our brother podcast. Like, it's so cool that we, you know, rising tide raises all ships. That's exactly what's happening here in the Ruby podcast community. VICTORIA: I like that familial sense within the different Ruby on Rails podcasts, and maybe even Giant Robots is a part of that. Like, are we a cousin or an uncle? [laughter] Who knows? But I was actually there when you recorded the episode live at RailsConf in Atlanta this year. Was that your favorite moment at RailsConf, or was it something else? BRITTANY: Yeah, I would say that was my favorite moment at RailsConf. No matter how many times I meet Aaron Patterson, I am always, like, deeply intimidated by just how funny and intelligent he is. So having that excuse of reaching out to him and saying like, "Hey, will you please be on this podcast ?" was so fun. I deeply adore Irina Nazarova, and so having her on the as well was fun. And then just doing the wildcard of having the audience, like, vote in who was going to be the third was truly a risky move, Victoria. [laughs] But it ended up paying off, and it ended up generating some really fun content for us. VICTORIA: That's awesome. And I'm curious, you know, to talk a little bit more about the Ruby on Rails Community. And what do you see is the biggest challenge that it's facing right now? BRITTANY: Oh, I have so many opinions on this. What a great question. [laughs] So I recently put together a talk proposal. It's currently waitlisted at a conference, but it is a talk that I very much want to give. But one project that I would really like to work on is...between, I would say, 2013 and 2015, Ruby on Rails was definitely the number one framework that was being taught in bootcamps. And I'm really curious about what happened to all those people. I'm one of them. I learned Ruby on Rails in 2014. I still believe that I'm in the Ruby on Rails Community, not only for the podcast, but I'm an engineering manager for a company that writes Rails. So I believe I'm very much in the community. I'm so curious. Those people had so much potential of being seniors, principals, staff engineers, founders, engineering managers, architects. What happened to them? And did they stay in our community? And then my second part of that is, what does it mean to be in the Ruby on Rails Community? Like, can you just listen to podcasts and be in the community? Do you need to actively write Ruby? I just find that whole thing very interesting. We're very obsessed with bringing new programmers into the Rails community, which I think is important. But what about the people who we taught Rails and left us? Like, is there an opportunity to bring them back? WILL: It's funny you say that because I wasn't in that year range. I was a little later, like, 2017. And I learned Ruby on Rails, and then I went to JavaScript, you know, React, React Native, but I'm slowly inching back towards Ruby on Rails. My current project, I'm actually able to do some Ruby on Rails. And I'm really excited about it because, like you, that was my first language style that I learned, and I still love it. It is weird, but you always love your first language; I do, at least. So it's interesting that you said that because, yeah, I can say, for me, I'm slowly coming back towards it. BRITTANY: Well, welcome back, Will. We're excited to have you. I know that Node was such a heavy hitter when it came out, and it made a lot of sense. Like, we're going to teach you JavaScript on the front end. Oh, hey, we're going to also teach you JavaScript on the back end. You know, from the business side, I'm so curious whether or not Rails is still, like, one of the top three solutions in order to get an MVP off the ground. I don't have my thumb on that, so I'm very curious whether or not that's true or not. VICTORIA: We certainly still tend to default to it at thoughtbot and to get MVPs off the ground. And we're still building a bunch of products every year with it. [laughs] So, Ruby on Rails and React together, especially if you're trying to iterate very quickly and test your assumptions about what you're building, I think that it's still a really fast and high-performing framework to use. And it's interesting because there's a coding school in San Diego, Codecademy, which is really heavily involved, [chuckles] of course, in the Ruby on Rails Community, and they still teach it in their bootcamp. And one of the reasons they said to me was because it's one of the frameworks that gives you that holistic view of how everything works. [laughs] Like, if you're new to tech, new to programming, in general, it's a very easy entry point to understanding. And I think that, of itself, when you're talking, like, the long-term viability of a framework, being able to hire people who can step in and understand what's going on in your codebase, that framework gives you a higher chance of that. [laughs] You know, that might point to your long-term success, too. BRITTANY: Now, that's a really good point. Going back to the podcast as well, I think one thing that is not very well solved is just being able to make it sustainable as well because there are only so many sponsors out there. And it's really hard to prove ROI from sponsoring a podcast, right? Like, you can put links in the show notes. And you can hope people click on them and they convert. And you can be able to say, "Hey, this podcast is the reason." But I've seen a lot of people start podcasts, and they think, well, if I put a bunch of episodes out and some people listen, then sponsors are going to knock down my door. I'm very lucky that I've had some long-term sponsors that have been able to keep the show sustainable. And I love seeing podcasts that come out of companies, you know, like thoughtbot, where you are being sustained by the company that, you know, is producing it. It's really hard to justify a podcast as a business unless you are already a major celebrity already, right? VICTORIA: Yeah, we certainly don't do it for the money it makes us directly off the podcast. We do not. [laughter] BRITTANY: We do not. VICTORIA: Yeah, I agree with that. And yeah, and even it's interesting as an advertising vehicle or marketing for your company. It can be great because, like, I feel with Giant Robots, we have so many listeners, like, loyal listeners over the years that we have this, like, direct way of communicating with a community that we care about. [laughs] But if you don't have...trying to, like, create that market and create that group of people from the ground up can be really tough. [laughs] And it takes a lot of time, a lot of investment, and a lot of effort, especially if you can't afford a professional editor. [laughs] BRITTANY: Agreed. There's just some cost that I believe, like, the longer I do this, that are just, like, non-negotiable. There are some things that you can definitely have as optional. You know, for me, like, you have to have a good microphone. You have to have a professional editor. I pay for, like, my calendar scheduling software because I want to make that really, like, slick for my guests. Like, I used to...oh, I used to do the emails back and forth of, like, I'm available at Thursday at 2:00 or Friday at 3:00. Like, would one of these work for you? No. [laughs] It's just...that's a rotten experience. For us, we do send, like, a thank you gift after being on the show, which has been, like, a nice add with having a producing partner that will back me on that. And I try to get to as many conferences as possible because I think it's a great vehicle to promote the podcast, but those end up all being optional. And all those things they do cost money. VICTORIA: They do. And it's funny, like, yeah, getting out to the conferences, it's still the number one way to grow things is by meeting people in person [laughs], like, being real and human. BRITTANY: Shocking, right? [laughs] VICTORIA: Yeah. And I'm just kind of curious, like, in of how you picture what success means for your podcast. Like, what does that look like in the next six months or even, like, five years of hosting this podcast for you? BRITTANY: Ooh, this is, like, the existential crisis question because I've been doing it for nearly five years. And I think the question is always going to be, you know, like, how long do I want to keep hosting the podcast? I will say the podcast is a positive influence on me in of making sure that I stay connected to people, that I keep writing code on the side so that way, I know what I'm talking about. I have this whole imposter thing of, like, what if someone finds out I'm not a Ruby on Rails developer day to day and that I'm, like, actually thinking about business problems; I was, like, an engineering manager? You know, I'm going to get found out, and people are going to unsubscribe. But in all seriousness, I think the success for this podcast is that it can go on without me. It's been around for that long already. And eventually, like, I want to have a succession plan where someones, I will say, like, multiple co-hosts to be able to take it over from there. It'll be rough to watch because, like, I really enjoy, you know, my current era because I feel like the podcast has gone through different eras. I really do enjoy it. But, at some point, it's just not going to make sense in of my professional goals. Do you feel the same? VICTORIA: Yes. But we're only a year in. So I feel like I'm still...[laughter] I feel like I'm still new to hosting. And I'm like, oh, I've already recorded, like, 30 episodes or something. [laughs] There's been a lot of change. And we're always thinking about, like, how do we make it better? What do we do? And trying to figure out how do we really get the most out of it for ourselves. But I feel the same way that it's just one of the more fun things that I do at thoughtbot [laughs]. And it gives me that chance to reach out to people and start conversations that I otherwise would not have had. So I really appreciate it. I don't know what you think, Will. WILL: No, I totally agree with you. I love meeting new people. And I love meeting the diverse group of people that we have on the podcast. I love that just, like, how did you get here? Like, what makes you keep at it? Like, you've been at it for five years. What makes you keep at it? Just those questions like that I really love. For me personally, I think that I'm still in the growing phase of podcast hosting. Like, I can get better at this. I can get better at that. What else can I get better at? So I think that's where I'm at in this phase. But, like Victoria said, that's only a year in. It's a different story when you're five years in. BRITTANY: [laughs] It is. And one thing that I will do to make it more sustainable is, you know, like when you're running, you can either be sprinting, or you can be doing, like, a long endurance race. So with the podcast, I will book a bunch of podcasts in one week and say, this is my week to be recording. Like, I'm going to be very heads down on the podcast. I have other things going on in my life, but I'm like, this is a podcast week for me. And so I will record a bunch of episodes. And that essentially gives me a couple of weeks where I can essentially take a break from the podcast. But guess what, listeners? Like, you're still getting new episodes. So you have no idea that I'm secretly taking a break. And I think that has also been a huge help. Odd fact is that the five years that I've been hosting The Ruby on Rails Podcast, I am only missing from one episode. And the reason for that is that when I broke my ankle, [laughs] I called my co-host and was like, "Hey, I'm going into surgery tomorrow. We have this great episode being recorded tomorrow. I need you to take it." [laughs] And so that is the one episode that I am missing from, but I think it was a good lesson for me to know that I can step away and good content can still happen. WILL: That's amazing. That's a pretty good record. [laughs] BRITTANY: Or it might be obsessive, Will. I don't know. [laughter] WILL: Let me ask you this, what does success look like for you personally - roller derby, your full-time job? What does success look like for you in those areas in six months or a couple of years? BRITTANY: Oh, that's a really great question. So I had stepped away from roller derby during the pandemic. And so I absolutely love fitness. I do CrossFit. I have a peloton. I have my own little home gym that I built during the pandemic that I absolutely adore. So, you know, success for me is continuing to invest in that self-care. I want to keep skating just because I'm that person. Everyone came to me, and they're like, "Oh, you broke your ankle. I bet you won't go back to a roller derby." And I was like, oh, you think I won't? You think I won't go back? [laughs] So I'm headed back, but I'm going to be very careful about it. Because I've seen that, you know, your body can break, and you need to give yourself some rest. But to answer, overall, like, I am an engineering manager now, and, you know, my goal is to eventually to get to that director level. And, in some ways, like, I can justify the podcast just because I do get the excuse to talk to people that have the job that I eventually want to have in my career. And so it helps in that regard as well. VICTORIA: I think that's great, and I agree. That's also why I started getting involved in my community a lot, maybe 5 or 10 years ago. I was just like, here's opportunities to show my leadership and see how connected I am with other leaders. [laughs] It helps in that way. And on blading, I actually bought rollerblades recently just to go around the neighborhood. BRITTANY: Yeesssss! VICTORIA: And I got heckled by a woman [laughs] who said...I think she was being sincere, but she was like, "Bend your knees, and it's going to be okay." [laughter] Like, "Wear wrist guards next time." [laughter] I was like, maybe just my face was very try-hard in that moment. Because I have a lot of respect for people who can roller derby and get around on skates that fast. [laughs] BRITTANY: Well, you know what's really funny? (I haven't even talked about this on my own podcast.) is that you know, I'm involved in the Roller Derby League. Obviously, I can't skate right now. And so I needed to find a committee so that I was able to still, you know, provide value to the league. And so, for some reason, I decided that skater resources would be a good idea. So I'm essentially one of the people who is, you know, human resources within the Roller Derby League. And so when there are disputes or questions, or people have hurt feelings, like, they're coming to me, which is, you know, really funny because I do some of that as an engineering manager. So, like, to your point, Victoria, like, you know, I can do growth because they're way more extreme through roller derby, as you can imagine. And, in some ways, it ends up being good practice. VICTORIA: Yes, that does sound like practice for higher-level management decisions, [laughs] so get ready. You're going to have issues and problems, and you're the one to solve it. So... BRITTANY: Yeah. It's not like their problems don't matter. But, in some ways, it's almost like playing with monopoly money because, like, you know, you're not dealing with somebody's, like, livelihood. You're dealing with a sport that they do for fun. Like, trust me, no one is being paid to play roller derby. [laughs] It's a very expensive sport. There's a lot of equipment involved. And, Victoria, yes, you want to wear wristguards. [laughter] VICTORIA: Yes. I learned my lesson. BRITTANY: You write code. You want to wear wrist guards. [laughter] VICTORIA: Right. And yeah, it's funny about things like that. Like, it's still very meaningful to people. Like, when I used to coach kids' climbing competitions, it's, like, the same thing. Like, it's rock climbing, everybody, but some people take it very seriously. [laughs] There's a lot of feelings involved. But, at the end of the day, it's nice to have that practice outside of the pressure of it being someone's livelihood and all of those details. BRITTANY: Agreed. VICTORIA: Well, let me ask you this question. It's one of our favorite ones. But if you could go back in time and give advice to your younger self, what would you say? And maybe it's at the beginning of the podcast or some other inflection point in your career. BRITTANY: That is...oh, what a gift because hindsight is 20/20, isn't it? When I was going through school, I ended up getting a marketing degree because I really enjoyed business. I really liked, you know, the mechanics behind marketing. But, at the time, I had taken a couple of computer classes, and this was back in 2006. And, you know, I thought about double majoring in computer science and marketing. And someone gave me the terrible advice that computer programming was going to go away [laughs], and so it would be a waste of time to get that double degree in computer science. And so, you know, I'm very much a second career developer. Like I noted earlier, you know, I was a PM. I was a non-technical product manager before I learned how to code, and so I learned how to code in my 30s. So I wish I could go back and get into programming way earlier. It would have changed the entire trajectory of my life. But part of me always wants to live out, like, that Black Mirror, like, what it would have been like if I had learned to code so much earlier. Would I have found Ruby? Maybe not. WILL: I totally agree with that because the same story. I growing up, and I had a cousin that lived next door. He used to program, and I was just, like, he was a celebrity because I was like, whoa, look what he's doing, and how can you do that? And then I went off to college. Well, I grew up in a small town, so we didn't really have many computer programs. I went to a college, and they said, "Hey, we have this one computer course you can either take it or test out." I was like; I'm not taking it; test out. I want to save that money. And I didn't realize how much I'll love computers and programming until later in life, late 20s, early 30s. And I wish I could have started early, so I totally agree with you about that. VICTORIA: Like, I wish I would have time now to learn how to code. [laughs] Like, I still need to learn it. No, I think that...oh, would I advise? I don't know. You know what's funny? A recent guest said that if that had happened, they still wouldn't have believed themselves [laughs], right? Like, would you really believe someone telling you what to do? Like, you know, you try to make the best decision that you can at the time. BRITTANY: I think it's fun to look back and see all the little things that happened that got you to where you are. So, like, two of, like, crucial things that happened for me. I was in school to become a genetic counselor, and I hated it. And so I had gotten an internship, and, like, that internship changed everything because it was like a day in the life as a genetic counselor, and I really did not like it at all. And so, I ended up dropping all my classes and moving into the business school. And so that was one thing that happened. And then the second thing is, you know, I was working at a cowboy restaurant. [laughs] It was ridiculous. And I was getting ready to graduate school and just absolutely terrified about not having a job. I ended up getting this table of this company that was, like, having a business meeting, and we ended up chatting, and they were so wonderful. And they left me their business card, and, like, that ended up being my first job. It's just the little micro-decisions that you make that, like, change your entire trajectory, which is really so cool. So you end up not really regretting anything, but you always just kind of look back and reflect, and you're like, what if I had given that table away? Or what if I hadn't been ambitious and, like, tried to get that internship? So just everything's an opportunity, right? WILL: Yeah, I totally, totally agree with that. So you do roller derby, CrossFit, marathons, coding, your podcast. So you do a lot of self-care, which I don't think, especially in the tech world, we do enough self-care. I know I don't. I am horrible at it, trying to get better. What's your wind in your sails for that? Like, how do you keep going? Like, how do you stay disciplined with that? BRITTANY: I think, for me, I feel better when I move my body. I make better decisions. I am more patient. I need to work out earlier in the day. Like, I am a morning person, and so it makes me feel good. And so then I go into work in a good mood. And I deal with people day to day, right? Like, I manage ten developers. And so it's also something that I can use to connect with my team as well. A lot of them also like to do physical things, and so that works out nicely. In of nutrition, I definitely could be better. But I will say my partner and I take turns meal prepping our lunches. We both work from home. And so being able to, like, in between meetings run over and grab a box of actually good food to be able to eat lunch. We do, like, a meal service at night as well. I don't know, like, you need to look out for you. Because while the belief is that other people are also looking out, nobody's going to look out for you like you are. And so you have to prioritize self-care and just making sure that you're getting those moments. And I agree with you, Will; sometimes, I'm absolutely terrible at setting up those processes so that way you don't fall through. VICTORIA: I think there's a book that makes me think of it called, like, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. [laughs] BRITTANY: Yes. VICTORIA: Yeah. BRITTANY: Yes. VICTORIA: Yep. And I think that's part of it, too. Like, there's a lot of pressure to be so high-performing and to do all the things for your family, and for your work and your personal life. But, at the end of the day, it's also okay to just sit around and do nothing [laughs] and, like, relax. BRITTANY: Yeah, I've watched a lot of Drag Race, a lot. [laughs] VICTORIA: Oh, awesome. Yes. What's your favorite season? BRITTANY: Oh, season six, I would say. Season six is just so good. Are you watching All-Stars? VICTORIA: I'm not right now. I'm actually...I usually binge-watch it at random times. So I'm not really caught up. But I have met a few of them at drag shows. I think I've met Milk. Is that [inaudible 44:27] BRITTANY: Oh, wow. What a queen to have met. VICTORIA: I know. BRITTANY: That's amazing. [laughs] VICTORIA: That was actually a very funny story. I'll tell you another time. [laughs] But yes. BRITTANY: But honestly, like, Drag Race actually relates to engineering management for me because, you know, at my last job, I had two developers that I was struggling to connect with. And I realized that after stand-up, they were staying behind to talk about Drag Race, and I wanted to connect with them. And I was like, oh, I'll check out a couple of episodes and became so deeply addicted [laughs] that, like, I sured them in how much I loved it. So, like, it is a fun, like, I've always thought about giving a conference talk where, like, each report that I have, like, one crazy thing that they do...well, not crazy but, like, one, you know, ion that they have and, like, trying it just to have something to relate to. Though I will say, I did manage somebody who really liked to jump out of planes, and that is just not in the cards for me. VICTORIA: I love that too. I like when someone is really ionate about something. I'm like, okay, I'll give it a chance, at least once, you know. But I have some friends right now who are into freediving, and I'm not convinced [laughs] that I want to go try to hold my breath underwater. BRITTANY: What in the world is freediving? VICTORIA: It's diving underwater without oxygen. BRITTANY: No. VICTORIA: Yeah. Yeah. BRITTANY: That's a big nope for me. VICTORIA: And, like, hunting fish. So, like, they catch tuna and stuff. They're down there pew-pew and making sushi when they get back. BRITTANY: Well, that actually sounds wonderful. But -- VICTORIA: Yeah, I'm like, I will eat this. I will eat [laughs] whatever you catch. BRITTANY: Yes, that's fair. VICTORIA: Yeah. Like, I'm into the results but not...I might try some of the, like... a lot of it is, like, training your breath and being able to hold your breath and to stay calm because that's really the biggest problem. [laughs] I do rock climbing. I think that's enough. Like, that's -- WILL: [laughs] BRITTANY: That's pretty badass. VICTORIA: Yeah. [laughs] WILL: Yes. BRITTANY: That is a very cool sport. VICTORIA: Yeah. And, actually, you're mentioning how it was, like, you worked at a cowboy restaurant, and that was how you got your first connection to your job. And, like, I would go up to, like, my college climbing wall and be, like, I'm a rock climber; you should hire me. And [laughs] through that connection, I got my first referral to my first job in DC. And so, basically, my whole life revolves around it. [laughs] Nothing would happen without these little connections that you make. I'm curious, Will, if you had a pivot point like that you can tell us about. WILL: It was probably getting to tech because it was more of a hobby, and sometimes it's still a big hobby for me. So I will say either getting into tech or working out. So I try to work out with friends. So I used to play football. Everything was a group workout. So after football, it was very hard for me to work out because it was always a group workout. So after many, many years of finally realizing that, I try to work out in groups, with friends, and stuff like that. So that's probably the biggest thing for me is, like, working out in a group and having someone to hold me able. BRITTANY: I love that. That's one reason...so I used to be a fitness instructor. I should reveal that as well. I used to be a BODYPUMP instructor. And the reason for that is just, like, again, I thought people that were fitness instructors were just, like, celebrities and absolute badasses. And so, I used to only go to group fitness class as well because I needed that ability. And so, yeah, there's definitely days I wake up where I absolutely do not want to do anything. But having that ability, it's just really awesome, and really, it makes sure that you follow through. VICTORIA: That makes sense how you've practiced your voice and why your podcasting voice is so strong [laughter] because you're a fitness instructor. That's what is starting to add up for me. [laughter] BRITTANY: You know what? The biggest challenge of being a fitness instructor is that they would send me the routines, and I would have to memorize them. And being able to memorize like, oh, I'm going to squat on the fourth count. And I'm going to do a clean and press on the eighth count. Oh my God, is that an algorithm -- WILL: Yes. BRITTANY: You know, for a pro...and I was like, is there any way that I could somehow automate? Like, part of me wanted to game it. I'm like, how do I game this so I don't have to spend so much time trying to memorize it? I mean, it was truly, truly challenging. And it was probably, like, the best brain teaser that I could have been doing because you're essentially putting on a live performance while working out. And everyone needs to be able to follow you and feel encouraged by you. It was just...it was a wild time. WILL: [laughs] VICTORIA: That sounds very demanding. Well, coming up to the end of our time here, is there anything else you would like to promote today? BRITTANY: Ooh, no. We're currently not hiring at my job. Normally, that is something that I would promote. I would say if you are interested in checking out my podcast, it is The Ruby on Rails Podcast. We have plenty of things on there that are not Rails-specific. We've had conversations about, like, what's it like to get stock options at a company? What does the recruiting landscape currently look like? And then we also have, like, deep topics about, like, what's currently being merged into Ruby Core? So, really, we have a wide variety of topics. So, if you find my voice somewhat pleasant, come on over; we'd be happy to have you. And, of course, you can listen to Victoria's episode, that will be linked up in the show notes. But this was such a pleasure. It was great spending time with you both, Will and Victoria. WILL: Yeah, it was great. Loved chatting with you. VICTORIA: Yes, thank you so much for ing. This was super fun. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. WILL: If you have any questions or comments, email us at [email protected]. And you could find me on Twitter @will23larry. VICTORIA: And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Special Guest: Brittany Martin. Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Charity Majors is Co-Founder and CTO of Honeycomb, which provides full-stack observability that enables engineers to deeply understand and debug production software together. Victoria and Will talk to Charity about observability, her technical background and decision to start Honeycomb.io, thoughts about the whole ops SRE profession, and things that surprised her along her journey of building a company around observability as a concept. Honeycomb Follow Honeycomb on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, or LinkedIn. Follow Charity Majors on LinkedIn or Twitter, or visit her website. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. WILL: And I'm your other host, Will Larry. And with us today is Charity Majors, Co-Founder and CTO of Honeycomb, which provides full-stack observability that enables engineers to deeply understand and debug production software together. Charity, thank you for ing us. How are you doing? CHARITY: Thanks for having me. I'm a little bit crunchy from a [laughs] long flight this morning. But I'm very happy to be home in San Francisco and happy to be talking to you. VICTORIA: Wonderful. And, Charity, I looked at your profile and noticed that you're a fan of whiskey. And I thought I might ask you just to get us started here, like, what's your favorite brand? CHARITY: Oh, goodness, that's like asking me to choose my favorite child if I had children. [laughter]. You know, I used to really be into the peaty scotches, the Islays, in particular. But lately, I've been more of a bourbon kick. Of course, everybody loves Pappy Van Winkle, George T. Stagg; impossible to find now, but it's so, so good. You know, if it's high-proof and single barrel, I will probably drink it. VICTORIA: That sounds great. Yeah, I tend to have the same approach. And, like, people ask me if I like it, and I like all of them. [laughter] I don't [inaudible 01:21] that I didn't like. [laughs] CHARITY: [inaudible 01:23] tongue sting? Then I'm in. [laughs] VICTORIA: Yeah, [inaudible 01:26]. WILL: See, I'm the opposite. I want something smooth. I'm a fruity drink type of guy. I'm just going, to be honest. CHARITY: There's no shame in that. WILL: No shame here. [laughs] Give me a margarita, and you have a happy Will for life. [laughs] VICTORIA: We'll have to get you to come out and visit San Diego for some margaritas, Will. That's -- CHARITY: Oh yeah. VICTORIA: Yeah, it's the place to be. Yeah, we do more of a bourbon drink in our house, like bourbon soda. That's usually what we make, like, my own custom simple syrup, and mix it with a little bourbon and soda water. And that's what we do for a cool down at the end of the day sometimes, yeah. Well, awesome. Let's see. So, Charity, why don't you just tell me a little more about Honeycomb? What is it? CHARITY: Well, it's a startup that hasn't failed yet, so... [laughs] to my own shock. [laughs] We're still around seven and a half years in. And I say that just so much joking. Like, you're not really supposed to say this as a founder, but, like, I 100% thought we were going to fail from the beginning. But we haven't yet, and we just got more money. So we'll be around for a while. We kind of pioneered the whole concept of observability, which now doesn't really mean anything at all. Everybody and their mother is like, well, I do observability, too. But back when we started talking about it, it was kind of a little bit revolutionary, I guess in that, you know, we started talking about how important it is to have high cardinality data in your systems. You really can't debug without it. And the fact that our systems are getting just astronomically more complex, and yet, we're still trying to debug it with these tools based on, you know, the metric data type [laughs] defined since the '70s when space was incredibly rare and expensive. And now space is incredibly cheap, but we should be wasteful with it so we can understand our incredibly complex systems. So that's us. We really try to empower software engineers to own their own code in production. For a long time, it was like, all of the tools for you to understand your software were really written for low-level ops people because they speak the language of, like, RAM, and disks, and U, which you shouldn't have to understand that in order to be able to understand I just deployed something, what went wrong? WILL: I love the honesty because there are so many founders that I'll talk to, and I'm like, okay, you're very successful. But did you really expect this to be what it is today? Did you really expect to survive? Because, like, just some of their ideas, I'm like, it's brilliant, but if I was with you back in the day, I'd be like, it ain't going to work. It's not going to work. [laughs] CHARITY: Yeah. And I feel like the VC culture really encourages delusion, just, like, self-delusion, like, this delusive thinking. You're supposed to, like, broadcast just, like, rock-solid confidence in yourself and your ideas at all time. And I think that only sociopaths do that. [laughs] I don't want to work for anyone who's that confident in themselves or their idea. Because I'm showing my own stripes, I guess, you know, I'm a reliability engineer. I wake up in the morning; I'm like, what's wrong with the day? That's just how my brain works. But I feel like I would rather work with people who are constantly scanning the horizon and being like, okay, what's likely to kill us today? Instead of people who are just like, I am right. [laughs] You know? VICTORIA: Yeah. And I can relate that back to observability by thinking how, you know, you can have an idea about how your system is supposed to work, and then there's the way that it actually works. [laughs] CHARITY: Oh my God. VICTORIA: Right? CHARITY: Yes. It's so much that. VICTORIA: Maybe you can tell us just a little bit more about, like, what is observability? Or how would you explain that to someone who isn't necessarily in it every day? CHARITY: I would explain it; I mean, it depends on who your audience is, of course. But I would explain it like engineers spend all day in their IDEs. And they come to believe that that's what software is. But software is not lines of code. Software is those lines of code running in production with real s using it. That's when software becomes real. And, for too long, we've treated like that, like, an entirely different...well, it's written. [laughs] You know, for launch, I was like, well, it's ops' problem, as the meme says. But we haven't really gotten to a point yet where...I feel like when you're developing with observability; you should be instrumenting your code as you go with an eye towards your future self. How am I going to know if this is working or not? How am I going to know if this breaks? And when you deploy it, you should then go and look at your code in production and look at it through the lens of the telemetry that you just wrote and ask yourself, is it doing what I expected it to? Does anything else look weird? Because the cost of finding and fixing bugs goes up exponentially from the moment that you write them. It's like you type a bug; you backspace. Cool, good for you. That's the fastest you can fix it. The next fastest is if you find it when you're running tests. But tests are only ever going to find the things you could predict were going to fail or that have already failed. The first real opportunity that you have to see if your code really works or not is right after you've deployed it, but only if you've given yourself the telemetry to do so. Like, the idea of just merging your code, like walking out the door or merging your code and waiting to get paged or to get [laughs] escalated to this is madness. This should be such an artifact of the battle days when dev writes, and ops runs it. That doesn't work, right? Like, in the beginning, we had software engineers who wrote code and ran that code in production, and that's how things should be. You should be writing code and running code in production. And the reason I think we're starting to see that reality emerge again is because our systems have gotten so complicated. We kind of can't not because you can't really run your code as a black box anymore. You can't ignore what's on the inside. You have to be able to look at the code in order to be able to run it effectively. And conversely, I don't think you could develop good code unless you're constantly exposing yourself to the consequences of that code. It lets you know when it breaks, that whole loop that completely severed when we had dev versus ops. And we're slowly kind of knitting it together again. But, like, that's what's at the heart of that incredibly powerful loop. It's the heart of all software engineering is, instrumenting your code and looking at it and asking yourself, is it doing what I expected it to do? WILL: That's really neat. You said you're a reliability engineer. What's your background? Tell me more about it because you're the CTO of Honeycomb. So you have some technical background. What does that look like? CHARITY: Yeah, well, I was a music major and then a serial dropout. I've never graduated from anything, ever. And then, I worked at startups in Silicon Valley. Nothing you'd ever...well, I worked at Linden Lab for a few years and some other places. But honestly, the reason I started Honeycomb was because...so I worked at Parse. I was the infrastructure lead at Parse; rest in peace. It got acquired by Facebook. And when I was leaving Facebook, it was the only time in my life that I'd ever had a pedigree. Well, I've actually been an ops engineer my entire career. When I was leaving Facebook, I had VCs going, "Would you like some money to do something? Because you're coming from Facebook, so you must be smart." On the one hand, that was kind of offensive. And on the other hand, like, I kind of felt the obligation to just take the money and run, like, on behalf of all dropouts, of women, and queers everywhere. Just, you know, how often...am I ever going to get this chance again? No, I'm not. So, good. VICTORIA: Yes, I will accept your money. [laughs] CHARITY: Yeah, right? VICTORIA: I will take it. And I'm not surprised that you were a music major. I've met many, I would say, people who are active in social media about DevOps, and then it turns out they were a theater major, [laughs] or music, or something different. And they kind of naturally found their way. CHARITY: The whole ops SRE profession has historically been a real magnet for weirdo people, weird past, people who took very non-traditional. So it's always been about tinkering, just understanding systems. And there hasn't been this high bar for formal, you know, knowledge that you need just to get your first job. I feel like this is all changing. And it makes me kind of...I understand why it's changing, and it also makes me kind of sad. VICTORIA: So I think you have a quote about, you know, working on infrastructure teams that everything comes back to databases. CHARITY: [laughs] VICTORIA: I wonder if you could expand on that. CHARITY: I've been an accidental DBA my entire career. I just always seemed to be the one left holding the bag. [laughs] We were playing musical chairs. I just feel like, you know, as you're moving up the stack, you can get more and more reckless. As you move down the stack, the closer you get to, like, bits on disk, the more conservative you have to be, the more blast radius your mistakes could have. Like, shit changes all the time in JavaScript land. In database land, we're still doing CRUD operators, like, since Stonebreaker did it in the '70s. We're still doing very fundamental stuff. I love it, though, because, I don't know, it's such a capsule of computers at large, which is just that people have no idea how much shit breaks. [laughs] Stuff breaks all the time. And the beauty of it is that we keep going. It's not that things don't break. You have no idea how much stuff is broken in your stack right now. But we find ways to resolve it after the fact. I just think that data is so fascinating because it has so much gravity. I don't know, I could keep going, but I feel like you get the point. I just think it's really fun. I think danger is fun, I think. It might not surprise you to learn that I, too, was diagnosed with ADHD in the past couple of years. I feel like this is another strand that most DevOps, SRE types have in common, which is just [laughs] highly motivated in a good way by panic. [laughs] WILL: I love that you said you love danger because I feel like that is right in your wheelhouse. Like, you have to love danger to be in that field because it's predictable. You're the one that's coming in and putting out the fires when everyone sometimes they're running for the window. Like you said, like, you got caught holding the bag. So that's really neat. This is a big question for me, especially for being an engineer, a dev, do you find that product and design teams understand and see the value in SRE? CHARITY: Oooh. These types of cultural questions are always so difficult for me to gauge whether or not my sample is representative of the larger population. Because, in my experience, you know, ops teams typically rule the roost, like, they get final say over everything. But I know that that's not typically true. Like, throughout the industry, like, ops teams kind of have a history of being kind of kicked around. I think that they do see the value because everybody can see when it breaks. But I think that they mostly see the value when it breaks. I think that it takes a rare, farsighted product team to be able to consent to giving, like, investments all along in the kinds of improvements that will pay off later on instead of just pouring all of the resources into fast fixes and features and feature, feature, feature. And then, of course, you know, you slowly grind to a halt as a team because you're just amassing surface area. You're not paying down your tech debt. And I think it's not always clear to product and design leaders how to make those investments in a way that actually benefits them instead of it just being a cost center. You know, it's just something that's always a break on them instead of actually enabling them to move faster. WILL: Yeah, yeah. And I can definitely see that being an engineer dev. I'm going to change it a little bit. And I'm going to ask, Victoria, since you're the managing director of that team, how do you feel about that question? Do you feel that's the same thing, or what's your observation of that? VICTORIA: I think Charity is, like, spot on because it does depend on the type of organization that you're working in, the hierarchy, and who gets priority over budget and things like that. And so the interesting thought for me coming from federal IT organizations into more commercial and startup organizations is that there is a little bit of a disconnect. And we started to ask our designers and developers like, "Well, have you thought much about, like, what happens when this fails?" [laughs] And especially -- CHARITY: Great question. VICTORIA: Yeah, like, when you're dealing with, like, healthcare startups or with bank startups and really thinking through all the ways it could go wrong. Is it a new pathway? Which I think is exciting for a lot of people. And I'm curious, too, Charity, like with Honeycomb, was there things that surprised you in your journey of discovery about, you know, building a company about observability and what people wanted out of this space? CHARITY: Oh my goodness. [laughs] Was anything not a surprise? I mean, [laughs] yeah, absolutely. You're a director of what team? VICTORIA: I'm a managing director of our Mission Control team. CHARITY: Oooh. VICTORIA: Which is our platform engineering, and DevOps, and SRE team. CHARITY: Now, does your platform engineering team have product managers? VICTORIA: I think it might be me. [laughs] CHARITY: Aha. VICTORIA: It might be me. And we have a team lead, and our CTO is actually our acting development director. So he's really leading the development of that project platform. CHARITY: When I was in New York the last couple of days, I just gave a talk at KubeCon about the Perils, Pitfalls, and Pratfalls of Platform Engineering, just talking about all of the ways that platform teams accidentally steer themselves into the ditch. One of the biggest mistakes that people make in that situation is not running the platform team like a product team, you know, having a sort of, like, if we build it, they will come sort of a mentality towards the platform that they're building internally for their engineers, and not doing the things like, you know, discovery or finding out like, am I really building, you know, the most important thing, you know, that people need right now? And it's like, I didn't learn those skills as an engineer. Like, in the infrastructure land, we didn't learn how to work with product people. We didn't learn how to work with designers. And I feel like the biggest piece of career advice that I give, you know, people like me now, is learn how to work with product and like a product org. I'm curious, like, what you're observing in your realm when it comes to this stuff. Like, how much like a product org do you work? VICTORIA: Oh, I agree 100%. So I've actually been interested in applying our platform project to the thoughtbot Incubator Program. [laughs] CHARITY: Mmm. VICTORIA: So they have this method for doing market strategy, and interviews, and all of that...exactly what you're saying, like, run it like a product. So I want them to help me with it. [laughs] CHARITY: Nice. VICTORIA: Yes, because I am also a managing director, and so we're managing a team and building business. And we also have this product or this open-source project, really. It's not...we don't necessarily want to be prescriptive with how we, as thoughtbot, tell people how to build their platforms. So with every client, we do a deep dive to see how is their dev team actually working? What are the pain points? What are the things we can do based on, like, you know, this collection of tools and knowledge that we have on what's worked for past clients that makes the most sense for them? So, in that way, I think it is very customer-focused [laughs], right? And that's the motto we want to keep with. And I have been on other project teams where we just try to reproduce what worked for one client and to make that a product. And it doesn't always work [laughs] because of what you're saying. Like, you have to really...and especially, I think that just the diversity of the systems that we are building and have been built is kind of, like, breathtaking [laughs], you know. CHARITY: Yeah. [chuckles] VICTORIA: I'm sure you have some familiarity with that. CHARITY: [laughs] VICTORIA: But what did you really find in the market that worked for you right away, like, was, like, the problem that you were able to solve and start building within your business? CHARITY: We did everything all wrong. So I had had this experience at Facebook, which, you know, at Parse, you know, we had all these reliability issues because of the architecture. What we were building was just fundamentally...as soon as any customer got big, like, they would take up all the resources in this shared, you know, tenancy thing, and the whole platform would go down. And it was so frustrating. And we were working on a rewrite and everything. Like, it was professionally humiliating for me as a reliability engineer to have a platform this bad at reliability. And part of the issue was that you know, we had a million mobile apps, and it was a different app every time, different application...the iTunes Store, like, top five or something. And so the previous generation of tools and strategies like building dashboards and doing retros and being like, well, I'll make a dashboard so that I can find this problem next time immediately, like, just went out the window. Like, none of them would work because they were always about the last battle. And it was always something new. And at one point, we started getting some datasets into this tool at Facebook called Scuba. It was butt ugly. Like, it was aggressively hostile to s. But it let us do one thing really well, which was slice and dice high cardinality dimensions in near real-time. And having the ability to do that to, like, break down by ID, which is not possible with, you know, I don't know how familiar -- I'll briefly describe high cardinality. So imagine you have a collection of 100 million s. And the highest possible cardinality would be a unique ID because, you know, social security number, very high cardinality. And something much lower cardinality would be like inches of height. And all of metrics and dashboards are oriented around low cardinality dimensions. If you have more than a couple hundred hosts, you can no longer tag your metrics with a host ID. It just falls apart. So being able to break down by, like, you know, one of a million app IDs. It took...the amount of time it took for us to identify and find these brand-new problems, it dropped like a rock, like, from hours of opening it. We never even solved a lot of the problems that we saw. We just recovered. We moved on [laughs] with our day, dropped from that to, like, seconds or minutes. Like, it wasn't even an engineering problem anymore. It was like a problem, you know, you just go click, click, click, click, click, oh, there it is. Just follow the trail of breadcrumbs. That made such an impression on me. And when I was leaving, I was just like, I can't go back to not having something like this. I was so much less powerful as an engineer. It's just, like, it's unthinkable. So when we started Honeycomb, we were just, like, we went hands down, and we started building. We didn't want to write a database. We had to write a database because there was nothing out there that could do this. And we spent the first year or two not even really talking to customers. When we did talk to customers, I would tell our engineers to ignore their [laughs] because they were all telling us they wanted better metrics. And we're like, no, we're not doing metrics. The first thing that we found we could kind of connect to real problems that people were looking for was that it was high cardinality. There were a few, not many; there were a few engineers out there Googling for high cardinality metrics. And those engineers found us and became our earliest customers because we were able to do breathtaking...from their perspective, they were like, we've been told this is impossible. We've been told that this can't be done. Things like Intercom was able to start tagging other requests with, like, app ID and customer ID. And immediately started noticing things like, oh, this database that we were just about to have to, like, spend six months sharding and extending, oh, it turns out 80% of the queries in flight to this database are all coming from one customer who is paying us $200 a month, so maybe we shouldn't [laughs] do that engineering labor. Maybe we should just, you know, throttle this guy who is only paying us 200 bucks a month. Or just all these things you can't actually see until you can use this very, very special tool. And then once you can see that... So, like, our first customers became rabid fans and vouched for us to investors, and this still blows people's minds to this day. It's an incredibly difficult thing to explain and describe to people, but once they see it on their own data, it clicks because everybody's run into this problem before, and it's really frustrating. VICTORIA: Yeah, that's super interesting and a great example to illustrate that point of just, like, not really knowing what's going on in your system. And, you know, you mentioned just, like, certainly at scale, that's when you really, really need to have [laughs] data and insight into your systems. CHARITY: Yeah. VICTORIA: But one question I get a lot is, like, at what scale do you actually need to start worrying about SRE? [laughs] Which -- CHARITY: SRE? VICTORIA: Yeah, I'll let you answer that. Yeah, site reliability or even things like...like, everything under that umbrella like observability, like, you know, putting in monitoring and tracing and all this stuff. Sometimes people are just like, well, when do I actually have to care? [laughs] CHARITY: I recognize this is, you know, coming from somebody who does this for a living, so, like, people can write it off all they want. But, like, the idea of developing without observability is just sad to me, like, from day one. This is not a tax. It's not something that slows you down or makes your lives worse. It's something that makes your lives better from day one. It helps you move more quickly, with more confidence. It helps you not make as many mistakes. It helps you... Like, most people are used to interacting with their systems, which are just like flaming hairballs under their bed. Nobody has ever understood these systems. They certainly don't understand them. And every day, they ship more code that they don't understand, create systems that they've never understood. And then an alarm goes off, and everybody just, like, braces for impact because they don't understand them. This is not the inevitable end state of computing. It doesn't have to be like this. You can have systems that are well-understood, that are tractable, that you could...it's just...it's so sad to me that people are like, oh God, when do I have to add telemetry? And I'm just like, how do you write software without telemetry? How do you have any confidence that the work you're doing is what you thought you were doing? You know, I just... And, of course, if you're waiting to tack it on later, of course, it's not going to be as useful because you're trying to add telemetry for stuff you were writing weeks, or months, or years ago. The time to add it is while you're writing it. No one is ever going to understand your software as well as you do the moment that you're writing it. That's when you know your original intent. You know what you're trying to do. You know why you're trying to do it. You know what you tried that didn't work. You know, ultimately, what the most valuable pieces of data are. Why wouldn't you leave little breadcrumbs for yourself so that future you can find them? You know, it's like...I just feel like this entire mental shift it can become just as much of a habit as like commenting your code or adding, you know, commenting in your pull request, you know. It becomes second nature, and reaching for it becomes second nature. You should have in your body a feeling of I'm not done until you've looked at your telemetry in production. That's the first moment that you can tell yourself, ah, yes, it probably does what I think it does, right? So, like, this question it makes me sad. It gets me a little worked up because I feel like it's such a symptom of people who I know what their jobs are like based on that question, and it's not as good as it could be. Their jobs are much sadder and more confusing than it could be if they had a slightly different approach to telemetry. That's the observability bit. But about SRE, very few ops engineers start companies, it seems, when I did, you know, I was one of three founding . And the first thing I did was, of course, spin up an infrastructure and set up CI/CD and all this stuff. And I'm, like, feeling less useful than the others but, you know, doing my part. But that stuff that I spun up, we didn't have to hire an SRE for years, and when we did, it was pretty optional. And this is a system, you know, things trickle down, right? Doing things right from the beginning and having them be clear and well-understood, and efficient, we were able to do so much with so few people. You know, we were landing, you know, hundreds of thousand-dollar deals with people who thought we had hundreds of employees. We had 12 engineers for the first almost five years, just 12 engineers. But, like, almost all of the energy that they put into the world went into moving the business forward, not fighting with the system, or thrashing the system, or trying to figure out bugs, or trying to track down things that were just, like, impossible to figure out. We waste so much time as engineers by trying to add this stuff in later. So the actual answer to your question is, like, if you aren't lucky enough to have an ops co-founder, is as soon as you have real s. You know, I've made a career out of basically being the first engineer to from infrastructure when the software engineers are starting to have real customers. Like, at Parse, they brought me in when they were about to do their alpha release. And they're like, whoa, okay, I guess we better have someone who knows how to run things. And I came in, and I spent the next, you know, year or so just cleaning up shit that they had done, which wasn't terrible. But, you know, they just didn't really know what they were doing. So I kind of had to undo everything, redo it. And just the earlier, the better, right? It will pay off. Now, that said, there is a real risk of over-engineering early. Companies they don't fail because they innovated too quickly; let's put it that way. They fail because they couldn't focus. They couldn't connect with their customers. They couldn't do all these things. And so you really do want to do just enough to get you to the next place so that you can put most of your effort into making product for your customers. But yeah, it's so much easier to set yourself up with auto-deployment so that every CI/CD run automatically deploys your code to production and just maintain as you grow. That is so easy compared to trying to take, you know, a long, slow, you know, leaky deploy process and turn it into one that could auto-deploy safely after every commit. So yeah, do it early. And then maintain is the easiest way in the world to do this stuff. Mid-Roll Ad: As life moves online, bricks-and-mortar businesses are having to adapt to survive. With over 18 years of experience building reliable web products and services, thoughtbot is the technology partner you can trust. We provide the technical expertise to enable your business to adapt and thrive in a changing environment. We start by understanding what’s important to your customers to help you transition to intuitive digital services your customers will trust. We take the time to understand what makes your business great and work fast yet thoroughly to build, test, and validate ideas, helping you discover new customers. Take your business online with design‑driven digital acceleration. Find out more at tbot.io/acceleration or click the link in the show notes for this episode. WILL: Correct me if I'm wrong, I think you said Facebook and mobile. Do you have, not experience with mobile but do you...does Honeycomb do anything in the mobile space? Because I feel like that portion is probably the most complicated for mobile, like, dealing with iOS and Android and everything that they're asking for. So... CHARITY: We don't have mobile stuff at Honeycomb. Parse was a mobile Backend as a Service. So I went straight from doing all mobile all the time to doing no mobile at all. I also went from doing databases all the time to doing, you know...it's good career advice typically to find a niche and then stay in it, and I have not followed that advice. [laughter] I've just jumped from...as soon as I'm good at something, I start doing something else. WILL: Let me ask you this, how come you don't see more mobile SRE or help in that area? CHARITY: I think that you see lots of SREs for mobile apps, but they're on the back-end side. They're on the server side. So it's just not as visible. But even if you've got, like, a stack that's entirely serverless, you still need SRE. But I think that the model is really shifting. You know, it used to be you hired an SRE team or an ops team to carry the pager for you and to take the alerts and to, like, buffer everything, and nowadays, that's not the expectation. That's not what good companies do. You know, they set up systems for their software engineers to own their code in production. But they need help because they're not experts in this, and that's where SRE types come in. Is that your experience? WILL: Yeah, for the most part. Yeah, that is. CHARITY: Yeah, I think that's very healthy. VICTORIA: And I agree with that as well. And I'm going to take that clip of your reaction to that question about when you should start doing [laughter] observability and just play for everybody whenever someone asks [laughs] me that. I'm like, here's the answer. That's great. CHARITY: I think a good metaphor for that is like, if you're buying a house and taking out a loan, the more of a down payment you can put down upfront, the lower that your monthly payments are going to be for the rest of your...you amortize that out over the next 20-30 years. The more you can do that, the better your life is going to be because interest rates are a bitch. VICTORIA: It makes sense. And yeah, like, to your point earlier about when people actually do start to care about it is usually after something has broken in a traumatic way that can be really bad for your clients and, like, your legal [laughter] stance -- CHARITY: That's true. VICTORIA: As a company. CHARITY: Facing stuff, yeah, is where people usually start to think about it. But, like, the less visible part, and I think almost the more important part is what it does to your velocity and your ability to execute internally. When you have a good, clean system that is well-tended that, you know, where the amount of time between when you're writing the code and when the code is in production, and you're looking at...when that is short and tight, like, no more than a couple of hours, like, it's a different job than if it takes you, like, days or weeks to deploy. Your changes get bashed up with other people's. And, you know, like, you enter, like, the software development death spiral where, you know, it takes a while. So your diffs get even bigger, so code review takes even longer, so it takes even longer. And then your changes are all getting bashed up. And, you know, now you need a team to run deploys and releases. And now you need an SRE team to do the firefighting. And, like, your systems are...the bigger it gets, the more complicated it gets, the more you're spending time just waiting on each other or switching contexts. You ever, like, see an app and been like, oh, that's a cool app? I wonder...they have 800 engineers at that company. And you're just like, what the hell are they all doing? Like, seriously, how does it take that many engineers to build this ittedly nice little product? I guarantee you it's because their internal hygiene is just terrible. It takes them too long to deploy things. They've forgotten what they've written by the time it's out, so nobody ever goes and looks at it. So it's just like, it's becoming a hairball under your bed. Nobody's looking at it. It's becoming more and more mysterious to you. Like, I have a rule of thumb which there's no mathematical science behind this, just experience. But it's a rule of thumb that says that if it takes you, you know, on the order of, say, a couple of hours tops to deploy your software, if it takes you that many engineers to build and own that product, well, if your deploys take on the order of days instead of hours, it will take you twice as many people [chuckles] to build and that product. And if it takes you weeks to deploy that product, it will take you twice as many again; if anything, that is an underestimate because it actually goes up exponentially, not linearly. But, like, we are so wasteful when it comes to people's time. It is so much easier for managers to go, uh, we're overloaded. Let's hire more people. For some reason, you can always get headcount when you can't actually get the discipline to say no to things or the people to work on internal tools to, like, shrink that gap between when you've written it and when it's live. And just the waste, it just spirals out of control, man, and it's not good. And, you know, it should be such a fun, creative, fulfilling job where you spend your day solving puzzles for money and moving the business materially forward every day. And instead, how much of our time do we just sit here, like, twiddling our thumbs and waiting for the build to finish or waiting for code review [laughs] to get turned around? Or, you know, swapping projects and, like, trying to page all that context in your brain? Like, it's absurd, and this is not that hard of a problem to fix. VICTORIA: Engineering should be fun, and it should be dangerous. That's what [laughs] I'm getting out of this -- CHARITY: It should be fun, and it should be dangerous. I love that. VICTORIA: Fun and dangerous. I like it. [laughs] And speaking of danger, I mean, maybe it's not dangerous, but what does success really look like for you at Honeycomb in the next six months or even in the next five years? CHARITY: I find it much more easier to answer what failure would look like. VICTORIA: You can answer that too if you like. [laughs] CHARITY: [laughs] What would success look like? I mean, obviously, I have no desire to ever go through another acquisition, and I don't want to go out of business. So it'd be nice not to do either of those things, which means since we've taken VC money, IPO would be nice eventually. But, like, ultimately, like, what motivates Christine and me and our entire company really is just, you know, we're engineers. We've felt this pain. We have seen that the world can be better. [laughs] We really just want to help, you know, move engineering into the current decade. I feel like there are so many teams out there who hear me talk about this stuff. And they listen wistfully, and they're like, yeah, and they roll their eyes. They're like, yeah, you work in Silicon Valley, or yeah, but you work at a startup, or yeah...they have all these reasons why they don't get nice things. We're just not good enough engineers is the one that breaks my heart the most because it's not true. Like, it has nothing to do...it has almost nothing to do with how good of an engineer you are. You have to be so much better of an engineer to deal with a giant hairball than with software that gets deployed, you know, within the hour that you can just go look at and see if it's working or not. I want this to go mainstream. I want people...I want engineers to just have a better time at work. And I want people to succeed at what they're doing. And just...the more we can bring that kind of change to more and more people, the more successful I will feel. VICTORIA: I really like that. And I think it's great. And it also makes me think I find that people who work in the DevOps space have a certain type of mentality sometimes, [laughs] like, it's about the greater community and, like, just making being at work better. And I also think it maybe makes you more willing to it your failures [laughs] like you were earlier, right? CHARITY: Probably. VICTORIA: That's part of the culture. It's like, well, we messed up. [laughs] We broke stuff, and we're going to learn from it. CHARITY: It's healthy. I'm trying to institute a rule where at all hands when we're doing different organizations giving an update every two weeks, where we talk two-thirds about our successes and things that worked great and one-third about things that just didn't work. Like, I think we could all stand to talk about our failures a lot more. VICTORIA: Yeah, makes it a lot less scary, I think [laughs], right? CHARITY: Yeah, yeah. It democratizes the feeling, and it genuinely...it makes me happy. It's like, that didn't work, great. Now we know not to do it. Of the infinite number of things that we could try, now we know something for real. I think it's exciting. And, I don't know, I think it's funny when things fail. And I think that if we can just laugh about it together... You know, in every engineering org that I've ever worked at, out of all the teams, the ops types teams have always been the ones that are the most tightly bonded. They have this real, like, Band of Brothers type of sentiment. And I think it's because, you know, we've historically endured most of the pain. [laughs] But, like, that sense of, like, it's us against the system, that there is hilarity in failure. And, at the end of the day, we're all just monkeys, like, poking at electrical sockets is, I think...I think it's healthy. [laughs] WILL: That's really neat. I love it. This is one of my favorite questions. What advice would you give yourself if you could go back in time? CHARITY: I don't know. I think I'd just give myself a thumbs up and go; it's going to be all right. I don't know; I wouldn't... I don't think that I would try to alter the time continuum [laughs] in any way. But I had a lot of anxiety when I was younger about going to hell and all this stuff. And so I think...but anything I said to my future self, I wouldn't have believed anyway. So yeah, I respectfully decline the offer. VICTORIA: That's fair. I mean, I think about that a lot too actually, like, I sometimes think like, well, if I could go back to myself a year ago and just -- CHARITY: Yeah. I would look at me like I was stupid. [laughter] VICTORIA: That makes sense. It reminds me a little bit about what you said, though, like, doing SRE and everything upfront or the observability pieces and building it correctly in a way you can deploy fastly is like a gift to your future self. [laughs] CHARITY: Yes, it is, with a bow. Yes, exactly. VICTORIA: There you go. Well, all right. I think we are about ready to wrap up. Is there anything you would like to promote specifically? CHARITY: We just launched this really cool little thing at Honeycomb. And you won't often hear me say the words cool and AI in proximity to each other, but we just launched this really dope little thing. It's a tool for using natural language to ask questions of your telemetry. So, if you just deployed something and you want to know, like, what's slow or did anything change, you can just ask it using English, and it does a ChatGPT thing and generates the right graphs for you. It's pretty sweet. VICTORIA: That's really cool. So, if you have Honeycomb set up and working in your system and then you can just ask the little chatbot, "Hey, what's going on here?" CHARITY: Yeah. What's the slowest endpoint? And it'll just tell you, which is great because I feel like I do not think graphically at all. My brain just really doesn't. So I have never been the person who's, like, creating dashboards or graphs. My friend Ben Hartshorne works with me, and he'll make the dashboards. And then I get up in the morning, and I bookmark them. And so we're sort of symbiotic. But everyone can tweak a query, right? Once you have something that you know is, like, within spitting distance as the data you want, anyone can tweak it, but composing is really hard. So I feel like this really helps you get over that initial hurdle of, like, er, what do I break down by? What do I group by? What are the field names? You just ask it the question, and then you've got to click, click, click, and, like, get exactly what you want out of it. I think it's, like, a game changer. VICTORIA: That sounds extremely cool. And we will certainly link to it in our show notes today. Thank you so much for being with us and spending the time, Charity. CHARITY: Yeah, this was really fun. VICTORIA: You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at [email protected]. And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. WILL: And you could find me on Twitter @will23larry. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Special Guest: Charity Majors. Sponsored By: thoughtbot: As life moves online, bricks-and-mortar businesses are having to adapt to survive. With over 18 years of experience building reliable web products and services, thoughtbot is the technology partner you can trust. We provide the technical expertise to enable your business to adapt and thrive in a changing environment. We start by understanding what’s important to your customers to help you transition to intuitive digital services your customers will trust. We take the time to understand what makes your business great and work fast yet thoroughly to build, test, and validate ideas, helping you discover new customers. Take your business online with design‑driven digital acceleration. Find out more at: url tbot.io/acceleration or click the link in the show notes for this episode. Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Irinia Nazarova is CEO of Evil Martians, a product development consultancy that works with startups and established businesses while creating open-source products and services. Victoria talks to Irinia about getting a sense of what people are interested in learning about or what kind of problems they have, how consulting and product development complement each other, and of course, the question on everyone's minds: Is Evil Martians really evil? 😈 Evil Martians Follow Evil Martians on GitHub, Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn. Follow Irinia Nazarova on LinkedIn, or Twitter. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. And with us today is Irina Nazarova, CEO at Evil Martians, a product development consultancy that works with startups and established businesses while also creating open-source-based products and services. Irina, thanks for ing us. IRINA: Hey, thank you for having me. VICTORIA: You're welcome. Tell me a little bit about what's going on in your world this week. IRINA: So I just returned from Rails SaaS in Athens, which was pretty incredible. It's a smaller conference, but it has amazing vibes, amazing people. And, like, I just loved it there in Athens. VICTORIA: Mmm. IRINA: And, yeah, I wonder how your experience was? Because I know you also went to Japan, right? VICTORIA: Yeah, I went to RubyKaigi in Matsumoto last month. It was a good community, and to get to travel to a cool place was really fun. So I feel really lucky that I was able to get to go. Did you eat a lot of Greek food while you were there? IRINA: Not that much. I was a speaker. So I was a bit nervous, and I skipped some meals. [chuckles] VICTORIA: Oh no. [laughs] IRINA: Just to prepare. But we did have a super nice dinner with Xavier Noria, and, well, we had some Greek wine. All right, we did that. VICTORIA: That sounds fabulous. And, you know, I was going to ask you...one of my questions was about the conferences you've been attending because we met at RailsConf in Atlanta. And I saw you went to Rails SaaS and maybe some other ones recently. So, how has that been for you overall? IRINA: It's amazing. I think, like, all the conferences are suddenly back. And the energy is different than maybe pre-COVID. I didn't really attend many conferences pre-COVID, but I did attend some. Now people are so eager to sort of reconnect. And me, I think, I feel like I'm only starting to make those connections. And it's so emotional to meet people that I only see on Twitter, but meeting them in person is magical for some reason. So this is what's happening. Like, to me, I'm just amazed by all this energy and coming from the community towards many people, like, towards each other. VICTORIA: I also feel amazed when I meet someone I've followed on Twitter for a long time but in real life [laughs]. I'm like, wow. That was Aaron Patterson for me. I was like, oh, this is someone I followed on Twitter a long time ago because I thought they were funny. And now they're a speaker at this conference I'm at [laughs], which is really nice. And do the conferences help you connect more to potential clients? Or what's, like, the business reason for attending all of these events? IRINA: Good question. So I'm not expecting any, you know, direct sales to happen at the conferences. But, for example, I get to understand the clients, maybe better, the potential clients. And I get to connect with the existing clients, again, on a different level. So, if you have a client at the conference and you have a chance to see them in person, which we never do, and you as well, right? thoughtbot, you guys are not meeting the clients, like, the same thing. But if you get to meet even, like, some people from the client team, it's amazing. You can have a different type of connection. And I met an engineer from our past client at RailsConf, and it was something incredible. I didn't expect him to react like the way he did. You know, the moment he realized that I am from Evil Martians, like, his facial expressions just immediately transformed into a big smile. And he said such warm words about the things we did, something like two or three years ago. I mean, you don't have anything better than that in this industry, right? There's nothing better than this sincere, you know, gratitude from a client. [chuckles] It's just amazing. VICTORIA: I can relate to that, being from thoughtbot and attending Rails and RubyConfs. It is a nice feeling that people know the company or they know some open-source projects or some training materials we put out. And they're so grateful. [laughs] And I've only been at thoughtbot for a year. So, for me, I'm like, you're welcome. [laughs] I haven't done those things, but I will. And I will build on, you know, I think it also helps you kind of get a sense for what people are interested in learning about or what kind of problems they have. So, tell me more about that with Evil Martians. What is it all about? IRINA: I think we share this feeling where we want to give back. You and me we both felt something where people were grateful for something the companies did. But now I feel I need to give back somehow, and maybe I'm sure you feel the same. And you're doing this podcast, which is important for the community and other things. You're open-sourcing the tooling. So both of our companies are actually sharing a lot of, like, philosophies, attitude, where it's great to be in the community that we're in. So we also do something where we have some products like AnyCable. And it's interesting to talk to people using those products because we do have a much larger number of s of our products, you know, compared to our consulting clients, that's for sure. So the chances of meeting the s of AnyCable or, like, other products are pretty high at the conference, at Rails Conference. VICTORIA: Right. So I find it similar that you have the consultancy side and you have the product development side. Take it a little bit further back to just where it all started with Evil Martians. Are you really evil? It's [laughs] [inaudible 05:47] question. IRINA: Absolutely. We are. I mean, and we come from Mars. VICTORIA: [laughs] IRINA: Yeah, that's also true. It's a nice planet. We just make you think that it's a bad planet. VICTORIA: Yeah, to keep you away. You don't want too many tourists. IRINA: Yeah. VICTORIA: Mm-hmm, that makes sense. [laughs] But I understand you all started as a consultancy from back-end engineers. And then, it grew into what it is today and having several side projects. So, how does the consultancy side and the product development side complement each other? IRINA: Yeah, so the way it works, it's like a cycle of things where we work for startups like thoughtbot. And then, we work with 20 to 30 product engineering teams every year. And we notice which tools could be helpful for those teams and maybe would be helpful for us in those teams. So we're trying to enhance, improve our own productivity and the productivity of our clients. And that's how, I think, many of our open-source projects started. Some of the open-source projects, I think, started, you know, for fun, for some other reasons. But many of them actually were useful in the client projects. So then we are ionate about this. So, for example, we have PostCSS. PostCSS was built by our Head of Front End, Andrey Sitnik. And it has something, like, 30,000, you know, GitHub Stars. And Autoprefixer, which is a PostCSS plugin, has, like, 20,000 GitHub Stars. So they are huge. I mean, it's not just about the stars; half of the internet is actually using PostCSS. But PostCSS is popular, but we didn't turn it into a product. We are not commercializing it at all. But some of the other tools, let's call them tools, that we open-sourced, we could then envision how we could commercialize them. And the way it works is there are actually several strategies. For imgproxy, for example, we sell a paid version. But for AnyCable, which is another tool, we also sell a pro version. But we also earn consulting kind of get consulting clients come in for product development related to AnyCable, let's say. This is how AnyCable also helps us get consulting clients in a major way. And then we ended up building a lot of tools for engineers. And then because we work with this type of tools, now we also have many developer tools clients. So we started specializing on developer tools. It's about half of the sort of revenue. And now it's getting even more interesting; I think, because we don't just build tools for engineers, you know, ourselves as side projects, like I said. But also, our consultant work is essentially the same thing. It's often commercial open source like Teleport, or HTTPie, tools for engineers. This is exciting, I think, because now we can use this, you know, sort of connection with a type of audience, with a type of customer base, like the engineers, and we can leverage this experience in our consulting work, which is even better. And then we do open source with the products. They help us get consultant revenue, and then the experience on those projects helps us improve our products, and get product ideas, and get the first s for those products, et cetera. So it's like consulting helps product development, in our case. VICTORIA: So, to play that back a little bit, it's almost like a cycle where they feed into each other where your engineers as they're working are also kind of, like, the customers who would be using the developer tools that you want to build. So you have some market research there. And then, you know, it all feeds back into each other so that the customers who are using your products are also likely to need your consultant services. [laughs] So that's a nice flow. I wonder if there's anything surprising that came out during that kind of discovery process for product, for developer tools when you were first starting out, anything that you thought this is a tool maybe we think people are going to use. But then what was the reality, or [chuckles] what surprising things happened? IRINA: A lot of things. But I think the main one that is sort of important is that there's a difference between open source and product a product. And the differences...okay, the way I'm trying to explain it is, like, between...it's, like, the difference between you and your friend from another industry. Let's say you have a friend who is a microbiologist or something. And they are smart, right? They are smart in their own field. But if you give them your open source and ask them to take a look and you expect them to learn about it, to want to learn about it, they won't do it. They might use your product based on your open source, though, if it is easy if they know how to benefit from the product. So what I'm trying to say is, turning open source into a product is like essentially building a new product, a new thing where the customer base is different because you want it to be wider. But you don't want them to learn about your open source and to be ionate about your technology. You want them to be ionate about the value they want to get, you know, about something they're building. So it's a shift in mentality that you got to make to make it work. And pretty often, the people that collaborate with us in the open source are, you know, super different from the people who become our s. And s are great, but, you know, they don't want to learn too much about the internals and how it's supposed to work. They just want to click a button, and pay some money, and get the result, get the value from this. And, I don't know, it sounds simple. But it's actually a major shift in thinking about your product for you as an author of a tool, of a technology, of something. VICTORIA: That's a really interesting distinction to make. So, when you're building open-source projects, you want to really invite people in and get people excited about how the whole tool works and how they can use it in their projects. And then, on the product side, you're wanting to make it super easy [chuckles] for people and make sure they're focusing on the value of what they're getting out of this product instead of having to, like, understand all the little details. Is that right? IRINA: Yeah, exactly, exactly. VICTORIA: That makes sense. And is there any product in particular that you're really excited about or you see a lot of growth in with Evil Martians? IRINA: Yeah, I will talk about AnyCable. I will say AnyCable because I am personally involved in its development. So we did it with Vladimir Dementyev, the author. And the exciting part about AnyCable is the types of products and the types of functionality that can be built using AnyCable. So these are all kind of collaboration features, collaboration tools. The simplest are just the chats within your Rails application. And we have a lot of medical and healthcare applications that want to keep the data, the chat, you know, data on their own servers without sending them to some SaaSs. That's why they use AnyCable. But also, we have other tools that use AnyCable to build collaboration. And we've helped some clients build this at Evil Martians using AnyCable, leveraging AnyCable. But it's exciting when, like, other companies do it themselves sort of without us just by using the product. So I don't like it when I don't have the collaboration within a tool that you're using with someone else together. So I we were using something like a tool to create a service, and me and Vladimir we're using it simultaneously, you know, rewriting our edits all the time. And it was so frustrating because they didn't collaboration in this tool. So the thing you do when you don't the collaboration is just that every , every player, is just rewriting what the other player did without saving. So it's, like, so frustrating, yeah. So I like it that our product is helping people fix this problem. VICTORIA: Right. And to kind of summarize a little bit about what AnyCable does, is that it allows you to build Ruby on Rails apps and use any WebSocket server in any language as a replacement for the Ruby server. Is that accurate? IRINA: Not exactly. So AnyCable is a server that stands next to your Ruby on Rails app and handles all the WebSockets. It's written in Go. It's super fast, super efficient, and scales efficiently. That's the most important part. Because you don't have to scale your entire Ruby on Rails app, your, you know, entire logic just to the real-time load. So you only scale this small, efficient app, and it handles all the load and super quickly. And it also s HTML over WebSockets updates, I mean, Hotwire and stuff. So it helps you scale your Hotwire updates as well. So it's much faster than Ruby. It's much more efficient in of scaling. And, yeah, it's bidirectional, meaning that the server sends...by the way, it's just a drop-in replacement for ActionCable. So we're using ActionCable protocol. So we have the channels and stuff. So this means that we can send data, you know, from server broadcasts, the data from server, but we can also send the data from any client. And one of the use cases for Any Cable, by the way, is different devices that send their coordinates or some other data in real-time. Like, we have some kind of cars sending us GPS data. It's cute, I think that you keep your business logic in your Ruby and Rails app, which is the place to write your business logic, which is the best place to write it. But the infrastructure and all the sort of delivery guarantees, order guarantees, all this kind of infrastructure layer is serviced, is handled by AnyCable, so you don't have to worry about it. VICTORIA: That makes sense. Thank you for expanding on that. The interesting part for you on that is just to have this be able to be more collaborative, right? So we're working on this whole project together and not siloing into our different groups and building bespoke products to solve this problem. IRINA: Yeah, I mean, I like collaborative UI as a norm, as something that has to be there. So, for any work-related tools...and we do work remotely now over the internet somehow. So I think any tool for any professionals has to have a collaborative regime, right? for collaboration because people want to work together. And that's the only way to work, I think. VICTORIA: Yeah, that makes sense to me. MID-ROLL AD: Are your engineers spending too much time on DevOps and maintenance issues when you need them on new features? We know maintaining your own servers can be costly and that it’s easy for spending creep to sneak in when your team isn’t looking. By delegating server management, maintenance, and security to thoughtbot and our network of service partners, you can get 24x7 from our team of experts, all for less than the cost of one in-house engineer. Save time and money with our DevOps and Maintenance service. Find out more at: tbot.io/devops. VICTORIA: Was there anything that's happened in the last few years maybe, or even that's come up in that discovery process as you're building these products that made you shift your strategic direction for Evil Martians? IRINA: Yeah. I was initially looking for the right strategy regarding the products at Evil Martians. And what I mean is we were always ionate about building our own products, building our own products for engineers. We were always ionate about this. But, in order to make it work...and I think it works now, in a way, because we just had our other product, imgproxy, incorporate. And they raised a round of external financing, which is a win, I think. I mean, they have a long, long way to go. And we will try to them. But, for me, it's important that we had an internal project, you know, graduate us and move beyond Evil Martians. So something that I changed, I think, in the company together with the founders, for sure, is how we structure the incentives related to the internal products. What I'm trying to say is this: many companies that have an internal project will be looking to own those products. That's what I'm trying to say. And we are not looking for that. What we're looking for is to have a founding team for a product and to make sure they have the majority of shares, that they are the owners of this product. Because we know that building a product is such a long way, and it's a difficult journey. And it takes years and decades to build them into something large, or profitable, or sustainable. So we want the people who are actually doing this to be properly motivated. So something that I convinced the founders to do was to keep the share of Evil Martian's [inaudible 20:40] in those new products at a low level, which may sound counterintuitive for some businessmen, you know, for some owners of the business. They will say, "Well, this was something that was built internally in this company. So this is fully owned by this company." And I agree. Like, from the legal standpoint, this is correct. But it doesn't make much sense if you think about it because you don't want to own, you know, 95% or 100% in something that its worth is zero or even, you know, a negative amount when you keep investing, and you're not getting any returns. But rather, you'd have 10%, 15%, 20% in something large and profitable. And that was the change, I think, where we said, look, we'll be investing in products in a certain way to make sure that the founders, you know, the team of authors is properly motivated. So they own this, and Evil Martians is just the first investor. VICTORIA: That makes a lot of sense because I have been a part of companies where they wanted to reproduce and productize what they'd built for a client and make that something they owned. And I think you use an interesting approach to motivate people to contribute to a project like that by sharing the ownership. [laughs] And that makes a lot of sense to me. I'm curious, based on your response to that last question, how would you describe your leadership style as a CEO? IRINA: There's no one way to be the CEO, I guess. So every person approaches this differently. And it's not that easy to be the CEO after the founder, [laughs] so, when, you know, the founder who was the CEO before hands you the job. It's not that easy. But I had trust and . And I still have it, for sure, the trust and from the founders and from the team because I've been with the company for four years already when I moved into this role. And I think of my style as, first of all, you know, listen to the team, collect the information first. I imagine that I act like a consultant from a management consulting firm, but I didn't work in a management consulting firm. I didn't know how they actually work. But I imagine this is how they work. They sort of speak with every person on the team, and they try to figure out the blockers, the problems, and the aspirations of the team. And then they try to find how to improve, you know, the collective utility, the utility of the group, how to improve the situation, maybe not for every single person but for the majority of them. And this was my initial approach and fixing some, maybe, problems in the company. But I would also try to come up with my own ideas as well for sure. But I rely on the team a lot. So what I also did is I started relying on my leadership team much more than maybe the founder and CEO. So I'm relying on Andrey Sitnik, Head of Front End, on Roman Shamin, on Vladimir Dementyev, and other people, Victoria, Victoria Melnikova, our Head of New Business. And I'm relying on many people heavily, heavily. And my goal is to make sure they see where we want to go and they each can contribute in a certain way. And I ask them how they can contribute. I'm not telling them how to do this, right? I trust their judgment in their area of expertise. But mostly, I just ask about what they can do. And this is how we work together. VICTORIA: I like that. I like how you're really connecting with your team and finding out their strengths, and their struggles, and what they think should do. And then it's how do you enable them as a CEO to achieve this greater vision that you all want to work towards? So I really like that. What would you say is maybe your biggest challenge that you're facing right now? IRINA: I actually challenged myself to become more publicly, sort of effective. [laughs] That's why I'm here, for example. So I realized we do have amazing engineers, amazing designers who are out there, you know, doing podcasts, doing open-source, building technologies, writing on our blog, doing all of this. And I realized that, well, I should do my part as well. And this was one of the goals for this year. The other goal, the other challenge is so complicated that I'm not sure [laughs] I'm ready to talk about it yet. So some of the things I'm trying to do, to be honest, I'm not sure if I can do them at all, [laughs] and that's the problem. So thoughtbot has the Incubator Program, right? And this means that thoughtbot presumably gets equity in those new businesses that people build with thoughtbot's help and guidance. And we're not doing this, but we're doing something else, also trying to make sure we have shares in the amazing businesses that we help grow and they become successful. And we're doing everything we can to make sure they are successful. And I want this company to have a share in the success of our clients, our products, all of that together. VICTORIA: It would probably contribute to motivation, which is another factor you mentioned previously about. IRINA: Yep. VICTORIA: You know, right? [laughs] IRINA: Absolutely, yeah. VICTORIA: Right. We're all going to work a lot harder and collaborate a lot more together. That makes sense. IRINA: Yeah, it also means, yeah, that it makes sense to have a share at Evil Martians. You know, as a part of the company, as an employee, you're getting a share in the company. But as you know, when you are a consulting company, it's sort of a complicated question, actually. If you're a startup and you are granting equity-like stock options to your team, this makes sense because if the company goes, you know, grows and goes public; those shares become something super valuable, like, super cool. But we are not looking to grow our consulting company into something huge. That's for sure. It won't be possible, right? We are operating at this small niche, that's for sure. And we don't have that many amazing engineers, consultants, and it's so hard to hire them. So, anyways, we're not looking to grow that much, although we are growing. And this means that shares in our company do not mean the same thing as the shares in our clients. But if we participate in the success of our clients, then it sort of changes the whole motivation on our own team. This is what I'm thinking about. VICTORIA: Yeah, that's a great question. And I wonder, to build on that, what success really looks like six months from now, or even, like, five years from now for Evil Martians. IRINA: I want us to be recognized as the best consultancy, consulting company for developer tools, products. I know maybe it sounds ambitious, but this is what we are super ionate about. This is where we are accumulating the expertise. And this means I want people to think Evil Martians when they build a product for engineers. I want them to think and reach out to us. But also, I want us to build a number of successful products, commercial products for engineers, which is a huge challenge. Like, doing both it's not easy, that's for sure. But let's see. VICTORIA: Yeah, it's good to be ambitious. And I love that journey for you. I'm excited to follow along. I wonder what advice you would give yourself if you could travel back in time to maybe when you first ed [chuckles] Evil Martians. IRINA: I'd say, first of all, be confident in sharing your opinion because, well, especially for females, we do have a lot of, like, impostor syndrome when ing a tech company, for sure. But it's not just females, right? When you dig deeper, you realize that most people have impostor syndrome, regardless of their gender, background, et cetera. No one is this perfect image of a perfect engineer. It's just no one, really. And everyone has that. And I want everyone who is ing the new company or maybe entering tech as the industry to be confident in sharing their opinions, well, humbly, respectfully but for sure. But don't shy away from asking the questions and from owning your agenda. That's what I want to say. Like, the first year and maybe two years, I didn't own my own agenda. I didn't try to control the sort of to-do lists, the things I'm doing. And later, when I started thinking, you know, critically about my own priorities, I realized that I could bring more value by doing something else, maybe not, you know, not 100% different things but maybe by adding 20% to the mix and removing something that is actually not urgent, not important, you know, just randomly added to...just randomly asked by someone, [chuckles] you know. So I think own your own agenda. Be more confident and look forward. Try to imagine the future that you want. And, for some reason, it works. I don't know how, but it does work. So you start imagining the future. You share it with the team; you discuss it with the team. And this is the magic of the teamwork. Maybe you cannot do it alone, but as a team, so much more is possible. VICTORIA: I love that. And thank you so much for sharing. I'm sure there's maybe a future Irina out there [laughs] who's hearing that advice now and can take it into their work. What if your younger self could travel forward in time, and what advice would they give you now? IRINA: Oh, this is funny. Maybe my younger self would say that I should spend more time with my friends. [laughs] That's what I should do, yeah. VICTORIA: That's never bad advice, I think. I love it. Okay. So, is there anything that you would like to promote? IRINA: This is not tech-related at all. But I want to ask the listeners to donate to the non-profit organizations ing people in Ukraine because people are suffering in Ukraine. And there was this explosion of the dam, and the floods, everything. And it's never been as important as it is now to the non-profits. And I can suggest the Nova Ukraine non-profit organization. It's an American organization, but they send all their money to the local initiatives. So it's a great way to a good cause. VICTORIA: Yes, wonderful, and we can include that into the show notes. Thank you so much for ing me today, Irina. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, you could email us at [email protected]. And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thank you for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Special Guest: Irina Nazarova. Sponsored By: thoughtbot: Are your engineers spending too much time on DevOps and maintenance issues when you need them on new features? We know maintaining your own servers can be costly and that it’s easy for spending creep to sneak in when your team isn’t looking. By delegating server management, maintenance, and security to thoughtbot and our network of service partners, you can get 24x7 from our team of experts, all for less than the cost of one in-house engineer. Save time and money with our DevOps and Maintenance service. Find out more at: tbot.io/devops Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Neetu Rajpal is the CTO of Oscar Health. Oscar aims to make a healthier life accessible and affordable for all by refactoring healthcare to make great care cost less. Chad talks to Neetu about working for a relatively new insurance company, reorganizing its structure by getting people into the right positions, and how incorporating large language models and generative AI is an inflection point that will help move things forward. Oscar Health Follow Oscar Health on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn. Follow Neetu Rajpal on LinkedIn, or Twitter. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Neetu Rajpal, the CTO of Oscar Health. Neetu, thank you so much for ing me. NEETU: It's great to be here. Thank you very much for having me. CHAD: I want to talk about your role at Oscar Health, and your history, and everything that you've done. But everyone listening might not be familiar with Oscar Health. So let's start there; what is Oscar Health? NEETU: Yes. Oscar Health is a health insurance company. We sell health insurance, primarily on the ACA marketplace across 20 different states in the U.S. We have just over a million . So we basically sell health insurance to people. One of the big, unique things about Oscar Health has been it's a very relatively new insurance company. So it's only been around for about ten years. And it was founded as a pretty standard tech startup. We've built all of the infrastructure for acquiring ing and providers, and brokers in-house. So we're fully cloud-native, distributed systems hosted on AWS and G with a giant data lake that s all of our workflows. And this is a pretty unique integrated solution in of health insurance companies. So we're very much a tech-focused health insurance company. I've been at Oscar for about three and a half years. I came to Oscar not from a healthcare background but just really mission-oriented and motivated to go help something in the healthcare space. I've spent most of my career building software, first at Microsoft and then at Conductor and WeWork. And I'm really excited to be here. It's really, really rewarding to be at a company that's serving primarily an underserved market in the ACA space. CHAD: Well, I suppose full disclosure is in order. Oscar and thoughtbot have been working together for a long time now, actually, with Oscar as a client of ours. So I appreciate you ing us on the show, and I appreciate you working with us over the years. I think we worked...we started working with Oscar maybe when you were just in one or two states. And so, how have you handled that growth? And I think that's one of the complexities of the insurance space, right? Is every location is different in important ways. NEETU: Yeah. Actually, it seems like Oscar and thoughtbot have worked longer than Oscar and myself. CHAD: [laughs] NEETU: So I think that's a pretty exciting, interesting statistic. And even during my time, it's been a great experience working with thoughtbot. One of the big premise Oscar had was to build software that was segregated enough and isolated enough but composable enough that you could, in fact, bundle the full healthcare tech stack and then bundle it back together as you needed with configuration and scale it as you needed with, like, smart built-in scalability. And I think our ability to grow into multiple states and multiple counties has been, like, a good proof point of the fact that you can, in fact, do that. In most cases, adding a new state is sometimes, at least from the tech perspective, from the software perspective is a combination of identifying the right configuration settings, mapping it to the features, and then just configuring the software to be able to that new service area that we've just added. And that, I think, has been, like, a huge value add in of being able to add new locations to serve our , add new providers, add new contracts. And our premise of building stuff or to unbundle and then bundle it back together as needed has really proven out a lot. CHAD: I assume there have been some challenges along the way. What do you think have been among the biggest? NEETU: I think the challenges have been an interesting combination of just learning the insurance business landscape then building software that aligns with it. So each county you might go into, each state you might go into, have its own set of regulatory requirements, have its own set of, like, reimbursement requirements, have its own set of, like, plan requirements, and these are...as a new insurance company, I think along the way, we really did have to learn a lot of these things and sometimes by trial and error and that, you know, it's a pretty sometimes a long cycle with insurance. So that has been interesting and challenging. CHAD: So not necessarily a technical problem but more, like, even just figuring out what it should...how it should work. NEETU: Yeah. I think definitely the business problem has been interesting on the technical side. So I started at Oscar about three and a half years ago. And my first questions as I was going through the interview process were, "Like, I don't understand why you built all of this stuff in-house, like, why aren't you just [inaudible 05:18]?" And those were rather naive questions to be asking a tech-focused insurance company. Many years ago, when Oscar chose to use Elasticsearch, it wasn't a BAA-compliant solution. So you couldn't actually use a managed version of Elasticsearch. So we ended up hosting our own Elasticsearch cluster. We were one of the first or the first few people to actually sign a BAA with AWS a long time ago. So, technically speaking, I think the challenges have been around you don't always have the same set of tools available to you; at least, that used to be the case. This is rapidly declining rapidly. The availability of tools is almost the same now. And two, the ecosystem that you live in. We still definitely have a service that has easy availability to a fax machine, and I think there are a few companies that are able to say that. But it's also the ecosystem that you live in, that you're trying to bring along with yourself, and also ecosystem you're using to and build the tech stack. Both of those things have been rather interesting. In of actually building the software, that's, like, pretty standard regular set of software challenges. CHAD: How big is the Oscar engineering team at this point? NEETU: Oscar engineering team has fluctuated between 300 and 400 people over the past few years. I think we're about 350 or so right now. CHAD: Generally speaking, how is the team organized to perform at that scale? NEETU: I am actually a pretty big believer in first building a tech strategy that is tied to the business strategy before building the org structure. So, even at the Oscar engineering and tech team org structure, it has probably fluctuated quite a bit based on what the business needed. As of right now, we have dedicated folks that are aligned along individual set of audiences that we are ing. So we have a group of people who focuses primarily on the and the member applications. We have a group of folks who focuses primarily on the provider and all the needs of the providers. And then we have a group of people maybe focused on just growth in general. And that could be growth through enrollments with brokers, enrollments without brokers, direct exchanges, or even some of our +Oscar business work. So we've tried to, at this moment, align ourselves with the audience that we're serving. And, of course, like, no engineering team is purely vertical or purely horizontal. So we also have an infrastructure platform team that s all of the areas. CHAD: Do people sort of opt in, or are their roles d in each of those places? Or, as you reorganize into those structures, have you seen ways that work successfully in of getting people into the right position? NEETU: Like, at the larger level in of the audience space, there tends to be pretty standard set of roles. As you might imagine, when the companies are smaller, there's a lot of investment or need for really, truly full-stack developers and full-stack engineers. As we've grown larger, there is a bit of specialization towards either the front-end portion of the house or the back-end portion of the house. And we do have roles posted, and the roles some of them concentrate more towards the front-end tech. Some of them concentrate more towards distributed computing, and back end, and data engineering roles. And some concentrate more towards infrastructure engineering. And, as the teams always get bigger, there tend to also be, like, the ing functions around technical product management and technical program management that are also part of the equation at the moment. We do post all of these roles in those , with clarity around what the expectations are. As we re-org, we always prioritize internal candidates. We have a big enough team. People like to work on different set of problems and happy to align ions with our business needs because that tends to work out really, really well. CHAD: Well, there's a reason why I'm asking about this particularly for you because one of the things that stood out to me about your background was the length of time that you were at Microsoft and the movement that you did between a variety of different roles across the organization. So that's an experience that you bring to the table. Was that something that you did intentionally? NEETU: Yeah. I was at Microsoft for 18 years. And I think every couple of years, I did a new thing. And while I would like to very much say, yeah, I totally figured out that I wanted to be an engineer... CHAD: [laughs] NEETU: And then a product manager, and then, you know, an engineer again, or then a product manager again, or a leadership role again, or even the stack as in work on small APIs or work on full enterprise-grade products or cloud...I would like to very much say those were very thought through, you know, clearly pre-planned career moves; they were not. And particularly, in my case, they were very much I chased problems. And I would get very obsessed or interested in a particular problem. And then, I would go dive deep into that problem and aim to go solve it. And by the time I had figured it out and solved it, there was always a new problem. And this was the wonderful promise of Microsoft where, you know, it is so large, and there are so many different ways to think about different problems, or different ways you can bring software to market, or problems in the world you can solve with it, that I particularly took full advantage of it. And that hasn't really changed in of how the rest of my career post-Microsoft has gone, either. Every couple of years, I find myself in a space that is completely scary, completely new, completely different. For me, that tends to be my happy place, to be working on super difficult things that are very scary. Mid-Roll Ad: When starting a new project, we understand that you want to make the right choices in technology, features, and investment but that you don’t have all year to do extended research. In just a few weeks, thoughtbot's Discovery Sprints deliver a -centered product journey, a clickable prototype or Proof of Concept, and key market insights from focused research. We’ll help you to identify the primary flow, decide which framework should be used to bring it to life, and set a firm estimate on future development efforts. Maximize impact and minimize risk with a validated roap for your new product. Get started at: tbot.io/sprint. CHAD: It does sound like even though you might not have some grand plan, [chuckles] you are driven to seek out challenges. NEETU: Yeah. I heard something really, really long time ago that kind of has stuck with me always, which is don't let your curiosity die. So, if you are curious, don't just let it shy away; just indulge in it. That's how you're always moving forward. For me, that's been a big theme as in, I really, really enjoy always learning. Always finding myself not to be the smartest person in the room is really, really great. And always moving forward and pushing hard, and solving bigger and bigger problems. CHAD: So, when you were deciding to Oscar Health, how concerned were you with the particulars of the individual position that you were applying for? Or was it more, like, I've identified this space and this problem that I want to be a part of? NEETU: Yeah, that's a really, really great question. And I think it's one of the ones that when I mentor people, I tell them about as well, which is, I had a role with Conductor that was this head of R&D, CTO, and O, and a very traditional ladder style path to the next step or something along those lines or bigger. But I personally am not motivated by titles as much as I am about potential impact I can have. My walk into healthcare out of MarTech or out of just, like, platform was very personal in of I have a healthcare story. Everybody really has a healthcare story. And I wanted to go do something in this space, utilize all of the skills that I already have, and then try to push the space forward. And so, when I ed Oscar, I was not really that motivated by what the title was going to be. I was really looking for is, is there going to be an opportunity to have an impact? And is there going to be space for me to have impact? Am I going to be surrounded by a group of people who I can have impact with? That was the primary concern. And I did Oscar as a VP of engineering. And that didn't last very long. Within the next year and a half, I was already promoted to CTO in that role. And each one of those steps was very much motivated by will I actually be able to have impact? Will I be empowered to have impact? Was I equipped to have an impact? And was I going to learn a lot in that role? Those were my primary motivators. And that's always been the case. It's also a hard-won lesson. Like, when I had my first kid, it was a really difficult time, personally. I had really bad postpartum depression. I had really hard time dealing with what is going to happen with my career, and I had to take a step back. And as somebody who was, like, super ambitious and wanted to go straight up, that was a really challenging thing to do. And that was a long time ago, and I've been able to rebuild, quote, unquote, "rebuild" my career back multiple times over. So it's actually been, like, a hard-won lesson where it doesn't kind of matter what part of the rocket ship you have a seat on, as long as you have the seat on the rocket ship. And by rocket ship, I wish I was only talking about stock price; I'm not. I'm just talking about the ability to have impact. If I can be in this right group and I can have a voice, then it didn't matter what my title was. CHAD: Yeah, thank you for sharing. And I think it feels like the pace of change accelerates. But in growing organizations, so much changes all of the time. So what you are doing...or the roles that exist will change as well. And the other thing...I often get asked by clients, "Should we be hiring a VP of engineering or a CTO?" I'm like, the definition of those roles varies so much between company, and team size, and everything. It's like; it really is difficult to answer that question because it is so different. It all depends on the needs of the organization. NEETU: Yeah. I've done both of those roles, at least twice each time, twice now. And I've personally discovered that A, those roles don't really have a defined, like, there is no clear definition for either one of those roles. The other thing that I think is more important is I don't think the organizations know what they want out of those roles most of the times, either. In my experience so far, VP of engineering is a little bit easier to define because it has a very heavy management component to it. And so I've ended up just defining those roles for myself every time, and so far, so good. And the way I define those roles is very much, like, a CTO role is a half-business half-technical role. It's the role where you understand the business strategy and turn it into a tech strategy that s the business strategy and pushes the business forward, and acts as the competitive advantage for the business. And your role is, in fact, to be the person who takes tech and applies it to pushing the business forward. That's one direction. And the other direction, it is the role to take the business strategy and translate into technical so that you can bring and coalesce your whole team's motivation around it and bring the whole team around it. And I definitely find this very much at Oscar, where most people who Oscar engineering and Oscar tech they all come motivated outside of Oscar already to help push the industry forward in one way or another. So actually keeping that motivation in the right place all the time with authenticity and truth about what it is, how we're pushing the business forward. And helping the business move forward is an extremely valuable skill. So, from my perspective, the tech role is definitely half-business, half-tech with some variable sprinkling of management attached to it, and I think that's the CTO role. And the VP of engineering was very heavily bent towards management, I think, yeah. CHAD: Well, so in that CTO role, we'll often be faced with understanding how industry changes, or new technology, or whatever can help the business. Obviously, we have a big one happening right now with artificial intelligence or large language models and machine learning. I have a couple of questions around this area. But, like, is there something in particular with that that you're either thinking about now in of Oscar or have already incorporated? NEETU: Yeah. I think large language models and generative AI, in general, is definitely an inflection point. And I think it's an inflection point that is going to help push so many things forward. And I think healthcare is very interestingly poised towards pushing in that direction. There is everything from, like, shortage of providers or shortage of mental health providers to just a large availability of data in the healthcare space that can help discover things that may not be the easiest to discover through humans looking at it. So I think there's a huge opportunity. I also think it needs, like, a bit of cautious evaluation. We are dealing with something that you can't break, so you can't move fast and break things when you're dealing with people. But there are interesting use cases where you could use generative AI and have it maybe not make a decision for a person but assist the provider to make a decision. Or you can use it in areas, at least in healthcare space, where there is a lot of inefficiency because of too much to do. And you can actually optimize a whole bunch of that. So examples could be, you know, there's the standard examples of chatbots as in, is this doctor part of my network? Can I have an appointment with this doctor? Can I have an appointment and a prior auth with this doctor immediately? Like, those are, I think, a little bit more accessible use cases. And Oscar, also, we're exploring and figuring out which one of those makes most sense for us in our business. And there's tons of excitement and tons of, like, thought being put behind it. As of right now, I probably can't say all the things that we're working on at the moment. But yes, absolutely, this is a very big deal. CHAD: So, speaking more generally around exploring new ideas, you mentioned at Conductor, you were in an R&D role combined...like, is there strategies that you've seen that work particularly well for doing research and development within an organization, exploring new ideas, figuring things out? NEETU: Yeah. It definitely depends on which portion or which portion of the maturity stack you're on. If you're building software that is going to be sold to enterprises, you have to have some version of a promise of a date, and then you have to keep your promise. So, if you're selling enterprise software, you have to be predictable because your partners on the other side are relying on you. And you can't actually get predictability without having enough stability in your team, and enough stability in your roaps, and enough stability in your tech environment [inaudible 22:30] So that you can figure out what you're going to build, you can figure out where you're going to build, and how you're going to build it. You can figure out what teams and resources you're going to allocate to it. And you can also have some confidence that when you're ready to send code out to production, there is some automated CI/CD system that is, like, going to help you make sure that the number of errors that you are sending out into the world is as few as possible. And that superpower of being able to, like, churn out code and features and products like a machine on a pretty regular basis has the potential downside of not being able to disrupt yourself. And I think there are definitely a couple of strategies to do that. One of them is to allocate enough space by filling it with P2s as opposed to everything being a P0, that if you were to, like, displace the P2s with something that is new and available now, then you're going to be okay because you can live without the P2s. We had to have enough of those. There is also the whole skunk works model, which I think works pretty well. I think it does need to be set up carefully so that you're not, like, destroying the motivation of everybody in the team. You do have the opportunity to do the skunkworks model. And, like, the generating ideas portion, we do this at Oscar, and I think this is also done elsewhere. We have pretty regular hackathons that are dedicated amounts of time, and we put them on the schedule. And, during that time, we just go explore and dream and go build other things. And we build it collaboratively with the rest of the business. And there are definitely still, like, stories of things that were developed in a hackathon that served us really well for years on end. And I don't think that's ever going to change. But anything that is, like, a real solid enterprise production stuff probably needs a dedicated skunkworks something or the other so you can...I don't think it's a bad thing to have solid schedules. I think it's a really huge superpower to have solid schedules. I do think you have to have the discipline to be able to disrupt yourself; otherwise, somebody else will. CHAD: Right. And so figuring out a structure, you can do that. And, like you said, you know, you don't want to ruin the morale or the excitement of the entire organization where people say, like, "Well, it's not my job," you know, or, "I wish I could work on this, but it's this team's." And you're not set up to capture that individual person's excitement over generative AI, for example, who is the one who's actually going to make it happen. And you're squashing that because they're not, quote, unquote, "supposed to work on it." I think that's a really difficult balance to strike. NEETU: Yeah, I think it is. But I don't know; there are very few things in the healthcare space that anybody does that is easy. CHAD: Yeah, that's a good point. Now that you've been in the role, well, at Oscar for a few years, what's next? What are the things that, like, you feel like are sort of motivating you each day you come to work? NEETU: Oscar is in the ACA space, which serves primarily underserved communities. There have been, like, some recent examples of where people had to shutter doors in the ACA space. So the fact that we're still around and the fact that we're successful, like, we don't take that for granted. It's a really valuable thing to be able to survive in this market and to be able to grow. We launched a mission-driven tech-focused company ten years ago based on the belief that you could build your own tech stack and be successful in a very tightly controlled market. And I think this is the year that we actually had to just, like, really prove out the use case. So, this year, Oscar is 100% focused on being insure co profitable. And once we finish proving that out, next year, we're going to prove out that it is... Holdco can be profitable, which is all of our tech stack, in addition to all of our insurance business. And I'm very, very much looking forward to Oscar being successful this year in the mission, where I think it's just proving out that you can build a successful business and ACA-powered by your own tech stack. And not compromising on the outcomes for our is really valuable and keeps me very motivated. And then, looking at the future, looking at being able to be 100% full company profitable and potentially selling our software for others so they could also bring this efficiency to their businesses is extremely motivating for me. And, as of right now, this is what the whole company is focused on. And we're all super excited about it. CHAD: Yeah, oftentimes, having a clear goal that everyone knows about and is working on can be really empowering for an organization, even if it's hard. NEETU: Yeah. Like I said before, I think almost everybody I've interacted with at Oscar didn't come to Oscar, assuming it was going to be easy. They came to Oscar with full knowledge that it was going to be hard, but they were going to try anyway. So we are so close. CHAD: Yeah. And, you know, that's one of the things that, at thoughtbot, we skew to working with clients that do positive things for the world, that deserve to exist for precisely this reason, is when you have a positive purpose in your organization, it makes working hard easier, [laughs] or solving big problems easier because you know that you're going to have a positive impact when you do. NEETU: Yeah. The personal healthcare story was a motivating factor towards going to go do something that was, like, going to be, like, positive for the world. I wish I could say, yes, I'm going to solve all of healthcare's problems and [inaudible 29:02] not that way. CHAD: Yeah. Well, that was actually what I was going to ask you about next is that's the thing about healthcare. And I've seen people almost get demoralized for it because you actually can't solve every problem. It's really difficult to solve all of healthcare. So, how do you sort of exist within that environment and not get demotivated? NEETU: I think the more you dig into the problem, the more you realize how interconnected the way in, like, society, politics, money, power, and tech it really is. And it seems like if you try to solve the whole thing, it almost feels like you're going to boil the whole ocean. And it is definitely a blocker from even trying. And, for me, it was just like, does that mean I stop? Do I apply the boy scout rule of, like, just trying to leave it better off, a whole lot better off, as much possible better off than I found it? I could do that. Or I could just go do something completely different. But there is no guarantee it's going to be as motivating or potentially as impacting. So, for me, it's very much about, like, if I could make even small changes, I know they'll be part of a greater whole. So I will just try to make those small changes because, alternatively, I may be neutral for the world at most. CHAD: Well, Neetu, thank you so much for stopping by and sharing with us. I really appreciate it. NEETU: Thank you very much for having me. It's been a great conversation. CHAD: If folks want to get in touch with you or follow along, where are the best places for them to do that? NEETU: I am easy to find on LinkedIn. I do have a Twitter , but I'm not very active. It's @Nee2D2, and I look forward to hearing from people. CHAD: Awesome. You can subscribe to the show and find notes for this episode, along with a complete transcript, at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at [email protected]. And you could find me on Mastodon @[email protected]. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks so much for listening, and see you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Special Guest: Neetu Rajpal. Sponsored By: thoughtbot: When starting a new project, we understand that you want to make the right choices in technology, features, and investment, but that you don’t have all year to do extended research. In just a few weeks, thoughtbot’s Discovery Sprints deliver a -centered product journey, a clickable prototype or Proof of Concept, and key market insights from focused research. We’ll help you to identify the primary flow, decide which framework should be used to bring it to life, and set a firm estimate on future development efforts. Maximize impact and minimize risk with a validated roap for your new product. Get started at: tbot.io/sprint Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Aaron Torres and Ala Shiban are from Klotho, which powers Infrastructure Copilot, the most advanced infrastructure design tool that understands how to define, connect, and scale your infrastructure-as-code. Victoria talks to Aaron and Ala about the Klotho engine, Klotho the CLI tool, and InfraCopilot and how they work together to help enable developer teams to iterate on applications and features quickly. Klotho Infrastructure Copilot Follow Klotho on Github, Discord, Twitter, or LinkedIn. Follow Aaron Torres on LinkedIn, or Twitter. Follow Ala Shiban on LinkedIn or Twitter. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. And with me today is Aaron Torres and Ala Shiban from Klotho, which powers Infrastructure Copilot, the most advanced infrastructure design tool that understands how to define, connect, and scale your infrastructure-as-code. Aaron and Ala, thank you for ing me. ALA: Thank you for having us. AARON: Yeah, thank you very much. VICTORIA: Well, great. I wanted to just start with a little bit of a icebreaker; maybe tell me a little bit more about what the weather is like where you're currently at. AARON: So I'm in St. Louis, Missouri. Right now, it is definitely...it feels like summer finally. So we're getting some nice, warm days and clear skies. ALA: And I'm in LA. And it's gloomier than I would like compared to what it's been in the last few years. But I'll take it if this means we're getting closer to summer. VICTORIA: Right. And I'm not too far from you, Ala, in San Diego, and it's a little chillier than I would prefer as well. But that's what we get for living close to the beach. So there's always trade-offs. Well, wonderful. I'm so excited to talk to you about your product here today. Let me start with a question about, let's say, I'm a non-technical founder, and I've just heard about your product. What's your pitch to someone in that position on the value of your tool? ALA: For somebody who isn't technical, I would say you can enable your team, your developer team, to quickly iterate on their applications or features and let InfraCopilot and Klotho take care of taking that application or features and deploy them and getting them running on the cloud. VICTORIA: Okay. So maybe I've been thinking about having to hire an AWS engineer or someone who's an infrastructure engineer. I could consider getting a tool like Klotho and Infrastructure Copilot to allow my developers to take on more of that responsibility themselves. ALA: Absolutely. VICTORIA: Gotcha. Okay, well, great. So let me ask about how did it all get started? What was the impetus that set you on this journey ALA: Both Aaron and I used to work at Riot Games, and I used to lead the cloud services org at Riot. I had about 50 people, 40 engineers, as part of a larger 120-person org, infrastructure platform org, which was tasked with building the platform that runs League of Legends, VALORANT, for 200 million people all around the world, in China. Full DevOps mode for Riot developers and full ops mode for running in China. It took us three years, a lot of effort. And by the time we were done, it was already legacy, and that seemed broken to me. We were already getting started to do another round of upgrades and iterations. At that point, I decided to leave. But I couldn't let go of this feeling that we shouldn't have had to spend so many years solving a problem only for it not to be solved. And based on research and conversations, it was clear that this was an industry-wide phenomena. And so I went about trying to figure out why that happens and then how we can solve it, and that's how Klotho came about. VICTORIA: That's so interesting. And I've certainly been a part of similar situations where you spend so much time solving a big problem and infrastructure only to get to the end of it and realize now you have a whole nother set of problems. [laughs] And you get upgrade. And they've also invented new ways of doing things in the cloud that you want to be able to take advantage of. So you had that time with Riot Games and League of Legends and building this globally responsive infrastructure. What lessons learned did you take from that into building Klotho and building your product, Infrastructure Copilot? AARON: We learned a bunch of things. One of the more difficult problems to solve isn't technical at all; it's organizational and understanding how the organization flows and how the different teams interact with each other. So we really endeavor to solve that problem. I mean, our product is a technical product, but it is meant to help bridge that gulf and make that problem a little bit easier as well. Otherwise, yeah, exactly to your point, part of the problem with these migrations is that new technology comes along. And there's definitely a feeling of when you hire new developers, they are excited about the new thing, and there's other reasons as well. But you get this kind of natural, eternal migration going to the newer technology. VICTORIA: That makes sense. And you bring up a great point on some of the issues, not being technical but organizational. And when I look at a lot of infrastructure-as-code tools, when we get to security, I wonder how it fits in with the organizational requirements for security, right? Like, you have to have defined groups who have defined access to different levels and have the tools in place to be able to manage identities in your organization. So I'm curious how that fits into what you built with Klotho and the Infrastructure Copilot. ALA: The way we think about infrastructure is as a set of intents or things that developers, and operators, cloud engineers, infrastructure engineers are trying to satisfy or to do. So you have tasks. You're trying to build a solution. You're trying to build an architecture or add something to it. And organizations have constraints, whether it's their own Terraform, or their own ruleset, or security expectations, or compliance expectations. And the way we look at this dynamic is those rules are encoded in a way that Klotho, which is a cloud compiler, it has the ability to reason about both the application and the infrastructure-as-code and enforce or at least warn about mismatches between the constraints that the organization sets, and what the developer or operator are trying to do, or the intent that is being described high level or low level within the tools. And then that is reflected both visually and in code and in the infrastructure-as-code, one or more. And so it's very much rooted in how the entire set of technologies and product and tools are designed. VICTORIA: Got it. So do you see the tool will be more fit for the market of larger development shops who maybe have existing infrastructure but want to experiment with a different way of managing it for their developers? ALA: It depends. So because we went about solving the problem rather than just building a specific vertical or a specific stack piece, we try to only play in this space of intelligent editing and intelligent understanding of the alignment between infrastructure and code. And so you could, as a developer, effectively with Klotho, write a plain application and have it be running in the cloud without knowing anything in the underlying cloud systems. It will set up storage, and persistence, and security, and secrets. All those elements are easily accessible within the code itself. It can also work in the context of a company where the infrastructure or platform team have set those rules and guidance within the tools. And then, developers can continue working the way they expect to work, either in code or in the infrastructure-as-code layer. And it would still allow them to do the same intents that they want only within that sandbox. Or if they can't be satisfied because they're trying to do something that isn't allowed, they have a mechanism of, one, knowing that but also asking, in our case, InfraCopilot to help it reshape what it's doing, what they're doing into the sandbox and the trade-offs that that brings in. VICTORIA: Got it. So you can both start from scratch and start a brand new application using it, or you can integrate it with your existing rules and systems and everything that already exists. ALA: Exactly. VICTORIA: Gotcha. Yeah, I think one interesting thing we've found with very new founders who are building their application for the first time is that there are some essential things, like, they don't even have an identity store like a Google [laughs] or Microsoft Azure Directory. So starting to work in the cloud, there are some basic elements you have to set up first that's a little bit of a barrier. So it sounds like what you're saying with Klotho is that you wouldn't necessarily have those same issues. Or how would you get that initial, like, cloud s set up? AARON: Yeah. So, for the situation where you're bootstrapping everything from scratch, you've done nothing; we haven't invested much in setting up the initial s. But assuming you get to the point where you have AWS credentials, and you're able to hit the AWS API using the CLI, that's sort of where we can take over. So, yeah, like, I would say right now, as a business, it's definitely where the value is coming is going to be these mid-sized companies. But for that scenario specifically, bootstrapping and starting something from scratch, if you have that initial setup in place, it's one of the fastest ways to go from a concept to something running in the cloud. ALA: And if you think about the two tools that we're building, there's Klotho, which InfraCopilot...or the Klotho engine, which Klotho the CLI tool uses and InfraCopilot uses. The Klotho engine is responsible for the intelligence. It knows how to translate things like I want a web API that talks to DynamoDB. And it will literally create everything or modify everything that is needed to give you that and plug in your code. You can also say things in a much higher level degree, which things like I want a lambda which handles 10,000 s. And I want it to be lowest latency talking to an RDS Instance or to a Postgres database. And what that would do is, in our side, in the Klotho engine, we understand that there needs to be a VPC and subnets, and spin up RDS, and connect an RDS proxy. Because for connection pooling with lambda specifically, you need one to scale to that degree of scale. And so that is the intelligence that is built into the Klotho engine if you want to start from the infrastructure. If you want to start from code, all you have to do is bring in the Redis instance, the Redis SDK, and, let's say, your favorite web framework, and just add the annotations or the metadata that says, I want this web framework to be exposed to the internet, and I want this Redis to be persisted in the cloud. And you run Klotho. And what comes out the other end is the cloud version that does that for you. And it's one command away from getting it to run. VICTORIA: So that's interesting how the two tools work together and how a developer might be able to get things spun up quickly on the cloud without having to know the details of each particular AWS service. And reading through your docs, it sounds like once you have something working in the cloud, then you'll also get automated recommendations on how to improve it for cost and reliability. Is that right? ALA: That's where we're headed. VICTORIA: Gotcha. I'm curious; for Aaron, it sounds like there is more in that organizational challenges that you alluded to earlier. So you want to be able to deliver this capability to developers. But what barriers have you found organizationally to getting this done? AARON: So I'm going to speak specifically on infrastructure here because I think this is one of the biggest ones we've seen. But typically, when you get to a larger-sized company, we'll call it a mid-sized company with, you know, a couple hundred engineers or more, you get to the point where it doesn't make sense for every team to own their entire vertical. And so you want to really put the cloud knowledge into a central team. And so you tend to build either a platform team, or an infrastructure team, or a cloud team who sort of owns how cloud resources are provisioned, which ones they , et cetera. And so, really, some of the friction I'm talking about is the friction between that team and developer teams who really just want to write their application and get going quickly. But you don't have to fall within the boundaries set by that central team. To give, like, a real concrete example of that, if you wanted to prototype a new technology, like, let's say that some new database technology came out and you wanted to use it, it's a very coordinated effort between both teams in of the roap. Like, the infrastructure team needs to get on that roap, that they need to make a sandbox and how that's going to work. The code team needs to make an application to test it. And the whole thing requires a lot more communication than just tech. VICTORIA: Yeah, no, I've been part of kind of one of those classic DevOps problems. It's where now you've built the ops team and the dev team, [laughs] and now you're back to those coordination issues that you had before. So, if I were a dev using Klotho or the infrastructure-as-code copilot, I would theoretically have access to any AWS sandbox . And I could just spin up whatever I wanted [laughs] within the limits that could be defined by your security team or by your, you know, I'm sure there's someone who's setting a limit on the size of databases you could spin up for fun. Does that sound right? AARON: Yeah, that's totally right. And in addition to just limits, it's also policies. So a good example is maybe in production for databases, you have a data retention policy. And you have something like we need to keep three months of backups for this amount of time. We want to make sure that if someone spins up a production database from any of those app teams, that they will follow their company policy there and not accidentally, like, lose data where it has to be maintained for some reason. ALA: That's an important distinction where we have our own set of, you know, best practice or rules that are followed roughly in the industry. But also, the key here is that the infrastructure central teams in every company can describe the different rulesets and guidelines, guardrails within the company on what developers can do, not only in low-level descriptions like instance sizes or how much something is, whether it's Spot Instances always or not in production versus dev. But also be able to teach the system when a developer says, "I want a database," spin up a Postgres database with this configuration that is wired to the larger application that they have. Or, if I want to run a service, then it spins up the correct elements and configures them to work, let's say, Kubernetes pods, or lambdas, or a combination based on what the company has described as the right way for that company to do things. And so it gives flexibility to not know the specific details but still get the company's specific way of doing them. And the key here is that we're trying to codify the communication patterns that do happen, and they need to happen if there's no tools to facilitate it between the infrastructure platform team and the feature teams. Only in this case, we try and capture that in a way that the central teams can define it. And the developers on feature teams can consume it without having as much friction. VICTORIA: So that will be different than, like, an infrastructure team that's putting out everything in Terraform and doing pull requests based off GitHub repository to that. It makes it a little more easier to read, and understand, and share the updates and changes. AARON: Right. And also, I mean, so, like, the thing you're describing of, like, the central team, having Terraform tends to be, like, these golden templates. Like they say, "If you want to make a database, here's your database template." And then you get a lot of interesting issues like drift, where maybe some teams are using the old versions of the templates, and they're not picking up the new changes. And how do you kind of reconcile all that? So it is meant to help with all of those things. VICTORIA: That makes a lot of sense. And I'm curious, what questions came up in the customer discovery process for this product that surprised you? ALA: I think there's one...I don't know that it was a question, but I think there was...So, when we started with Klotho, Klotho has the ability to enable a code-first approach, which means that you give the tool to developers as the infrastructure or platform team, or if you're a smaller shop, then you can just use Klotho directly. You set the rules on what's allowed or what's not allowed, and then developers can work very freely. They can describe very succinctly how to turn a plain object, SDK, et cetera, how to build larger architectures very quickly with a few annotations that we describe and that give cloud powers. We had always thought that some teams will feel that this encroaches on their jobs. We've heard from people on infra, you know, platform teams, "This is amazing. But this is my job." And so, one of our hypotheses was that we are encroaching into what they see as their responsibility. And we built more and more mechanisms that would clean up that interface and give them the ability to control more so they can free themselves up, just like most automations that happen in the world, to do more things. What happened later surprised us. And by having a few or several more discoveries, we found out that the feeling isn't a fear of the tool replacing their job. The fear or worry is that the tool will make their jobs boring, what is left of the job be boring, and nobody wants to go to work and not have cool and fun things to do. And because I think we all, on a certain degree, believe that, you know, if we take away some of the work that we're doing, we'll find something higher level and harder to solve, but until that exists in people's minds, there's nothing there. And therefore, they're left with whatever they don't want to do or didn't want to do. And so that's where we tried to take a step back from all the intelligence the Klotho engine provides through that code-first Klotho. And we built out focusing on one of the pillars in the tech to create InfraCopilot, which helps with keeping or making the things that we already do much simpler but also in a way that maintains and does it in a fun way. VICTORIA: That makes sense because my understanding of where to use AI and where to use machine learning for best purposes is to automate those, like, repetitive, boring tasks and allow people to focus on the creative and more interesting work, right? ALA: Yes and no. The interesting bit about our approach to ML is that we don't actually use machine learning or ChatGPT for any of the intelligence layers, meaning we don't ask ChatGPT to generate Terraform or any kind of GPT model to analyze a certain aspect of the infrastructure. That is all deterministic and happens in the Klotho engine. That is the uniqueness of why this always works rather than if GPT happened to get it right. What we use ML for is the ability to parse the intent. So we actually use it as a language model to parse the intent from what the is trying to convey, meaning I want a lambda with an API gateway. What we get back from our use of ML is the has asked for a lambda, an AWS lambda, and API gateway and that they be connected. That is the only thing we get back. And that is fed into the Klotho engine. And then, we do the intelligence to translate that to an actual architecture. VICTORIA: That's a really cool way to use natural language processing to build cloud infrastructure. MID-ROLL AD: Are you an entrepreneur or start-up founder looking to gain confidence in the way forward for your idea? At thoughtbot, we know you’re tight on time and investment, which is why we’ve created targeted 1-hour remote workshops to help you develop a concrete plan for your product’s next steps. Over four interactive sessions, we work with you on research, product design sprint, critical path, and presentation prep so that you and your team are better equipped with the skills and knowledge for success. Find out how we can help you move the needle at: tbot.io/entrepreneurs. VICTORIA: I'm curious; you said you're already working on some issues about being able to suggest improvements for cost reduction and efficiencies. What else is on your roap for what's coming up next? AARON: So there's a bunch of things in the long-term roap. And I'll say that, like, in the short term, it's much more about just expanding the breadth of what we . If you think about just generating all the different permutations and types of infrastructure, it's, like, a huge matrix problem. Like, there's many, many dimensions that you could go in. And if you add an extra cloud or you add an extra capability, it expands everything. So you can imagine, like, testing it to make sure things work, and everything becomes very complicated. So, really, a lot of what we're doing is still foundational and trying to just increase the breadth, make the intent processing more intelligent, make the other bits work. And then one of the areas right now is for our initial release of the product; we chose to use Discord as our interface for the chatbot. And the reason for that is because it gives us a lot of benefits of having sort of the community built in and the engagement built in where we can actually talk with s and try and understand what they're doing. However, we really have a lot of UI changes and expansions that we'd like to do. And even from some of our early demo material, we have things like being able to right-click and being able to configure your lambda directly from the UI. So there's a lot of areas there that we can expand into an intent, too, once we get sort of the foundational stuff done, as an example. The intelligence bit is a much bigger process, like, there's a lot of things to unpack there. So I won't talk about it too much. But if we were to just talk about the most simple things, it'd be setting up alerts somehow and then feeding into our system that, like, we're hitting those alerts, and we have to make modifications. A good example of that would be, like, configuring auto scaling on an instance for [inaudible 22:17]. So we can get some of those benefits now. The bigger vision of what we want to do with optimization requires a lot more exploration and also the ability to look at what's happening to your application while it's running in the cloud. ALA: Let me maybe shed a bit more light on the problems we're trying to solve and where we're headed. When it comes to optimization, to truly optimize a cloud application, you have to reason about it on the application level rather than on the one service level. To do that, we have to be able to look at the application as an application. And today, there's a multi-repo approach to building cloud applications. So one of the future work that we're going to do is be able to reason about existing infrastructure-as-code from different portions of the teams or organization or even multiple services that the same team works and link them together. So, when we look at reasoning about an architecture, it is within the entire context of the application rather than just the smaller bits and pieces. That's one layer. Another layer is being able to ingest the real runtime application metrics and infrastructure metrics, let's say, from AWS or Azure into the optimizer system to be able to not only say, oh well, I want low latency. Then this is hard-coded to use a Fargate instance instead of a lambda. But more realistically, being able to see what that means in lambda world and maybe increase the concurrency count. Because we know that within the confines of cost limitations or constraints that the company wants to have, it is more feasible and cost-effective to raise the minimum concurrency rate of that lambda instead of using Fargate. You can only do that by having real-time data, or aggregated data come from the performance characteristics of the applications. And so that's another layer that we're going to be focusing on. The third one is, just like Aaron said, being able to approach that editing experience and operational experience, not just through one system like InfraCopilot but also through a web UI, or an app, or even as an extension to other systems that want to integrate with Klotho's engine. The last thing that I think is key is that we're still holding on to the vision that infrastructure should be invisible to most developers. Infrastructure definition is similar to how we approach assembly code. It's the bits and pieces. It's the underlying components, the Us, the storage. And as long as we're building microservices in that level of fidelity, of like, thinking about the wiring and how things interconnect, then we're not going to get the gains of 10x productivity building cloud applications. We have to enable developers and operators to work on a higher abstraction. And so our end game, where we're headed, is still what we want to build with Klotho, which is the ability to write code and have it be translated into what's allowed in the infrastructure within the constraints of the underlying platforms that infrastructure or platform teams set for the rest of the organization. It can be one set or multiple sets, but it's still that type of developers develop, and the infrastructure teams set them up to be able to develop, and there's separation. VICTORIA: Those are all really interesting problems to be solving. I also saw on your roap that you have published on Klotho that you're thinking of open-sourcing Klotho on GitHub. AARON: So, at this point, we already have the core engine of Klotho open-sourced, so the same engine that's powering InfraCopilot and Klotho, the tool itself is open source today. So, if anyone wants to take a look, it is on github.com/klothoplatform/klotho. VICTORIA: Super interesting. And it sounds like you mentioned you have a Discord. So that's where you're also getting from developers on how to do this. And I think that challenge you mentioned about creating abstractions so that developers don't have to worry as much about the infrastructure and platform teams can just enable them to get their work done; I'm curious what you think is the biggest challenge with that. It seems like a problem that a lot of companies are trying to solve. So, what's the biggest challenge? And I think what do you think is unique about Klotho and solving that challenge? AARON: I guess what I would say the biggest challenge today is that every company is different enough that they all saw this in a slightly different way. So it's like, right now, the tools that are available are the building blocks to make the solution but not the solution itself. So, like, every cloud team approaches it on, let's build our own platform. We're building our own platform that every one of our developers is going to use. In some cases, we're building, like, frameworks and SDKs that everyone's going to use. But then the problem is that you're effectively saying my company is entering the platform management business. And there's no way the economies of scale will make sense forever in that world. So I think that's the biggest issue. And I think the reason it hasn't been solved is it's just a very hard problem. There's many approaches, but there's not a clear solution that kind of brings it all together. And I think our product is positioned better than most to solve some of the higher-level abstractions. It still doesn't solve the whole problem. There's still some things that are going to be tricky. But the idea is, if you can get to the point where you're using some of our abstractions, then you've guaranteed yourself portability into the future, like, your architecture will be able to evolve, even in technologies that don't exist yet once they become available. ALA: To tack on to what Aaron said, a key difference, and to our knowledge, this doesn't exist in any other tool or technology, is a fundamentally new architecture we call adaptive architecture. It is not microservices. It is not monoliths. It's a superset that combines all the benefits from monoliths, microservices, and serverless if you consider it a different platform or paradigm. What that means is that you get the benefits without the drawbacks. And the reason we can do it is because of the compiler approach that we're taking, where everything in the architecture that we produce is interchangeable. The team has decided to use Kubernetes, a specific version of Kubernetes with Istio. That works great. And, a year later, it turns out that that choice no longer scales well for the use. And we need to use Linkerd. The problem in today's world and what companies have to do is retrofit everything and not only the technology itself, but it's the ripple effects of changing it into everything else that all the other choices that were made that depended on it. In the Klotho world, because of the compilation step or the compilation approach and its extensibility, you could say, I want to take out Istio and replace it with Linkerd. And it would percolate all the changes that need to happen everywhere for that to maintain its semantic behavior. To our knowledge, that doesn't exist anywhere today. VICTORIA: So it would do, maybe not, like, would do migrations for you as well? ALA: I think migrations are a special case. When it comes to stateless things, yes. When it comes to data, we are much more conservative. Again, bringing what we've learned in different companies in, a lot of solutions try to solve all the things versus we're trying to play in a very specific niche, which is the adaptive architecture of it all. But if you want to move data, there's fantastic tools for it, and we will guide you through getting the access to the actual underlying services and, say, great, write a migration system, or we can generate for you. But you will run it to move the data from, let's say, Postgres to MySQL or from being able to drain a unit on Kubernetes to a lambda. Some of those things are much more automatic. And the transition happened through the underlying technologies like Terraform or Pulumi. Others will require you to take a step, not because we can't do it for you but we want to be conservative with the choices. AARON: I would also add that another aspect of this is that we don't position ourselves as being the center of the universe for these teams. Like a lot of products, you kind of have to adopt the platform, and everything has to plug into it, and if you don't adhere, it doesn't work. We're trying very, very hard with our design to make it so that existing apps will continue to function like they've always functioned. If app developers want to continue using direct SDKs and managing config themselves, they can absolutely do that. And then they'll interact well with Klotho apps that are also in that same company. So we're trying to make it so that you can adopt incrementally without having to go all in. VICTORIA: So that makes a lot of sense. So it's really helpful if you're trying to swap out those stateless parts of your infrastructure and you want to make some changes there. And then, if you were going to do a data migration, it would help you and guide you to where additional tools might be needed to do that. And at your market segment, you're really focusing on having it be an additional tool, as opposed to, like, an all-encoming platform. Did I get it all right? [crosstalk 31:07] ALA: Exactly. VICTORIA: [laughs] Cool. All right. Well, that's exciting. That's a lot of cool things that you all are working on. I'm curious how overall the workload is for you two. How big of a team do you have so far? How are you balancing out this work of creating something new and exciting that has such a broad potential scope? AARON: Yeah. So, right now, the team is currently six people. So it's Ala and I, plus four additional engineers is the current team. And in of, like, where we're focusing, the real answer is that it's somewhat reactive, and it's very fast. So, like, it could be, like...in fact, Copilot went from ideation to us acting on it extremely quickly. And it wasn't even in the pipeline before that. So I'd actually say the biggest challenge has been where do we sort of focus our energy to get the best results? And a lot of where we spend our time is sort of meta-process of, like, making sure we're investing in the right things. ALA: And I think that comes from both Aaron and I have been in the industry for over 15 years. We don't, you know, drop everything and now switch to something new. We're very both tactical and strategic with the pace and when we pivot. But the idea is when we decide to change and focus on something that we think will be higher value, and it's almost always rooted in the signals and hypotheses that we set out to kind of learn from, from every iteration that we go after. We are not the type that would say, "Oh, we saw this. Let's drop everything, and let's go do it." I think we've seen enough in the industry that there's a measure of knowing when to switch, and when to refocus, and what to do when these higher tidbits come, and then being able to execute aggressively when that choice or decision happens. VICTORIA: Are there any trends that you're watching right now that the outcome would influence a change in direction for you? ALA: Not technically. I think what we're seeing in the industry is there's no real approaches to solving the problem. I would say most of the solutions and trends that we're seeing are...I call them streamlined complexity. We choose a set of technologies, and we make that easy. We make the SaaS version, and it can do these workloads, and it makes that easy. But the minute you step out of the comfort zone of those tools, you're back into the nightmare that building distributed systems brings with it, and then you're back to, you know, square one. What we're trying to do is fundamentally solve the problem. And we haven't seen many at least make a lot of headway there. We are seeing a few of the startups that are starting to think in the same vein, which is the zeitgeist. And that's fantastic. We actually work with them closely to try and broaden the category. VICTORIA: Right. Do you feel that other companies who are working in a similar problem space that there is...is it competitive between each other? Or do you think it's actually more collaborative? ALA: It depends on the companies and what they're trying to achieve. Every set of companies have different incentives. So Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have, you know, are incentivized to keep you on their clouds. They may care less about what they have in there as long as you are happy to stay. So you'll see more open source being adopted. You will see Amazon trying to copy or operationalize a lot of open-source tools. Microsoft will give their...because they are working with larger companies to have more vertical solutions. Google is trying to catch up. If you look at startups, you will see some focus more on developers. You'll see others focus on infra team. So it really depends on the intersection of the companies, and then they either collaborate or they compete, depending on how it affects their strategy. In our case, we recognize that our competition is the incumbents and the current way of doing things. And so we are happy to collaborate with all the startups that are doing something in the vicinity of what we're doing, startups like Ampt, and Encore, and Winglang. And there's several others. We have our own Slack channel where we talk about, like, where we're headed or at least what we can do to one another. VICTORIA: Great. And I wonder if that's part of your business decision to open source your product as well or if there are other factors involved. ALA: I think the biggest factor that we've seen, realistically, is the expectation in the developer community to have a core that is open source, not even the source available model but to have an open-source core that they can rely on always existing and referencing when, you know if the company disappears or Oracle buys them. And so I would say that that was the biggest determining factor in the end to open-sourcing the Klotho engine. It's a very pragmatic view. VICTORIA: That makes sense. Well, I wanted to make sure we had time to ask one of my favorite questions that I ask on the podcast, and you can both answer. But if you could go back in time to when you first started this project, what advice would you give yourself? ALA: I guess the advice that I would give is keep selling and start selling as early as you can, even before the vision is realized. Or let's say you're making kind of headway towards what you'll wind up sharing and giving companies, the lead time to creating the opportunities and the belief and the faith that you can solve problems for companies, and the entire machinery of doing that is a lot more complex than most founders, I think, or at least first-time founders or, honestly, myself have found it to be. AARON: Yeah. If I try and answer that same question, it's very challenging. I guess my perspective now is there's nothing I could tell myself that would make me go any faster because a lot of it really is the journey. Like, the amount of stuff that we've learned in the last year of working on this and exploring and talking with people and everything else has been so vast that there's nothing I can communicate to past me that would prepare me any better. So [laughs] I think I would try just my best to be encouraging to just stick with it. VICTORIA: Well, that's good. And who knows what you're going to learn in the next year that [laughs] probably might not help you in the past either? That's wonderful. Do you have any final takeaways for our listeners today or anything you'd like to promote? ALA: So, from my lens, I've always wanted to do a startup but felt that the life setting wasn't quite ready. And a lot of the startup culture is talking about younger, earlier founders. I think having had the industry experience and understanding both the organizational and technical challenges, knowing more people, and engineers, and founders, potential founders, has been vastly more helpful than what I would have been able to pull off ten years ago. So, if you are thinking maybe it's too late, it is not. It's probably easier in some regards now. And yeah, check out InfraCopilot. It's on infracopilot.io. We would love to have you try it out and go on this journey with us. AARON: Yeah, I would definitely echo that. I mean, sort of the same thing on the journey. Like, it's never too late to start. And yeah, like, I would say being in the industry and actually seeing these problems first-hand makes it so much more fulfilling to actually try and solve them. VICTORIA: That's [inaudible 38:15]. I'm excited to see what you all accomplish. And I appreciate you coming on the show. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, you can email us at [email protected]. And you could find me on Twitter @victori_ousg or on Mastodon @[email protected]. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Special Guests: Aaron Torres and Ala Shiban. Sponsored By: thoughtbot: Are you an entrepreneur or start-up founder looking to gain confidence in the way forward for your idea? At thoughtbot, we know you’re tight on time and investment, which is why we’ve created targeted 1-hour remote workshops to help you develop a concrete plan for your product’s next steps. Over four interactive sessions, we work with you on research, product design sprint, critical path, and presentation prep so that you and your team are better equipped with the skills and knowledge for success. Find out how we can help you move the needle at: tbot.io/entrepreneurs Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Brendan Schwartz is the Co-Founder and CTO of Wistia, software that makes it easy to find, engage, and grow your audience with video. Victoria talks to Brendan about the latest updates on the platform, interesting problems he found that Wistia was able to remove and help his team get to speed and velocity, and the personal value that drives his decision-making. Wista Follow Wistia on Twitter or LinkedIn. Follow Brendan Schwartz on LinkedIn, Twitter, or visit his website. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. And with me today is Brendan Schwartz, Co-Founder and CTO of Wistia, software that makes it easy to find, engage, and grow your audience with video. Brendan, thank you for ing us. BRENDAN: Thanks so much for having me. VICTORIA: And I believe this will be your third time, at least, on the Giant Robots Podcast, right? BRENDAN: Yes, I think this is my third appearance. Thank you for having me back. VICTORIA: Yes. BRENDAN: Is there anything I receive? What is it when you host SNL in a [crosstalk 00:39]. VICTORIA: You get a jacket. BRENDAN: A jacket, yeah. VICTORIA: Yeah, we should. BRENDAN: [laughs] VICTORIA: We should do a Giant Robots jacket or something from returned guests. I love it. So it's been great to follow along your journey here. So, for those who don't know, like, what is Wistia? And I'll say, just a precursor, that thoughtbot is a client of Wistia. So we use it ourselves. But why don't you just give us a little bit about what is the product and what makes it different? BRENDAN: Sure. And thank you so much for being a customer all these years. You kind of hit it at the top, but we help businesses of all sizes thrive with video. And so we serve mostly marketers. To dive a little bit into the history of the business, we'll be around seven...is that right? 17 years. It sounds like a long time when I say it out loud, [laughs] 17 years this June. And, for most of our history, we were, I'd say, a video-hosting platform for marketers. So if you want to put video on your website, track who's watching it, how they're watching it, and integrate that data with your other marketing systems, that was our focus and what we did. And over, I'd say, the past two years, we've brought in that focus to help businesses with all aspects of their video marketing from creating video...We recently introduced a live video product for webinars and for live events last fall. We just launched last week, which I'm very excited about native video recording in the Wistia platform. So you can record your webcam and your screen. And there's also a very simple video editor in the platform, which has been really powerful for folks to make small adjustments to content or to atomize content, take out highlights or sections of things, and to be able to publish them to their audiences. VICTORIA: Thank you for providing that context. And I'm curious if there were any, like, environmental or market forces that pushed you in that direction with the latest updates on the platform. BRENDAN: So, like I mentioned, we...in a large part, our success came (We're a relatively small team.) it came from being focused. And so for, you know, that decade or more, there were a lot of things that we had heard from the market or from customers. Like, live video was an obvious one we had been asked for a really long time. When will Wistia do live? When will Wistia do live? And, you know, our approach to that is we want to be really good and excellent at the things that we do and be focused. And I think that has served us well over the time that we've existed. And some of that came out of; I'd say, the really early days of the company where...it's funny, [laughs] we've always built Wistia, you know, sometimes we say in the shadow of YouTube, so YouTube and seeing YouTube. My co-founder was the first person who showed me YouTube in 2005, I think it was, and that was part of the inspiration to start Wistia. We are both really into video. And we saw that and having video be more accessible on the web, we knew was something that was going to change the world. There was a question...this sounds kind of dated nowadays to say, but there was a question if you were starting a business, you know, let’s say, in 2006 or 2007 or '8, right? What are you going to do when Google enters your space? [laughs] It was a funny one for us to answer because we said...well, I forgot when YouTube was bought by Google. It was maybe in 2006 or something like that. Like, Google is already in our space, and it's free. So that was always an interesting challenge. And the way that we were successful there [laughs]...obviously, YouTube is at a much larger scale [laughs] and level of success than Wistia is. But to the extent we have a business at all against a very well-known and free competitor from those early days, it was being really focused on our customers and keeping the product footprint fairly small. Our business changed a lot during the pandemic. There were some obvious things, right? Video was used a lot more. So existing customers had a lot more usage. We saw an influx of customers, people who maybe were late to adopt video in their organization, and then that became a much obvious way that people could reach their audiences and grow. So that was something of a tailwind for us. And then it also forced us to kind of take a step back and look at the market in general with clear eyes. It was a funny moment, I think, for me and my co-founder because in the years leading up to that, you know, it had been like 12,13 years of doing Wistia, and it felt like we had solved a lot of problems in the product. We were still building new things, but they were for the most mature part of our audience or the most advanced marketers, which was pretty fun. But it felt like a lot of the problems had been solved. We were always, like, is the product done? Is the product complete? And when we took a step back and looked at the market, what we had found was that we had kind of just, like, got ourselves into this, you know, more mature corner of the market. But in a large part, because of COVID, so many businesses, existing and new businesses, were very new to video and were using video in new ways. And people who had been using video, their solutions to do that were super fragmented. You'd have one product that is providing...[laughs] You might have a different product you're using for internal meetings, video meetings, and that's different than a live event product, that's different than a webinar product, that's different than where you might publish your videos or host your videos, which is different than how you'd, like, analyze your performance. And as video became more important to organizations, that fragmentation of the solutions was something that was super painful. And we had heard from a lot of people who were Wistia customers and people who were not...having this as an all-in-one platform was something that they really desired, which I was also kind of, you know, we were, like, cynical about a little bit, right? Because if [laughs] you're in the world of product, it's like you can ask, you know, if you had a magic wand, what would you want? And someone says, "Oh, I want it all in one. And if you could just do everything for me, that would be so great." You know, it's hard to say, is that what people really want? And what gave us more confidence at that was, correct, is when we started digging into some of the details and hearing about existing workflows that existed that marketers have to deal with, including ourselves. We do a lot of content marketing. A lot of the really interesting things you could do in a product that is all in one it opens up new opportunities. And you could just imagine...you've hosted a webinar before. Almost always, it's the best practice that you host a webinar; after you're finished, you probably have a good marketing asset there. You should publish it to your website. You usually need to do some light editing. Maybe you're going to take off the Q&A before you publish it. And you put it on your website. And then, a while later, you're like, was this effective? Did it work? And then you have to, you know, probably have a spreadsheet somewhere. You have to go into the tool used to host the webinar to figure out who was watching it and [laughs] who ed. Did they attend? And then where's the data for how it performed on your website? How many people watched it? Did you get subscribers if you were, you know, had an email gate on that content? It's cumbersome, and it's a mess. And then, you know, the most motivated people who are well-resourced have the time to do that and analyze the performance. But then a lot of marketers who are on smaller teams they just don't have time to do that, which means a lot of content gets under-utilized or under-marketed. So a lot of evidence and motivation to change what we were doing and expand the product footprint. So that had us make a big investment in our product design and engineering teams, and we almost...we doubled them in about 18 months. And then that kind of set us on this journey that we started maybe two years ago to greatly expand what we're doing. VICTORIA: Well, that's great. So just to play that back, staying close and focused on your customers almost had you to a point of being stable with your product until COVID happened. And you have this increased demand for video that opened it up to almost have Wistia be like a startup again and create a whole new feature branch, right? BRENDAN: Yeah, that's exactly right. And that was really fun and motivating. I mean, we...that early-stage energy and not having all the answers to things where stuff is a little bit, you know, less-researched, and it's faster paced is something that I really like. That was a big shift for the company. So there was some, I don't know, I think we had some self-doubt a little bit if I'm honest, of, you know, when you've been so focused for so long. Like, can we do this? Like, will we be able to create something really good with this expanded footprint, and what resources that take? And is it going to take shifting the culture and mindset of the team, like, in ourselves? But, I don't know, that's kind of why I started the [laughs] business in the first, like, the adventure and not knowing what's next is very appealing. So that's been the fun part of it. VICTORIA: And how did you go about shifting that mindset? Or even what was the moment where you realized that you needed to go after this shift? And how did you start lobbying everyone around you to get on board? BRENDAN: A lot of those customer interviews and market interviews, we worked with an outside firm. We worked with Boston Consulting Group, who was a really great partner. We have obviously worked with folks outside. We hadn't worked with somebody; I'd say, at that scale in of kind of, like, tie-in with our company strategy today. But that was really helpful to have a partner, especially to push us. We got to something different than we had been doing, I mean, not dramatically so. But it was expanding what we were doing. So that was really helpful. It helped...that put some structure around it to what we had, and the whole company knew this was happening and was along for the ride. So I'd say the communication and getting to a clear strategy was something we did pretty well, and telling that story internally. I'd say where we didn't do as well [laughs] and were maybe late to make some decisions is how the culture would need to change to that strategy. Again, like I said, we've doubled the product design and engineering teams. That is now feeling in a pretty good spot, but that was a lot of growth for us. And was, I'd say, pretty messy along the way. So the beginning, I'd say, was clear, and I think communicated well. And then I feel like in the middle it was, I don't know, a big mess where we got maybe a year in, and we're like, wow, we have this new strategy, but we really haven't executed much on it. Some of these things we're building are taking a lot longer than we thought. Our velocity doesn't feel great. Like, maybe we didn't plan some of this stuff out. Like, we've hired a lot of people, but, like, are they productive yet? And so, yeah, I think we were in a pretty [laughs] tough spot maybe last summer. We were a year into this strategic shift, but it didn't feel like we were really moving against it as much as we had hoped. VICTORIA: It makes sense that it would take some time to change strategic direction and then get to that high-velocity point that you would expect. Were there other blockers that you found you were able to remove to get the team back up to that high velocity on delivering features for clients? BRENDAN: [laughs] Well, it's funny that you say that. I wish; I mean, that is pretty obvious, I think, and obvious in retrospect. But, for some reason, when you're in this, or when we were in this, you're impatient, and you want it faster. And I think probably [laughs] having some clear expectations would have made the ride a little smoother along the way for this. I feel like I have to remind myself of this pretty frequently. I mean, Wistia is not big. We're 180 people or so but certainly bigger than...I can think back to various other sizes. Doing that strategic shift it takes time for leadership, let's say, or me to shift my mindset about some of those things. And then once you've changed your mind, you kind of... it's easy, or at least for me, to discount the time it took and all the information it took to lead to that, which needs to cascade through an organization. And so that's where some of that impatience...or just the piece you said about, yeah, it makes sense that this would take time. I was like -- VICTORIA: [laughs] [inaudible 11:56] BRENDAN: [laughter] You're like, once you've got it, you're like, wow, this is so exciting. Let's go. Let's go. And everybody is like, what are you talking about? VICTORIA: Yeah. My background has been in, like, Federal IT consulting. So you're used to kind of the pace of things being a little slower. And I think people forget that as an organization gets to any amount of size, that kind of bureaucracy tends to creep in. And, like you're saying, the information just needs to cascade down throughout everybody. I think my original question was, were there any blockers or interesting problems you found that you were able to remove and help your team get to that speed or velocity you really wanted? BRENDAN: Yeah, there were a lot. I think most of them and most of the hardest ones to move centered around cultural change, and they weren't necessarily so clear at the onset. And so, you know, one thing that kind of partway into the strategy change that became clear is, and you had said it, it's like going from, you know, basically thinking of ourselves as being in a late stage or more mature market to being in an early-stage environment. And the type of culture that, you know, succeeds in those worlds is different. One thing that we've learned along the way at Wistia that we have employed and I think been successful with is this concept that when you update your strategy as a company, you should be thoughtful and, like, make conscious updates to your culture and values. And so much is that...so you're saying culture is the way that you work. You want that to be in of strategy. And I when I first heard this concept, and we were earlier into our journey. I was like, what is this, like, corporate nonsense? Culture is just this, like, intangible, you know, it's this sum of how everyone works. And it's, like, this beautiful symphony of values. [laughs] It was a more kind of, like, idealistic [laughs] view of it or more organic view of it, which I think is reasonable. But you can also be intentional about your culture. So when we wrestled with that the first time...this was many years ago when we updated. I forgot even what the strategic changes at the time. But we updated our values, and we set about making a conscious cultural change. So when we changed the strategy this time, we did the same thing. I'd say we were a little bit late doing it, like, getting to it. But we did do it. And so some of that was there were certain things...so, for instance, being so focused. We had a really lean team. And we were optimizing for things like predictability of outcomes and needing to be correct. So, for instance, if you're only going to make...let's just, like, say, on the product side. Like, if you're only going to be able to ship or do, you know, a few big improvements to the product per year, like, you're well served to kind of go slowly and make sure those have a reasonable chance of success. This was, like, the culture and the mode that we were in. That doesn't really work very well when you're in an early-stage environment where things are pretty unpredictable and things are moving really quickly. So that was an example of something that we kind of identified, and we're like, we're going to need to change this. So it was this shift from teams feeling the need to be correct and really well-researched about something to moving towards; I'd say, you need to talk to a lot of customers to build customer intuition in order to make decisions faster. But that shouldn't be the case that; for every product decision you need to make, you have to talk to 5 or 10 customers to validate that. You should be able to build an intuition to be able to make those decisions faster, and we should be more tolerant of failure. And so, we should work in a more incremental style. I mean, some of this is, like, super familiar to anybody [laughs] listening to this, right? It's like a more agile style. So work more incrementally, like, work incrementally towards great as opposed to, you know, this big thing that's going to be super polished and correct from the jump. VICTORIA: I think that's really interesting. And it's not necessarily wrong to be so thorough in your changes when you're in that steady state, and you, like, know what clients you have, and you have a pretty well-defined product. But it's interesting that it took quite a bit of effort, it sounds like, to shift back into a flow state where you're incrementally doing changes very frequently to get that new product and find those new customers that you're targeting. BRENDAN: And it continues to be. We've made a lot of progress on this. And maybe it's helpful...I don't know if it's helpful to folks listening to dive into some of the details of how we went about making those changes. It's still really difficult, right? There's a lot of things in tension. So I'd say in our previous mode, one thing we were pretty good about is when something was released, it was well-tested. It was high quality. It was, like, well-communicated. Throughout the org, people knew what was coming. Obviously, there were hiccups with that, but, like, that's the side of the spectrum that we were on there. And then in this mode where we're building faster and more incrementally, we have a lot of internal tension in of quality, like, is this good enough? Is this first version good enough? Are we going to make a bad first impression? And so, obviously, you do this for a...it's a set of trade-offs, right? There's no free lunch, but that is still very much we're trying to find the right balance. VICTORIA: Right. So, like, in your role as CTO, how do you make people feel comfortable failing [laughs] [inaudible 17:06] describing. BRENDAN: Some of this cultural change, I think, it's been interesting to go through because some of the properties of how we had been working are, you know, things that are part of the way I like to work. Like, it makes me uncomfortable to release something that you know the flaws in it. And that's an old kind of startup advice that I think is generally right. Like, if you release something and it doesn't make you a little bit uncomfortable, you have waited too long. [laughs] Advice is very easy and abstract. It's hard to apply. Like, there's a huge spectrum there of, like, how uncomfortable [laughs] you want to be. But I will say that that's been something that's been, yeah, hard to reconcile with. And I guess that the piece that I'm able to do in my role is, like, remind folks where we're headed, right? So the first version can be a bit rough. What matters is what happens after that. So, if we're quick to listen to customers, to fix those things, to correct that, and people can see that momentum, I think that matters for a lot. And I think that's, like, something...I've been telling that story repeatedly. Internally, I've had other leaders, and that's what we've really been leaning on is, like, we've adjusted how we're delivering customer value. And that we're going to push things out that might be a little bit more raw, but where we ultimately are going to get them to and get them to quickly is something that we're really proud of. So that has helped. And then, I'd say we still haven't figured out, which is, again, like, in these smaller increments, things can be a failure, and that's okay as long as we learn something and correct and move forward. And one thing that's been a little bit tricky to recognize, too, is there's some places where you have some experiment, and you're not actually sure if there's a market or if there's a need for a feature. So you might do something, and it really doesn't land well. And then you learn something about the market or the customer base and say, okay, that isn't what people needed. But, in a lot of places that we're building product, like, let's say, take live video, for example. [laughs] When we launch a live video product, it may be a failure. Like, the first version may not be completely right or may be a failure. But the customer need for [laughs] a live video for a webinar exists, right? So that's not the type of failure that you go, oh, I guess there's not [laughs] a market there. Or, it's like, you go back and say, okay, how do we need to improve this to make it work? I don't think we have the right language internally around that. You know, there are certain areas where it's like a failure, and then it's like, okay, we've learned not to do that again. And there's other areas where it's like, we're going to keep...[laughs] not we're going to keep failing. I mean, there are goals to succeed, right? But we're going to keep improving this until we get it to work because we know there is a market here, and there is a customer need. VICTORIA: Making a culture where it's acceptable to run experiments [chuckles] and as long as you're learning from the failures. And honestly, it sounds like you all are very connected to your customer. Like, you're talking to them regularly. You're testing out features with them and getting that . And that sounds like that's really what you want to focus on and want your whole team to focus on. BRENDAN: Yes, yeah, exactly. Mid-Roll Ad: As life moves online, bricks-and-mortar businesses are having to adapt to survive. With over 18 years of experience building reliable web products and services, thoughtbot is the technology partner you can trust. We provide the technical expertise to enable your business to adapt and thrive in a changing environment. We start by understanding what’s important to your customers to help you transition to intuitive digital services your customers will trust. We take the time to understand what makes your business great and work fast yet thoroughly to build, test, and validate ideas, helping you discover new customers. Take your business online with design‑driven digital acceleration. Find out more at tbot.io/acceleration or click the link in the show notes for this episode. VICTORIA: You mentioned a little bit about your values. So, what would you say is, like, your most important personal value that drives your decision-making at Wistia? BRENDAN: So, like I mentioned, we've changed our values over time when we've changed strategy. And we think of our values as a decision-making framework, not as a set of things that we value. For instance, if you go on our website on wistia.com, I think about/values, about/company. It's somewhere. And you can see our values. It's not a list of everything that Wistia values or even the things that we value the most. For example, Wistia has, like, creativity is something that I value a lot that is very built into Wistia's culture that we value a lot, but it's not a listed value. It used to be at one point, and then we found that as a decision-making tool, it wasn't very helpful. [laughs] If you're faced with a decision, and you say, okay, one of the values is creativity, how do I make this more creative, right? VICTORIA: [laughs] BRENDAN: That's not usually the question you want to ask. So we have, over the years, shifted towards the values are a decision-making framework. And I'd say the one value that has stood the test of time in there is simplicity, which is not unique to Wistia, but it's something that I care a lot about personally. It's served us well as a business. It's almost always harder to get to a simple solution or answer than it is to get to a complex one. It takes a lot of failure. Sometimes there isn't a simple solution, but I think it's always worth the pursuit of trying to find one. And that's served us well in keeping a focused and easy-to-use product. I think that's fairly self-evident [laughs] why that matters to customers. And it's something that I think it's hard to do as you grow, and add, and get bigger. And it's an important feature of the product. And it's an important feature of, I don't know, companies' internal policies or the employee experience. The simpler something is, it's easier to understand. I think the more someone who works inside your company can wrap their arms around more of that context or, you know, more of the product, more of the all the ins and outs of how it is to work there, the better informed they'll be, the better faster they'll be able to make decisions, and the better work they'll be able to do. So, yeah, simplicity, minimalism, those are things I think that have served us well over the years. VICTORIA: Oh, I appreciate that. I could see how that could apply to how you're writing your code, or how you're deg a feature, or even your pricing structure. BRENDAN: Yeah, and I don't think...we definitely don't always get it right. So, you know, all of this is aspirational, but I think it's the right thing to aspire to. VICTORIA: Right. Oh, I'm familiar. [laughter] It's like that, I mean, the Marie Kondo, like, keeping it simple and organized. It's definitely aspirational [laughter] in my personal life as well. But that makes sense. Okay, I have a fun one for you. What is your favorite viral video style that you think people should do more of on Wistia? [laughs] BRENDAN: Oh, whoa. That's a hot-button one. [laughs] I think we have long said...this, like, feels like it takes me back to when we first started Wistia. The term viral and viral video was a new thing for the internet, I guess because video on the internet was still fairly new. I've always been on the side of this, like, hardworking video. And most of our customers are B2B businesses, so these are, like, marketing teams at B2B companies. I'm sure a lot of people who are listening to this have seen some very cringeworthy, you know, attempts at a viral video made by various corporations. Those usually don't land well. There are some people out there maybe that can crack this and make something that is viral through some art and science, but most everybody else cannot. VICTORIA: [laughs] BRENDAN: It's like, not something that can be kind of, like, bottled and captured. So we've always been on the side of, like, be authentic, be yourself, make these harder-working videos. But -- VICTORIA: I think that's generally good advice for businesses that was, like, maybe don't try to just do viral trends...[laughs] Like, make your own authentic content. But you personally now, like, yeah, if you were going to do whatever the latest TikTok trend is, which one would you pick? BRENDAN: You know, okay, maybe here's one. So we have always been, as I described it, on the side of, like, do not do this. It is, like, almost always going to be cringe-worthy. But do you ...I don't know what year this is from, the Harlem Shake. It was mostly kind of a business trend, right? You'd play this track, the Harlem Shake, and have, like, when the beat dropped, it would go from normal office to everyone dancing in a costume. VICTORIA: Oh, that's fun. BRENDAN: So it was, like, a fun trend. But it was...we were and still are, I'd say, fairly, like, anti-trend. I don't know what, you know, like, contrarian when it comes to marketing trends or things like that. But then, when this happened, we were like, this will be really funny. We should set a calendar reminder to do this, like, ten years in the future. Actually, the last onsite that we had; unfortunately, it was the last day. Our head of production [laughs] who, like, we kind of had this, like, running joke of he randomly saw a news article. I think that it was the 10-year anniversary of the Harlem Shake [laughs] or whatever. He's like, oh, this would be...this is the perfect time to do this, now that it's so, so, so out of vogue. But, you know, people, like, maybe have fond memories of it. And now this is so out of fashion. I think it could be funny to do it. [laughs] VICTORIA: Yeah, right. You don't want to do it just because it's the trend. But if it fits your personality and your business, then I think it would make sense. BRENDAN: Yeah. VICTORIA: I've heard that there might be a Wes Anderson style. [laughs] And I wanted to do a Wes Anderson goes to RailsConf video, but I'm actually meeting this -- BRENDAN: Did you do it? VICTORIA: I didn't do it. I'm not actually good enough. I think tomorrow I'm meeting with the Wistia customer success team. [laughs] I'm going to ask them to help me. BRENDAN: Oh yes, we'll help you. VICTORIA: Yes. BRENDAN: I do like...that trend is nice. That feels like a; I don't know, like, less aggressive. I've seen a lot of those, and they don't feel, I don't know, cringeworthy to me because maybe it's a nice shell in which to put some personality and content, as opposed to -- VICTORIA: Just being goofy or whatever, yeah. [laughs] BRENDAN: Yeah, I don't know exactly how to describe it. But I think that one works better. Yeah, someone at Wistia did that the other day in the office, and people enjoyed it a lot. That was more for, like, internal consumption. But those ones are nice. VICTORIA: Yeah. Well, I like the idea of bringing some of these editing tools to marketing teams where they can maybe not create viral videos all the time but do a lot of very highly editing and having it all in one place as well. Like you mentioned, I do run webinars, [laughs] and I'm familiar with the bouncing around between different tools to get everything to work. And there's even sometimes, like, security issues with different types of video-hosting tools. So I think there's a lot to offer for a marketing team who may not have as many resources to do the individual pieces. BRENDAN: Yeah, that's a story we've heard, yeah, from a lot of customers. And we have a lot of video resources internally because we're a video company, and we invest a lot in that. But even so, yeah, if you talk to folks on our marketing team, they'd say it's hard to get those resources, especially if you have something small that you want to do. I think it's always better if the person who has the need can easily do the thing themselves, right? More and better work gets done that way versus if it's, like, this chain of having to, like, ask other people because then you're like, should I really ask? It's like, do I want to, you know, spend social capital or budget on this thing? Will it work, will it not? But you can be, I think, faster and also experiment more when you have those tools available to you. VICTORIA: Yeah, no, that makes sense. Because I don't know if it's worth [laughs] me spending my team's time to make this Wes Anderson video, but I want to do it for fun. So we'll see if I can do it at RubyKaigi next week. BRENDAN: You should. That's great. That's, like, the perfect example of it because I feel like, yeah, well, maybe not. You might be sheepish to be like, yeah, I'm going to spend, like, ten grand with this, like, contractor to make this Wes Anderson...and to be like, what do you...what? What are you doing? VICTORIA: [laughs] That makes sense. BRENDAN: But if you do it, I think, you know, it's very likely it'll be really well-received, and you'll learn something about your audience. And then that could, like, blossom into, you know, a whole bunch of other things. I feel like that's been the case for us in our content marketing. We've long said, and this is, like, much more commonplace now, but one of the advantages of having a video producer in-house, like, is exactly that you now are employing someone full-time. And so you've, you know, like, maybe knocked off, like, the major pieces of content that a business would make with video, some of the obvious things. But then it's exactly what you're talking about that, oh, we could take a risk, and we could try this. And that's where you learn and figure out new things and things that are different than your competitors might be doing or more creative approaches. VICTORIA: Oh, That's great. You know, something I like to ask everybody who comes on the show, and it will be super interesting since you've been on a few times before, but if you could go back in time to your younger self when you first started Wistia, what advice would you give yourself? BRENDAN: Patient...One funny thing of when we started Wistia, we had really unrealistic expectations. I don't think that's [laughs] unique when starting a business when you're young. But yeah, I was 22 or 23, as was my co-founder, Chris. And we really honestly thought—this is, like, this is cringeworthy to say—that we would either be really successful and, in six months, build this great business and sell it to Facebook or now Meta, right? But that was, like, a hot company at the time. So we'd be wildly successful and sell to Facebook in six months, or we would fail in obscurity. That was, like, our honest-to-goodness business plan, which is so naive. [laughs] And here we are, you know, 17 years later and having a wonderful time. So I guess I would say, I mean, it's the most cliché advice, and you're young, and you never listen to stuff like this, but it's, like, enjoy the journey. [laughter] Things haven't always been easy. And there are, you know, hard challenges and, like, times filled with self-doubt. But even in those moments, if you have from people around you, if you can learn to enjoy the growth and the journey, that is what keeps you motivated to do something for a long period of time. And usually, you know, people who stay focused on something for a long period of time you figure it out and can be successful. This sounds like the most generic advice as I say this out loud. VICTORIA: [laughs] BRENDAN: It really is. Enjoy the journey. [laughs] VICTORIA: Enjoy the journey. But I think that's common. And even actually talking with Chad a few weeks ago and interviewing him about thoughtbot, is his younger self would tell him to have more fun [laughs] during the whole process and really enjoy it. And I think it's also interesting that you had either the most optimistic and the most [laughs] pessimistic as options and, like, nothing in between [laughter] that you expected would happen. Which is funny because I have people ask me, like, is there still money in building apps and building new products? And it's like, yeah, like, it feels like there's these big people in the space, and they're doing everything you could think of possible. But there's still niche market that you can pursue [laughs], right? And there is still the ways that you can differentiate yourself as a product. BRENDAN: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. What advice would you give to your younger self? VICTORIA: Oh, me? I think, you know, probably something similar. Like, I feel like all of the times in my life where I've been, like, what am I going to do next and been really stressed out about it, within, like, three to six months, I found a new job, or I found something better where life improved a hundred-fold. [laughter]. So I think that's something even now I like to keep in mind is, like, if things turned down badly, like; usually, things turn around in a few months after that, [laughs] and a lot of times for the better. And that's, you know, true with, like, moving to California across the country from DC a few years ago. And yeah, a few other points like that. I think the other part I think about is who I might have invested more time in and who I would have invested less time in. And like what you were saying, like, having the of people around you, and finding the people who really have your back and you, and, for people who don't, maybe letting go a little sooner. [laughs] BRENDAN: Oh, interesting. Yeah, that's good advice. Yeah, I feel like both of those things are things I should probably remind myself of more frequently. [laughs] VICTORIA: Right? And have more fun, which means...there's another quote I heard that's, like, when people travel back in time, they're worried about changing a small thing that will affect the future. But people don't think that they can make small changes now that will affect their future big time. BRENDAN: Oh, that's a good one. I haven't heard that. But that's a good one. VICTORIA: Well, super cool. Just to kind of really summarize or go back to some things we mentioned already about video, just how important do you think video really is to marketing in the current landscape for businesses? BRENDAN: I mean, [laughs] I'm a very biased party, but I think it is becoming increasingly more important. I think it is the default way a lot of people want to consume information. This is a whole other tip that we didn't talk about with what's happening in the world of generative AI. And I'm sure a lot of people listening to this have voice cloning and how good those things have been getting. I think it's going to make the value of authentic connections in video much more important in the short and medium term. And there's some challenging questions about how do you tell what's real in an environment where we've gone past the uncanny valley in of generating, you know, an avatar of me or you with the perfect voice clone? But I think people are going to rely a lot on video to break through. VICTORIA: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It's going to be just more video world [laughs] as it goes. What does success look like for Wistia six months from now and even five years from now, the longer term? BRENDAN: I think for six months from now, so there's a lot of new areas of the product that we've added. And, in the next six months, we should be able to make pretty substantial progress to have those parts of the product have really solid adoption and repeated usage by customers. I think that's what success looks like, which we're seeing it now for our editors, probably the farthest along, that it has really good adoption among the customer base, and repeat usage, which I think is, like, a really good sign of success for a product. Live is still really early for us. You don't get a lot of shots if something goes wrong with a live event. [laughs] You know, I'd be pretty quick to look for another platform. And that's a pretty mature market where there are a lot of really strong competition. I think if we can get to a place in six months where we've got, you know, a few hundred customers using that every week or every month, we'd feel like we're on a path towards success. And the five-year version, I don't know, we recently started making three-year goals for the company a few years ago that have been pretty helpful to have as an anchoring. We have not made a five-year goal. But the thing I'm very excited about right now and what we're doing is, again, like, live is a small example. The market for live itself is much bigger than the market that traditionally Wistia has been in, and just in of video hosting, which itself has always grown a lot over the years. And it's itself a big market, as is video recording and creating video. So we have entered into a bunch of new markets that are all really quite large. And it's pretty humbling to be in a spot where I feel like we have a really solid base with a lot of in-depth knowledge of marketing and our customer to be able to build a really excellent product for that set. We're playing in a much bigger market than I ever thought we would. VICTORIA: It's like, success already achieved. [laughter] BRENDAN: Well, I don't know. It doesn't feel that way. It doesn't feel that way. But -- [laughs] VICTORIA: Maybe next time you come on the podcast, you'll have another success story to share with us. [laughs] BRENDAN: I hope so. Yeah, I feel like that's always the case, right? It's like, yeah, there are moments where we're certainly very proud of what we've been able to achieve. But most of my time is spent [laughs] in the headspace of, you know, why are we so slow? Why is the product not good enough? Why are we, you know, like, all the stuff that's going wrong, right? Which drives you to be better and is exciting. VICTORIA: Right. That makes sense. Well, hopefully, this helps remind you all the good stuff that you all have done so far, too. BRENDAN: [laughs] VICTORIA: I'm really excited to hear about just how your values drive your decisions and then how that goes to the rest of the team and how closely you're listening to your customers, too, on the product. I think those are all just really great cultural examples and ways to build great products. So, thank you for sharing your story with me. And you can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. And if you have questions or comments, you can email us at [email protected]. And you can find me on Twitter at @victori_ousg. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Special Guest: Brendan Schwartz. Sponsored By: thoughtbot: As life moves online, bricks-and-mortar businesses are having to adapt to survive. With over 18 years of experience building reliable web products and services, thoughtbot is the technology partner you can trust. We provide the technical expertise to enable your business to adapt and thrive in a changing environment. We start by understanding what’s important to your customers to help you transition to intuitive digital services your customers will trust. We take the time to understand what makes your business great and work fast yet thoroughly to build, test, and validate ideas, helping you discover new customers. Take your business online with design‑driven digital acceleration. Find out more at: url tbot.io/acceleration or click the link in the show notes for this episode. Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Agnes Malatinszky is the Founder of Senga, which takes care of back-office istrative needs for freelancers, contractors, and solopreneurs. Victoria and Will interview Agnes about the thoughtbot Incubator program and what led Agnes to choose to apply, what the demands on her time were like, how it worked, and how she feels now that she's at the end of the program. Senga Follow Senga on Twitter or their Discord. Follow Agnes Malatinszky on LinkedIn or Twitter. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: WILL: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Will Larry. VICTORIA: I'm your other host, Victoria Guido. And with me today is Agnes Malatinszky, Founder of Senga, providing back-end for freelancers. Agnes, thank you for ing me. AGNES: Hey, it's a pleasure to be here. VICTORIA: You are the first graduate of thoughtbot's incubator program, and I'm really excited to dive into that with you today. So, before we get started in talking about the incubator program, let's just start with what fun thing do you have going on this week? AGNES: I'm based in Washington, D.C., and it's a beautiful time of year here. Early summer, late spring is gorgeous. So I'm excited because my family and I are actually headed out to Harpers Ferry this weekend for a little hike. So I'm looking forward to that. WILL: So, what is...when you say a hike, can you explain it to anybody that's outside of the D.C. area? AGNES: It's just a beautiful area in West Virginia. And we're going to take our dog and my daughter out there and get some fresh air and walk around. There's a little historic town there as well that's really interesting to explore. WILL: That sounds fun. VICTORIA: Yeah. I've been to Harpers Ferry to go floating, like, on the river. AGNES: Yes. VICTORIA: Where you float down the river in inner tubes and drink beverages. [laughter] There's also...there's rock climbing in Harpers Ferry too, which is sometimes closed for bird nesting. So it is really beautiful. AGNES: Ooh, I didn't know that. That's really cool. We'll keep an eye out for that. WILL: Yes. For anybody that doesn't know, Victoria is an amazing rock climber. I have a lot of respect for her because I don't know if I could do it. [laughter] VICTORIA: You could definitely do it. The next thoughtbot trip that we're on, we'll go rock climbing, Will. I'm confident in your skills. You could do it. Yes, I'm a big rock climber and rock-climbing advocate, so I'll talk about it forever if you let me. WILL: [laughs] VICTORIA: And I'm actually going to go rock climbing this weekend and get outside myself. And we're going up to Mammoth, California. And we're going to do a half-climbing, half-ski trip. WILL: Ooh. VICTORIA: So that's going to be fun for Memorial Day weekend, so...What about you, Will? What do you have going on fun this week? WILL: Yeah. So you said skiing. VICTORIA: Yes. So Mammoth got the most snow in the country this year. When we were there in February, they'd already had, like, 10 feet of snow. And then they got another foot of snow while we were there, so they're going to have snow through August, at least. WILL: August. Wow. Here in South Florida, the lowest we got was 50. So snow, I don't even know what you're talking about. [laughs] Yeah, so you asked what I'm going to do. Last week was a big week for us because my boys they turned four years old and one year old. And we took them to Disney and had a blast. Anybody who's been to Disney knows it's a trip. It could be a lot, especially it was very hot there too. So I think this weekend we're just going to take it easy. We're just going to relax and just enjoy it. VICTORIA: Trip of a lifetime for them, I'm sure. WILL: Yes, they loved it. VICTORIA: We have Disneyland over here in California. I have been to Disney World in Florida. But I still haven't been to Disneyland since I've been here, [laughs] which I think some people would judge me for. AGNES: You know what? I haven't been to either. I hold it against my parents forever. [laughter] Although my family is not a big fan of crowds, so I think that's why. WILL: Yes, if you're not a fan of crowds, Disney is not the place, especially now. I've heard around September is probably the best time to go. So we're going to try that out during that time too. AGNES: Ooh, protip. You heard it here first. WILL: Yes. [laughs] VICTORIA: September, Disneyland, Florida sounds very warm to me. [laughs] But yeah, we're actually going to go to Mexico with thoughtbot as a team meetup in September, which is also going to be pretty warm, I think. [laughs] But it'll be fun. Well, that's lovely. I love getting to hear a little bit about your lives before we dig into your business. Agnes, I'm super excited to hear about Senga. But maybe start with just a little bit about your background before you started. AGNES: I had been thinking about starting my own business for a while. I am an immigrant, and I come from an entrepreneurial family. Actually, my mom ran her own translation business back in Hungary, and now she's a really successful artist. So, you know, I had from them and my husband as well to sort of try out something new. But, in my last role, I was actually Chief Operating Officer at an EdTech company that had scaled to serve over 80% of U.S. schools during the pandemic. And I was at that company for about five years and had seen the full arc of, you know, startup to a mature organization. So I was ready to take on a new challenge and to learn something new. WILL: You mentioned that your mom was an entrepreneur. And my dad was an entrepreneur, also. He had his own electric and HVAC business, and I learned so much from him. Is there anything that you can just, like, ooh, I learned this and this from my mom as a kid, looking at your mom being an entrepreneur? AGNES: I mean, she is just a, you know, fix-it person in every sense of the word. So she will fix an electric outlet. She will fix something with her business. WILL: [laughs] AGNES: She's just, like, really good at getting her hands dirty and being really scrappy. And I think that's a really important skill to have, you know, especially in a startup, and especially when you're starting out and still on your own. VICTORIA: So, what did your parents say when you told them you were going to start out on your own and build your own company? AGNES: They were really encouraging. They, you know, they keep up with all my LinkedIn posts, and they read everything I publish. So they're just very ive and the best cheerleaders I could possibly hope for. [laughs] WILL: Did stepping out and starting your business did anything scare you in that area? AGNES: Oh my gosh, every day, something new. It's all just uncertainty and risk at this point. You know, I'm very, very early in my startup journey, so literally every question about the business I have to test. I have to find answers for. And that ranges everything from, you know, business formation to, you know, the nuts and bolts of getting the business organized and setting up financials, and the legal structure for the company, to figuring out what the product is going to be. So all this uncertainty is definitely a little bit nerve-racking. VICTORIA: And I'm wondering, what about your past experience as a Chief Operations Officer led you to want to build a product like Senga? AGNES: So being a Chief Operating Officer, I think one of the things that I really learned was that in order for a business to be really successful, and for people working at that company to be really successful, they have to have the organization's to do what they do best. You know, what I used to tell my operations team was that you know, we were really the plumbers of the organization, making sure that everything ran smoothly behind the scenes. So, actually, that was one of the inspirations for Senga, for my current company, this idea that freelancers and independent workers don't have that . They don't necessarily have somebody helping them with HR, and with financials, and with legal stuff, and with everything else that goes into running a business, whether you're a business of 1 or a business of 100. And that's really where I wanted to come in and, you know, independent workers. VICTORIA: One follow-up question for Agnes on your experience in the COO role. I believe your team also had a lot of background in the freelancing world. So you had people you could ask questions to and start to understand that market. Is that right? AGNES: Yeah. Like a lot of businesses, I guess we had, you know, freelancers and contract workers that we relied on. And that's increasingly true for most companies now, I would say. There's specialized roles. There is seasonal roles that you don't necessarily hire full-time employees for but that are perfect for somebody, you know, on a temporary basis or somebody with more specialized skills. So you're exactly right; being able to tap into that network and having had experience working with freelancers and contractors was really helpful coming into the incubator and having people to tap for interviews and for input. VICTORIA: Great. And then, what is the thoughtbot incubator, which we've mentioned a few times already? It is for a non-technical founding team with a business idea that involves a web or a mobile app. It's an eight-week program that helps you get the proof points you need in order to move forward with confidence. So I'm curious, Agnes, what led you to choose the thoughtbot incubator Program as something you wanted to apply to? AGNES: I mean, it's exactly what you named. So this incubator program was really a perfect launching pad for me. It's designed for non-technical founders, like myself, to get their own dedicated team of product and dev experts to, you know, like, hone customer discovery practice, create a product strategy, run proof of concept experiments. And, you know, these were exactly the areas where I lacked skills and expertise the most. So I had actually looked at other incubators and even some venture studios before, but those models were not as good of a fit for me. I was really excited to find and to be able to thoughtbot's incubator program. MID-ROLL AD: Now that you have funding, it’s time to design, build and ship the most impactful MVP that wows customers now and can scale in the future. thoughtbot Lift Off brings you the most reliable cross-functional team of product experts to mitigate risk and set you up for long-term success. As your trusted, experienced technical partner, we’ll help launch your new product and guide you into a future-forward business that takes advantage of today’s new technologies and agile best practices. Make the right decisions for tomorrow, today. Get in touch at: thoughtbot.com/liftoff. WILL: What was the original idea behind Senga? AGNES: The idea that I came into the incubator with and then the pain points that we honed in on during the incubator, and then the long-term vision for the company are all kind of a little bit different. So I'll zoom out first to the sort of 30,000-foot view of this. So, coming into the incubator, I had been reading and researching a lot about some macro trends that I think are really interesting, and these are trends that many of us are keeping an eye on. So they're nothing revolutionary, but I think they're going to create some really interesting problems to solve in the next couple of years. So the first one is the rise of independent workers, or contractors, or freelancers. I'm kind of going to use these interchangeably. In recent years, the number of independent workers has shot up like crazy. There are already over 65 million independent workers in the U.S., and this number is growing by about 25% annually. And then, add to this that economic downturns tend to grow this number even more. You know, this makes up about a third of the workforce in the U.S. already, and it's growing. The second thing is that you know, the fact that early-career folks, especially Gen Z, really like the independence and autonomy that comes with this type of work. Over half of Gen Z already freelance, and the majority want to make independent work their career. In other words, they explicitly do not want to work for a company in the traditional sense. And then, third, there's kind of a mishmash of factors that I'll lump into one bullet that additionally drive up this type of work, which is that, increasingly, jobs are going to be skills-based, not degree-based, and all work, even white-collar work, will become more modular. Both tech advances and even, I think, novel organizational structures are going to make it possible for people to hyper-specialize and to plug into different organizations at different times, and, you know, even simultaneously to perform that specialized work. So take all this together, and what I'm really seeing is that the current market offerings serving freelancers and contractors are not nearly enough to meet all their needs, which is driving huge inefficiency. The types of companies that cater to this segment now or, you know, there's mature marketplaces like Upwork, and Fiverr, and some earlier-stage companies that do, you know, more workflow and back office. But I'm not seeing a comprehensive solution, and that's driving like I said, a lot of inefficiency. So, ultimately, being a freelancer is still really hard. Only about 50% of a freelancer's time is spent on billable work. And so this is what I really want to solve. VICTORIA: And did anything change through the incubator process? AGNES: So the biggest thing I found during the incubator was actually a really good entry point into this market. So startup wisdom says that you have to narrow down your product to a super tight segment that has a very strong, like, yes to your product. So, during the course of the eight weeks that I did the incubator, we did a ton of interviews, and I was really on the lookout for big spikes and pain points that repeated for a specific niche of freelancers. And that's exactly what we ended up finding. There's lots of nuance to this, but generally speaking, people new to freelancing and those that are just looking to get started need help getting started in a more manageable way and then setting up good practices that will serve them in the long run. WILL: You mentioned those practices that helps them set them up in the long run. Are you talking about mostly the operation, so, like, anything that's non-billable for a client? AGNES: Exactly, yeah. So that's kind of how I think about the work is anything that's billable and then anything that's non-billable. So that includes client management, client communication, marketing themselves, finding, you know, new work, so drumming up new business, all the back-office financials, back-office legal and stuff. All these other things that traditionally would be, you know, done by, you know, an operations team at a big company, but, for freelancers, they have to do it themselves. WILL: Yeah, I love that idea because my spouse she dipped her toe into the freelance world. And I felt like the operations kind of overcame everything else. And so it almost felt like the operations was taking over the job. But it's one of those things I feel like we didn't really think through of how much work that that 50% is. Like, how much work do you have to do, which are taxes, operations, speaking to clients, even to get to the things that people usually love, like the design, the software development? So I'm excited about this product. AGNES: Yeah, exactly. And that's kind of what I kept hearing again and again in interviews with all sorts of different freelancers because we went out and interviewed folks from, you know, everywhere from graphic design, to UX/UI design, to web developers, to other types of creatives, content creators. And this idea that they all get into freelancing to pursue their ion, the thing that they're uniquely good at. But then end up spending a huge chunk of their time on, you know, things that they're not really specialized in, you know, basically running their business. VICTORIA: What types of experiments did you run while you were in the incubator program with the people you mentioned you're talking to? And what were the demands on your time really like? AGNES: Oh, so the program is between 20 to 40 hours a week. I had a chance to meet with my thoughtbot team daily. We had independent work time, also breakout sessions. Like you said, a lot of that time was spent doing interviews and running all sorts of different experiments, so discovery interviews, interviews showing the prototype once we had it to interviewees. But we also set up Google Ads. We created a landing page with various calls to action. And then based on who was coming through the landing page and what they were doing on the site, we had all sorts of, you know, lessons that we could take away from that. And then another piece of it was I also learned how to basically start building out an organic community around this problem and from, you know, the community of freelancers, which is so important to have, like, for a future base and also to be able to continue to engage with my target audience. WILL: Was there anything that surprised you about the program, or did you have any interesting findings coming out of the program? AGNES: One thing I learned through the program was that you know, there are concrete steps that you can take and a process that you can follow to build out a strong business that solves real problems for people. And that's really what this program and this incubator is focused on, is to teach you those skills to go through those early steps. You know, everything that I had read before about startups they're kind of clouded in mystery. And, you know, the big ones that end up being really successful tend to be mythologized, and founder stories tend to have these, like, big eureka moments in them, where the founder had their big idea that led to the big company. But really, at the early stage, it's pretty messy. And nevertheless, you have these steps that you can follow and processes that you can follow to build out the company. VICTORIA: And how are you feeling now at the end of the program? AGNES: I feel really excited and, frankly, more confident than I came into the program. So, you know, I'm leaving here with lots of good data, lots of good anecdotal evidence, having had dozens and dozens of conversations with my target market. So, for me, that's a really great feeling to know that my ideas they don't just exist in the abstract in my head but that we've bounced them against the universe and confirmed that folks are having the pain points that we expected and some that we did not expect. And that there is an opportunity around this. WILL: So, what could be done better about the incubator program from your perspective? AGNES: It was a great program, and that's a pretty hard question to answer. But, you know, I would selfishly say make it longer. Eight weeks is, by design, you know, a pretty short time to get started. And that's really what the program is designed to do is to get you started, to set you up with good practices and good tools. But, again, selfishly, I wish it were a little bit longer, so I can stick around and have the thoughtbot team around me. And then I just look forward to building more of a community as more founders thoughtbot's incubator every quarter. We have a shared Slack channel that I'm going to continue hanging out in and that I've been told the new founders, as well, will be added to. So I'm looking forward to getting to meet them and to, you know, hear about their experience as well. VICTORIA: What's coming up next for you in the next six months? AGNES: So I'm talking to a couple of potential partners in the next couple of weeks, which might kind of change the roap slightly. But, basically, this summer and fall, I'm building out a lot of the content and the prototype for Senga. Again, continuing to talk to the freelancers I've been continuing to talk to. I'm also putting together sort of, like, an advisory committee of freelancers I've met along the way who had a strong yes sort of reaction to this product. And then my goal is that by fall or winter, I'll be able to start building out an MVP. WILL: That's exciting. AGNES: Yeah, I'm really excited. [laughs] WILL: Your dream is finally coming true, so, yeah, you have something to be excited about. [laughs] Do you have any advice for any other founders? AGNES: I guess I don't know how qualified I feel to be, you know, handing out advice as a brand-new founder. But, overall, I would encourage others out there who are interested in taking this path to, you know, really take a risk and to bet on themselves. What I've found in the last couple of months is that there are so many ive communities, and founder groups, and entrepreneur groups. And this is kind of common advice, and everybody says this, but there's really no way you can fully prepare. You just kind of have to start doing. And at least from what I've seen, that's the secret sauce to this early stage is to keep doing and to keep going from one step to the next every day. VICTORIA: If you could travel back in time and give yourself advice from when before this all started, what advice would you give yourself? AGNES: I would just encourage myself to, you know, take the plunge and maybe even go down this path sooner. You know, I feel really confident where I'm at now in of my career and my, you know, networks and everything. But being able to go back and start experimenting earlier and start going down this path earlier might have even set me up better. WILL: One thing when you're starting a startup is funding. Are you looking for any funding? AGNES: Not urgently, but I'm definitely interested in talking to others working and investing in this space. So, you know, if any of your listeners are investors or entrepreneurs in a similar space, I would love to talk to them. WILL: Yeah. So, how could they reach you if they wanted to reach out to you? AGNES: You can reach me by email at [email protected], or you can find us on LinkedIn at Senga. VICTORIA: You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at [email protected]. You could find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. WILL: And you can find me on Twitter @will23larry. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Special Guest: Agnes Malatinszky. Sponsored By: thoughtbot: Now that you have funding, it’s time to design, build and ship the most impactful MVP that wows customers now and can scale in the future. thoughtbot Lift Off brings you the most reliable cross-functional team of product experts to mitigate risk and set you up for long-term success. As your trusted, experienced technical partner, we’ll help launch your new product and guide you into a future-forward business that takes advantage of today’s new technologies and agile best practices. Make the right decisions for tomorrow, today. Get in touch at: thoughtbot.com/liftoff Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Chad s cohosts Victoria and Will to talk about thoughtbot's 20th birthday! 🤖🎉 In this episode, you'll find the 411 on the thoughtbot mascot, "Ralph," taking the company fully remote, and our company values and how we believe products should be designed and built! Follow Chad Pytel on LinkedIn, Twitter, or visit his website. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: Hey there. It's your host Victoria. And I'm here today with Dawn Delatte and Jordyn Bonds from our Ignite team. We are thrilled to announce the summer 2023 session of our new incubator program. If you have a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our 8-week program. We'll help you validate the market opportunity, experiment with messaging and product ideas, and move forward with confidence towards an MVP. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. Dawn and Jordyn, thank you for ing and sharing the news with me today. JORDYN: Thanks for having us. DAWN: Yeah, glad to be here. VICTORIA: So, tell me a little bit more about the incubator program. This will be your second session, right? JORDYN: Indeed. We are just now wrapping up the first session. We had a really great 8 weeks, and we're excited to do it again. VICTORIA: Wonderful. And I think we're going to have the person from your program on a Giant Robots episode soon. JORDYN: Wonderful. VICTORIA: Maybe you can give us a little preview. What were some of your main takeaways from this first round? JORDYN: You know, as ever with early-stage work, it's about identifying your best early adopter market and persona, and then learning as much as you possibly can about them to inform a roap to a product. VICTORIA: What made you decide to start this incubator program this year with thoughtbot? DAWN: We had been doing work with early-stage products and founders, as well as some innovation leads or research and development leads in existing organizations. We had been applying a lot of these processes, like the customer discovery process, Product Design Sprint process to validate new product ideas. And we've been doing that for a really long time. And we've also been noodling on this idea of exploring how we might offer value even sooner to clients that are maybe pre-software product idea. Like many of the initiatives at thoughtbot, it was a little bit experimental for us. We decided to sort of dig into better understanding that market, and seeing how the expertise that we had could be applied in the earlier stage. It's also been a great opportunity for our team to learn and grow. We had Jordyn our team as Director of Product Strategy. Their experience with having worked at startups and being an early-stage startup founder has been so wonderful for our team to engage with and learn from. And we've been able to offer that value to clients as well. VICTORIA: I love that. So it's for people who have identified a problem, and they think they can come up with a software solution. But they're not quite at the point of being ready to actually build something yet. Is that right? DAWN: Yeah. We've always championed the idea of doing your due diligence around validating the right thing to build. And so that's been a part of the process at thoughtbot for a really long time. But it's always been sort of in the context of building your MVP. So this is going slightly earlier with that idea and saying, what's the next right step for this business? It's really about understanding if there is a market and product opportunity, and then moving into exploring what that opportunity looks like. And then validating that and doing that through research, and talking to customers, and applying early product and business strategy thinking to the process. VICTORIA: Great. So that probably sets you up for really building the right thing, keeping your overall investment costs lower because you're not wasting time building the wrong thing. And setting you up for that due diligence when you go to investors to say, here's how well I vetted out my idea. Here's the rigor that I applied to building the MVP. JORDYN: Exactly. It's not just about convincing external stakeholders, so that's a key part. You know, maybe it's investors, maybe it's new team you're looking to hire after the program. It could be anyone. But it's also about convincing yourself. Really, walking down the path of pursuing a startup is not a small undertaking. And we just want to make sure folks are starting with their best foot forward. You know, like Dawn said, let's build the right thing. Let's figure out what that thing is, and then we can think about how to build it right. That's a little quote from a book I really enjoy, by the way. I cannot take credit for that. [laughs] There's this really great book about early-stage validation called The Right It by Alberto Savoia. He was an engineer at Google, started a couple of startups himself, failed in some ways, failed to validate a market opportunity before marching off into building something. And the pain of that caused him to write this book about how to quickly and cheaply validate some market opportunity, market assumptions you might have when you're first starting out. The way he frames that is let's figure out if it's the right it before we build it right. And I just love that book, and I love that framing. You know, if you don't have a market for what you're building, or if they don't understand that they have the pain point you're solving for, it doesn't matter what you build. You got to do that first. And that's really what the focus of this incubator program is. It's that phase of work. Is there a there there? Is there something worth the hard, arduous path of building some software? Is there something there worth walking that path for before you start walking it? VICTORIA: Right. I love that. Well, thank you both so much for coming on and sharing a little bit more about the program. I'm super excited to see what comes out of the first round, and then who gets selected for the second round. So I'm happy to help promote. Any other final takeaways for our listeners today? DAWN: If this sounds intriguing to you, maybe you're at the stage where you're thinking about this process, I definitely encourage people to follow along. We're trying to share as much as we can about this process and this journey for us and our founders. So you can follow along on our blog, on LinkedIn. We're doing a LinkedIn live weekly with the founder in the program. We'll continue to do that with the next founders. And we're really trying to build a community and extend the community, you know, that thoughtbot has built with early-stage founders, so please us. We'd love to have you. VICTORIA: Wonderful. That's amazing. Thank you both so much. INTRO MUSIC: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. WILL: And I'm your host, Will Larry. And with us today is our other host, Chad Pytel, the CEO of thoughtbot. Which, we're celebrating 20 years of business this year. Chad, welcome. CHAD: Oh, it's good to have the tables turned on me. And I'm looking forward to the discussion today. VICTORIA: Great. We have a whole set of questions, some of which come from other employees within thoughtbot. So we're really excited to dig into it today. Why don't we start with thoughtbot's iconic logo, the Ralph bot, and the little red robot that everyone knows thoughtbot for? And we call him Ralph within thoughtbot. So, how did Ralph come to be? Where does his design come from? And how did that become part of the company mascot? CHAD: I'm happy to tell the story. But I have a question for both of you: have you ever heard me call the robot Ralph? WILL: [laughs] No. VICTORIA: I don't think I've ever heard you refer to the robot. WILL: [laughs] VICTORIA: So, if you did call it, I don't know what you would call it. WILL: Oh, who started that? [laughs] CHAD: It was someone who was at the company, Matt Jankowski. WILL: [laughs] VICTORIA: Ah, I see. CHAD: I actually don't like the name. I think it's a terrible name for the robot. [laughs] I don't understand why the robot has to be gendered at all. And so I've never said that that's the robot's name. You know, when you're CEO, you have to pick your battles. WILL: [laughs] Yes. CHAD: Yeah. So that's the unofficial name of the robot, I think. And Matt started calling it that because Matt's a big fan of coming up with names for things. And yeah, so, at some point, he started calling it that. And it sort of stuck as people ed the company and just sort of assumed that that's what the robot's called. We didn't start with this logo. Logo has always been a robot. But the thing we started with was an illustration based off of a tin robot that I think either one of us had or that we saw a picture of. Another Matt, who is one of the founders of the company, sketched it. He was a designer as well as a developer. And we used it for a few years. But what we learned over the course of it as we gained more exposure is that, actually, it's a really common tin toy robot. And you can find a lot of other art and illustration and uses of it in stock photography and everything. Which at first was good because then we could get a bunch of stock photography, and it was our logo. But then we realized, ooh, this is not something that we really own or have control over. So we started to think about creating our own robot logo from scratch. Since we're a design firm, and I think it's notoriously hard to design things for yourself, we actually went to another agency that we were friends with and hired them to work with us to create the logo. And I have to say I was probably the worst client ever. WILL: [laughs] CHAD: Because I was asking...I had a particular vision in mind for this idea of, like, a powerful robot. And we kept on doing sketches, after sketch, after sketch, and it was really hard. We couldn't arrive at something that seemed powerful, that didn't seem aggressive. The logo at the time was a 3D representation of the robot. And it was really hard to also make a new 3D robot that looked powerful but not aggressive. And we just banged our heads against that for a long time. I think it was a couple of months. Until one day, I just said, you know what? We're not going to do it. Let's just stop trying to do this. [chuckles] Let's just do the simplest 2D representation of a robot that we can think of. And just going back to the drawing board starting over, we arrived at the logo we have today. Now we have to deal with the fact that it looks a lot like the Android logo. [laughter] But that's the, I guess, the story of the robot. WILL: So, first off, scratching the name Ralph. [laughs] CHAD: No, no, you can use it. I just think it's funny. WILL: Definitely. Second thing is Chad is not a good client when working with designers. No, I'm just joking. [laughs] CHAD: No, it's totally true. WILL: [laughs] CHAD: You know, when we have strong opinions that are mostly preferences, that leads to people being bad clients. [laughter] Because there was no reasoning behind, you know, the preferences. It was just what I had in my head. And so it wasn't until I let that go that we were able to arrive at something usable. WILL: [laughs] That's awesome. So, was the robot a ion for you, or was it just a toy that one of the founders, employees had, and that's where you went with it, how you got your inspiration? CHAD: The name thoughtbot with the bot on the end comes from...because before we started thoughtbot, we did a lot of Java development as a group, same people I went to school with them. We did projects together. And we would follow the pattern where you sort of have an object and then a manager object or a service object. And it was a common naming pattern. If you have orders or customers, then the service object might be called order manager or customer manager. And, in our code, we tended to not do that and instead do bots. So we would have order bot over orders, customer bot over customers. So, when we were brainstorming names for the company, we naturally tended to put bot on the end because that was our typical naming convention in the projects we were doing together. And so there wasn't anything particular about robots that we cared about at all. [laughter] It was that naming convention, which then extended to, okay, well, it's the thoughtbot. And so it should be a robot with thoughts on it or thought lines or something like that. That's where it came from. VICTORIA: I love to hear that. I'm learning so much myself I didn't know before even as a thoughtbot employee. WILL: [laughs] VICTORIA: It's been 20 years since you started the business. I want to start...or go back in time. So, if you could go back and give yourself, the younger version of you 20 years ago, some advice, what would you say? CHAD: I've gotten similar versions of this question on different shows. My answer for the last several years has been pretty consistent. So I'll give that one, and then I think I have another one too. The thing that I didn't realize at the time that I think I would be better for and the company would be better for I had a big blind spot in of I started thoughtbot with friends. We were the same age. We were all five White guys in our 20s, just out of school. That was the people that I was doing projects with; that was the people I was surrounded by in school. And it was a big blind spot. And, if I could go back in time, I would try to open my eyes to the fact that that was the case. And I think that I would be a lot better for it. And I think the company would be a lot better for having started with a more diverse team from the beginning because it makes us worse when you don't start off that way. It's harder and harder to correct it the longer it goes on. And so that would be something that I would go back and try to tell myself. Look at what you're doing. You don't realize now, but it is important. WILL: So, because we started talking about this at Summit a month ago, and it was amazing to hear that you're saying that because, at the same time, we're at this all-staff event, and we're able to see how diverse our team is and stuff like that. How has the journey been increasing the diversity of the team? Like, I look at our team photo, and it's just amazing to see the diversity in every level, especially in leadership, the diversity in leadership. And I know we haven't, quote, unquote, "arrived." So, how has that journey been? And what does it look like in the future? CHAD: Yeah, I mean, we've clearly made a lot of progress on this. It is better and easier now than it was in the early days because nobody wants to be the first. Nobody wants to be the first woman on the team. No one wants to be the first person of color on the team. You don't know when you're coming into an organization like that, whether it's the kind of place for you or whether you're going to run into problems. And so now that we've made some progress, that in and of itself makes it easier to continue on the journey. But when we were just getting started on that, we really needed to do a lot to intentionally fix it without tokenizing people, which is not easy to do. And so we're very fortunate that we have made progress. And I appreciate everyone along the way putting themselves out there, willing to be the first, or the second, or the third. I know that that's not easy, and it's made thoughtbot a better place now that we've progressed. WILL: Yeah, and I want to interrupt and say this: after that conversation, I I had to split and run to another event. While at that event, I met one of the first ladies that were on the team. And I started chatting about her experience. And it was amazing to see the transformation from the beginning to where it is now. So it was just really good to have that conversation with you, and then go talk to her and just, I guess, see the complete picture, so that's amazing because she's still on the team to this day. CHAD: Yeah. But we're not done yet. Like you said, we still have [laughs], you know, we can always be better. WILL: Where do you see it going in the future? CHAD: Well, I think that even though the management team, the senior leadership team, we have made progress there, I think that that is an obvious area where we have more progress to go in of making sure that people at the company are represented...the demographics of the people at the company are represented at every level of the company, especially when you have a culture like we do where the leaders are the people who have been here the longest. And we don't have so many of those positions opening up over the years. In fact, over the last five years, we've eliminated more of those positions in order to reduce overhead and to stay financially sustainable. So we actually have less of those opportunities than we have in the past, and so that holds us back. And so we have to figure out how to handle that and to do better with that. The other is, you know, one of the biggest changes over the last three years is going fully remote. And that has enabled us to hire the best people, no matter where they live, in the time zones that we operate in. And that has been really great for bringing new people, new energy onto the team. That is going to continue into the future. And we're going to see the demographics of the company continue to shift away from the United States. 60% of the company is now outside of the U.S., and that's going to keep on going. And that doesn't make us any worse off. It makes us better. VICTORIA: Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that. So, thoughtbot, as I understand it before we went fully remote, was known for having an amazing in-person office culture. So, what was that shift like for you? And how do you maintain that company culture after going fully remote? CHAD: Well, here's the honest answer. WILL: [laughs] CHAD: The honest answer was I was already not part of that office company culture. I was traveling one week out of every month to one of the studios. I didn't interact with people in the same way because of my position within the company. I was out of the studio a lot of the time. And even when I wasn't there, I was already working from home a few days a week because of my travel schedule or something like that. So moving to fully remote...and I was already sort of over-commuting to 45 minutes each way to the office. And so moving to fully remote has made things a lot better for me because I'm traveling a lot less. I get to be home with my family a lot more. I don't have that commute time. And my experience now, I think, is more similar to everyone else on that team. And I feel like we're all sharing more equally in what the experience is at thoughtbot. And so when I work to improve that, I'm not only working to improve it for me. I'm working to improve it for everybody. And so there are trade-offs. It is certainly different for the individual designer or developer at thoughtbot than it was before. But I think that the benefits of having the team that we have now, people being able to live where they want to live and to get that commute time back, outweigh the downsides of changing that company culture. VICTORIA: The other part is about just that shift, right? Of it was COVID. [laughs] Obviously, a lot of people were going remote at that time. So I'm just curious how that experience really happened for thoughtbot. I know how it happened for me at the company I was at. [laughs] CHAD: Well, it was certainly abrupt, you know. And, at the time, we thought, okay, we're going to shut down the office for two weeks, and then we'll all be back. And that, very quickly, was proven to be wrong. When it came to our actual work, the biggest shift we had was in the way that we collaborated with clients. But we were already collaborating with each other across studios in a distributed way. And so that was a more natural progression. I think the biggest shift was the way that our projects were working and collaborating with clients. You know, we would have clients in the office with us, too, sitting right next to us. And so figuring out how to do design sprints fully remotely, to ramp up the amount of remote pair programming that we were doing, those were the big changes, I think. And then you had the cultural ones, too, that you really need to work at when two people are getting a snack in the kitchen and having an off-hand chat about something. When you're fully remote, that doesn't happen. You need to put a lot more effort into those sort of what would have been casual conversations previously. WILL: So, and it seems like...just having a conversation with you, I know that it wasn't an easy decision to change over. And my question is, how do you make decisions, especially the hard ones that are not...and you stick with them? For example, I know, like, with hiring, we're talking about the diversity and creating a diverse pool that kind of resembles the area that we're trying to hire for, so, you know, resemble the U.S., or overseas, or wherever it is. And that's a hard thing to do at times, but we stuck with it. And there's been other decisions I've noticed. So, how do you make those decisions, one, and then, how do you stick with them when most companies or most people will say, "Hey, it's just too hard. Let's pivot and change it up"? CHAD: Yeah, we have our values, five core values, and one of them is fulfillment. And I often refer to that as our North Star value, meaning that when we're faced with a decision as a company or as individuals, fulfillment is often the one that we most often look to as the guide for which direction to go in. And I think that that is really powerful for us. It causes us to choose things that other companies might not choose. And it also is really powerful for us because it means that I don't need to be the one to make all of the decisions. You can make decisions based on what is fulfilling to you in your work. And that's very likely the right thing for everybody else at the company. And it may mean that we're a little bit less successful financially. But there are two aspects to success, you know, you need to be financially sustainable, but if you're unhappy in your work, if you're unfulfilled in your work, then that's not truly being successful. And so that's the guiding point of the way that we make a lot of decisions. Take the example of going remote, we weren't really deciding between going back to the way things were or going fully remote. Going back to the way things were was not an option because we had already told everyone if you need to move if you need to be away from the studio you were previously part of, go do that. You don't need to worry about remaining at thoughtbot. And about 20 people moved away from where their studio had been located, which is about 20% of the company. So we were deciding between hybrid or fully remote. Going back to the way things were wasn't an option because we had already removed that from the table, I think, guided by ing the team, fulfillment, trust, our values. So then the decision-making comes, do we want to figure out how to be hybrid? Which we had done before in our history. And we understood, based on that past experience, that you have to work at that quite a bit to integrate everyone fully, and sort of if you don't, it becomes very tough or even just mediocre. And so it was, are we more excited about working at being the best hybrid organization in the world, or are we more excited at figuring out how to be the best remote company in the world? You know, for me, that was an obvious choice. I was more excited about figuring out how to be the best remote company than I was about being the best hybrid company. So I think that that's an okay... [laughter] I think that's an okay way to make decisions. What are you more excited by? What are you going to be more fulfilled by in your work than that? And so that's, you know, sort of dissecting that decision-making, you know, part of what tipped us over the edge in of choosing to be fully remote. VICTORIA: I like that you said that you tried to make it so that you're not the one making all the decisions. [chuckles] And I felt that as a managing director and as an associate director that there is a very purposeful tact of when I'm bringing issues to leadership. The response I get back is very careful not to tell me what to do. [laughs] CHAD: Yeah. I'm sure it's annoying at times, right? [laughter] VICTORIA: I think it's a shift, right? Like, if you're coming from a typical, like, top-down organization, it can be a real mind shift, and it can be frustrating. But then, once you embrace it, it can be very fulfilling, like you said. CHAD: Part of why we do that, too, is because if you're not careful, you know, one of our other values is trust. And we really do trust people more than they're used to. And our other value is self-management. So, people should be left to their own devices. People at thoughtbot take initiative in their work to make decisions, those kinds of things. And so, at the intersection of trust and self-management, what happens in a lot of other cultures is this idea of permission. If you have to ask permission to do things, then you can't truly self-manage. So, when you come to a leader and you're asking for something, it's hard for that not to be articulated as asking for permission for something in a traditional sort of power hierarchy. I encourage people at thoughtbot to think about...in the way that our culture works, it's a lot better to frame things as asking for advice because there are people who have more experience in a certain area than you or whatever. And so a much better way of framing the conversation that you want to have with those people is instead of just asking open-ended questions, which it's very easy to misunderstand as basically just asking for permission to do something, it's better to say, like, "Here's what I know. Here's what I would do based on what I know. Do you have any advice for me based on that?" And then I can say, "Oh, well, here's what I know. [laughs] Can I share that with you?" And then, you can take that information in, and then you can make the decision based on having that additional information. I don't want to make the decision for somebody. That's the way I think about it. If you're not sure what's happening, it can be pretty frustrating in our culture because we are sort of averse to telling other people what to do. We're happy to help people and give people information, but we don't like to tell people what to do. WILL: Yeah, and I've definitely felt this, even as a developer here. But it has been the perfect fit for me because I love the, hey, we trust you. Go and do it. Go make decisions. Hey, even if you fail, let's come back and talk about it and move forward. But also the pushing me out of my comfort zone. There has been numerous times where I'm like, "Yeah, I don't think I can do that." And someone in leadership is like, "I think you can. Let's try it out. Let's do it. If you have any questions, come talk to me. I'll help you in any way I can." So, even as a developer, I feel that same way. And so I guess my question for you, Chad, is there's been a lot of decisions that I've seen you make or even this part right here, the trust. Because sometimes, money can override that when you're a CEO, especially because of jobs and everything. But you said fulfillment, and you had the values. But, Chad, as the CEO, like, why do you personally lead like that and make decisions like that? CHAD: It's a really good question. [laughs] WILL: I always wanted to peel back the layers of Chad. VICTORIA: [laughs] WILL: So that's what it is. [laughs] CHAD: To tie it back to development, just like you just did, I think a lot of our values and the way that we do things come from the way that we believe products should be designed and built. When I'm working on a project, I don't want to be told how to do everything. I don't want every ticket to be specified without me being part of the understanding or decision-making process. I want to be able to collaborate with the people that I'm working with, understand the problems that we're trying to solve, and then pick up the ticket and do the research, figure out the best way to solve it or be part of that. And when it's not clear to me, ask questions, learn from other people about the right way to solve something might be, and then to implement it in the best way that I know how, and collaborate with the people that I'm working with as I do that. And then I pick up that ticket, and I'm responsible for deploying it to staging and asking for acceptance of it. And I'm responsible for deploying it to production. So I'm pushing my work. I have agency over my work at every step of the way. I hope everyone who's listening has had an opportunity to be on a project where you've truly had agency over your own work. It's a really good, fulfilling feeling. And so I think that's where it comes from. I think that's what I try to bring to everything that I do. VICTORIA: And I think that philosophy is what creates such a compelling company culture and makes people want to work here, right? CHAD: I think so. Particularly because the work we do, the majority of us are designers and developers, but I don't think it's just design and develop. Like, it resonates a lot the relation to product work. But I think that's true for fulfillment in your own work generally across the board, no matter what your role is. People would rather have agency over their own work than to be micromanaged, to be told what to do all of the time. MID-ROLL AD: Are your engineers spending too much time on DevOps and maintenance issues when you need them on new features? We know maintaining your own servers can be costly and that it’s easy for spending creep to sneak in when your team isn’t looking. By delegating server management, maintenance, and security to thoughtbot and our network of service partners, you can get 24x7 from our team of experts, all for less than the cost of one in-house engineer. Save time and money with our DevOps and Maintenance service. Find out more at: tbot.io/devops. VICTORIA: In 20 years of hiring people and building products, what has really changed in of what you see customers looking for in building products, and what's stayed the same? CHAD: There's a lot that has changed, mostly in of platforms and practices. When we were first getting started out, the practice of test-driven development was not generally established as a best practice. It was one that we needed to advocate for and fight for, and really put ourselves out there as this is what we believe about the way good products are built, and if you don't want that, we're not a good fit for each other. So that's what I mean by practices. A lot of those things that used to be controversial we sort of won on as they played out as, yes, general agreement now about certain best practices. And so that has evolved over time. The other is mobile development. You know, when we first started, that wasn't really a thing. We did some mobile development early on for Palm platforms and for Motorola platforms using different versions of Java. It was a very different ecosystem. And mobile development has evolved a lot and become...almost every project we do has some mobile component. And a lot of them are native mobile applications with an API back end that we're building as well. So that has been a big change. The things that stay the same are, I would say, the things that we have sort of been constant about. So in the way that best practices change or evolve, the constant has been that we put ourselves out there, willing to be opinionated about what we believe the current best way of working is. That means that the clients who work with us are coming to us wanting that. And that leads to a culture of work and quality and that kind of thing, which I think has been pretty constant over the years. But it's not because we didn't try. Like, if we were willing to be anything to anybody and to compromise all the time and those kinds of things, it wouldn't be a constant. But we work at it, but I think that feeling of what it's like to do this work has been a constant. WILL: Speaking of changes and constant changes sometimes, what's the story behind the handbook? Everyone at the company can access the handbook through GitHub and how [inaudible 29:35] Whose idea was it? How did that come to be? And explain how it's always changing and what that looks like. CHAD: Yeah. So, like you said, we have our company handbook and the public playbook in a source code repository that everyone at the company collaborates on and has access to change. I don't who initially moved it into version control. It started as a document. We worked with an outside payroll or HR company to make as our first company handbook. It had policies and those kinds of things in it. At one point, you know, we were doing some revisions, and maybe me, maybe somebody else said, "Let's move this out of this," whatever it was at the time, Word doc, or whatever, "and move it into Markdown and natural place we want to have version control on it." But even though we moved the document into version control and even though everyone at the company technically had access to it, I think for many years, we still did things like a lot of companies do, which is the version control in and of itself isn't the special thing. It's using GitHub issues to track actual problems that we know about, or potential issues that we know about, defects in our policies, our practices, the company itself, just like we do on our software products. That was the actual fundamental shift that we made because it completely changed the way that we make change at the company and organize the work that we do to improve the company. And the way that that happened was, I think, prior to that, we made changes in a lot of ways that companies make changes. So some people know about some things, some people don't. Typically, senior leaders will get together often in meetings and talk about the issues that they see. And they tend to result in really big changes all at once that attempt to address multiple issues or make big reorganizational changes. And there's a tendency not to work iteratively when you work that way, and we did the same thing. So the sort of final big event that happened that triggered the fundamental change of working was, at the time, we had an unlimited time off policy. We had gone to that a few years prior because it was a trend in general. But also, we were tired of sort of tracking time and the permission that happens around time off and all that kind of stuff. So we had sort of blown it all up and gone to an unlimited time off policy. But it's more well understood now that unlimited time off policies have a few issues. And we were seeing those issues. Time off was very inconsistent among everyone on the team. Particularly, new people would the company, and they'd be like, okay, yes, but how much time am I supposed to really take? So that was one issue. Another issue was we wanted to increase the amount of parental leave that we offered as a company, like, on paper. Now, technically, we had the unlimited time off policy, but you want to give guidance to people, and you want to be able to say in a job ment that you have this much parental leave, you know. And because we're a consulting company and we make our revenue when people are working, the question was asked, how much can we say that we have for parental leave? And it was a very uncomfortable position for us to be in to not be able to work that financially because we could say, okay, we have 12 weeks of parental leave. But, at any point in time, anyone else could take more time off for any other reason because we had unlimited time off policy. And the idea that we couldn't prioritize one kind of time off over another to make it work financially was uncomfortable to us. And then, the state of California ed a sick time law, which was fundamentally incompatible with unlimited time off policies that lump sick time and vacation time together. And so we knew about these things. We got together in a meeting. We talked about them. And we put together a pull request to the handbook that, you know, we said, you know, we could probably fix any one of these problems. But probably all signs are pointing to just switching back to a regular time off policy. And so we put together a pull request. You can probably guess since I'm telling this story that, generally, people were very surprised. It was a big change to take in all at once. And I think even though we have a high level of trust, as a company, it was hard for people who generally viewed an unlimited time off policy as a good thing. You know, they were worried that there was some ulterior motive there, that something was being taken away for some reason, maybe financial. So we worked through it, and the pull request is there for everyone at the company, so you can see. Anna, when she opened the pull request, outlined all of those reasons why, but it was a lot of information to take in. And after we made it through, it sort of caused me to reflect on the process. And there was good criticism from of the team at the time about the process, and we really took that in. And I think it was the state of California ing that law that the solution that we arrived at to mind for me because they ed the law in, whatever it was, the spring or the summer. And it wasn't going to go into effect until the new year. And that's really no different than, you know, a new version of a library is going to come out, or a new version of an operating system or a browser is going to come out. And we know it's going to break our app. What do we do? We create a ticket in the backlog. We describe what the problem is. We prioritize it among everything else we're working on. And we make sure that the fix is in place in time for that to be released. And yet, we weren't doing that for these very obvious defects or things that we knew were going to break an existing policy against this kind of stuff. So I was like, we could use GitHub issues to log problems that we know about that are out there, and not only would that have led to a lot more transparency along the way. When a change was made, people could have come along that journey with us of identifying the problem, being aware of it, being part of problem-solving, and coming to a resolution, and then getting a pull request. But more fundamentally, I think once you start to work that way, probably would have never made the change that we did in the first place because this way causes you to work more incrementally, to work more iteratively, to take each of the problems to try to identify the root cause and the best way to fix it. And very often, that is a smaller change that you can put into place more quickly. And we know that we don't need to get it perfect. We don't need to change absolutely everything about this all at once in order to fix every problem. We just need to make tomorrow better than today. If we can do that, then we know that, over time, it adds up to significant positive change that is very different a year from now or two years from now than what we're doing today. But we do that by chipping away and making tomorrow better than today. And so working this way with these discrete tickets, with this thing, there are downsides too, don't get me wrong. It's not all sunshine and rainbows. It's hard to work this way. But those are some of the benefits and sort of the story of how we arrived at how we do things. WILL: I love that because I'm familiar with creating PRs, commenting on PRs, just giving through PRs. And also, I've never been in a leadership meeting at thoughtbot, like, just never been in one. But I know that if I comment on a PR, my voice is heard with leadership making the decision. I love that idea. CHAD: Yeah, leadership meetings at thoughtbot are actually very boring. WILL: [laughs] CHAD: Because the only things that we're talking about that aren't represented in GitHub issues are things that aren't proper for GitHub issues, so they're individual personal problems or things like that, or, hey, we're doing a leadership training and, you know, talking about that. Actual change, actual things that happen, are represented in those GitHub issues. And that's why it's super important that we have issues for everything because when we truly work this way, if something's not represented as an issue, it's not getting worked on. There's not a lot happening in leadership meetings other than those things that aren't ideal for GitHub issues, or we're going through, and we're saying, "Hey, this issue has been sitting around for a while," or "What's the update?" And you'll often see someone comment after the fact about an issue. Now, that being said, I think one of the hardest things about this is that when you expose these big issues, it can be a little discouraging over time to have them be around there to be not closed. But the way...I'll bring this back to our product work as well, like, when you identify...at least this is the case for me. A bug could have been there for two years, [chuckles] and I don't know about it, and therefore, it's out of sight, out of mind. I didn't know about it. But the minute I find out about a bug in a product that I'm working on, I can't stop thinking about it, and I want to fix it so badly. It becomes my top priority right away. [laughs] And I have to remind myself that just because I know about something now doesn't mean it's actually the highest priority item, or that I can fix it, or that I should take the time to fix it. I know it's my natural tendency to do that. So shedding light on something that's positive in and of itself, and then we can chip away at that over time. And this way of working allows us to tackle big problems. But sometimes it doesn't feel so great because you're identifying sort of defects in the company itself that make everybody uncomfortable. But I would rather light be shed on those so that we have a chance to improve it than to have it go unidentified, just like bugs in our products. VICTORIA: And just to illustrate, we have 162 open issues on our handbook. [laughter] But, you know, from my perspective, that makes me really excited, like, people are engaging with it. They're putting in issues and creating it. Because I've converted a company handbook to GitHub before, and no one ever looked at it. [laughs] So it was actually kind of nice that -- CHAD: [laughs] VICTORIA: You said that it took some time to build up that interaction with it and make people feel comfortable. And I wanted to ask about actually your Dungeons & Dragons campaigns that you run with the company. And I'm wondering what skills or practices from that comes over into your leadership style or the culture at thoughtbot. CHAD: Ooh, I'm not sure it's as deep as that, Victoria. VICTORIA: [laughs] CHAD: I just really like [laughter] playing Dungeons & Dragons. But I will say the itch that it scratches for me and the reason why I like Dungeons & Dragons, and the reason why I'm really happy to play it with thoughtbot people...my degree is computer science. But all throughout elementary school, high school, I did improv and theater, and I have a degree in theater as well. For a long time, Dungeons & Dragons is essentially doing group improv with other people around a game. And to be able to bring those two things together with a group of people that I like to have fun with it's a really great outlet. And I really enjoy it. But I'm not sure that there's anything deeper than it sort of scratches that performance itch that I have with a group of people that I like to hang out with. VICTORIA: That's fair. And then, just to kind of go back to one of our earlier questions we asked —what would you go back in time and advise your younger self —now, what if your younger person could travel to the future and give you some advice, looking at where you are at now? CHAD: The only way that I've done this for 20 years is day by day. Like, each day, you get up, and you approach each day. This is the way I do it anyway. It's like I approach each day as a fresh day. And now, over thousands of days, it's been 20 years. And I think that that is part of why at least I've been able to do this so long is I don't do a lot of dwelling on what happened yesterday. I think about today and tomorrow much more than I do about what happened yesterday. The upside is I've been able to do this for 20 years. [laughs] The downside to that is you tend to not reflect so much on the good things, just like you don't reflect so much on the bad things. You tend to not celebrate the milestones when they happen or appreciate them as much because you're onto the next thing. You're thinking about tomorrow rather than yesterday. And so I would think that if my younger self came forward and talked to me today, I think the thing that he would say is like, hey, look at where you are, look at what you've done. Take a moment [laughs] to celebrate not only your work but, you know, this is true for the people around me. I tend not to celebrate the accomplishments as much and everything because I'm very much someone who sort of lives in maybe not even the moment but the next moment that's about to happen. And so I think the person would say, relax a little bit, have a little bit more fun. Take a moment to celebrate the people around you a little bit more. I think that's what I would say to myself. WILL: I love learning things that I didn't know about thoughtbot. So this has been perfect. CHAD: Thank you both for the really thoughtful questions. And on the note of what I just [inaudible 44:53], thank you for everything that you both do at thoughtbot. I really appreciate it. We couldn't have accomplished everything that we have without the individuals [inaudible 45:01]. So I'm here sort of representing thoughtbot for our 20th anniversary, but it's not just me who got us to this point. It's been a lot of other people over the many years making it happen. And so I appreciate both of you for helping make it happen. VICTORIA: Well, thank you. And again, thank you so much for ing us. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at [email protected]. And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. WILL: And you could find me @will23larry. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Sponsored By: thoughtbot: Are your engineers spending too much time on DevOps and maintenance issues when you need them on new features? We know maintaining your own servers can be costly and that it’s easy for spending creep to sneak in when your team isn’t looking. By delegating server management, maintenance, and security to thoughtbot and our network of service partners, you can get 24x7 from our team of experts, all for less than the cost of one in-house engineer. Save time and money with our DevOps and Maintenance service. Find out more at: tbot.io/devops Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Brian Douglas is the CEO of OpenSauced which helps enterprises discover the best engineers in Open Source. Victoria and Will talk to Brian about meeting as many developers as possible, setting goals, and keeping himself able, and what makes a successful open source project. OpenSauced Follow OpenSauced on Twitter, GitHub, Instagram, YouTube, Discord, and Dev.to. Follow Brian Douglas on LinkedIn, Twitter, or visit his website. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: Hey there. It's your host Victoria. And I'm here today with Dawn Delatte and Jordyn Bonds from our Ignite team. We are thrilled to announce the summer 2023 session of our new incubator program. If you have a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our 8-week program. We'll help you validate the market opportunity, experiment with messaging and product ideas, and move forward with confidence towards an MVP. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. Dawn and Jordyn, thank you for ing and sharing the news with me today. JORDYN: Thanks for having us. DAWN: Yeah, glad to be here. VICTORIA: So, tell me a little bit more about the incubator program. This will be your second session, right? JORDYN: Indeed. We are just now wrapping up the first session. We had a really great 8 weeks, and we're excited to do it again. VICTORIA: Wonderful. And I think we're going to have the person from your program on a Giant Robots episode soon. JORDYN: Wonderful. VICTORIA: Maybe you can give us a little preview. What were some of your main takeaways from this first round? JORDYN: You know, as ever with early-stage work, it's about identifying your best early adopter market and persona, and then learning as much as you possibly can about them to inform a roap to a product. VICTORIA: What made you decide to start this incubator program this year with thoughtbot? DAWN: We had been doing work with early-stage products and founders, as well as some innovation leads or research and development leads in existing organizations. We had been applying a lot of these processes, like the customer discovery process, Product Design Sprint process to validate new product ideas. And we've been doing that for a really long time. And we've also been noodling on this idea of exploring how we might offer value even sooner to clients that are maybe pre-software product idea. Like many of the initiatives at thoughtbot, it was a little bit experimental for us. We decided to sort of dig into better understanding that market, and seeing how the expertise that we had could be applied in the earlier stage. It's also been a great opportunity for our team to learn and grow. We had Jordyn our team as Director of Product Strategy. Their experience with having worked at startups and being an early-stage startup founder has been so wonderful for our team to engage with and learn from. And we've been able to offer that value to clients as well. VICTORIA: I love that. So it's for people who have identified a problem, and they think they can come up with a software solution. But they're not quite at the point of being ready to actually build something yet. Is that right? DAWN: Yeah. We've always championed the idea of doing your due diligence around validating the right thing to build. And so that's been a part of the process at thoughtbot for a really long time. But it's always been sort of in the context of building your MVP. So this is going slightly earlier with that idea and saying, what's the next right step for this business? It's really about understanding if there is a market and product opportunity, and then moving into exploring what that opportunity looks like. And then validating that and doing that through research, and talking to customers, and applying early product and business strategy thinking to the process. VICTORIA: Great. So that probably sets you up for really building the right thing, keeping your overall investment costs lower because you're not wasting time building the wrong thing. And setting you up for that due diligence when you go to investors to say, here's how well I vetted out my idea. Here's the rigor that I applied to building the MVP. JORDYN: Exactly. It's not just about convincing external stakeholders, so that's a key part. You know, maybe it's investors, maybe it's new team you're looking to hire after the program. It could be anyone. But it's also about convincing yourself. Really, walking down the path of pursuing a startup is not a small undertaking. And we just want to make sure folks are starting with their best foot forward. You know, like Dawn said, let's build the right thing. Let's figure out what that thing is, and then we can think about how to build it right. That's a little quote from a book I really enjoy, by the way. I cannot take credit for that. [laughs] There's this really great book about early-stage validation called The Right It by Alberto Savoia. He was an engineer at Google, started a couple of startups himself, failed in some ways, failed to validate a market opportunity before marching off into building something. And the pain of that caused him to write this book about how to quickly and cheaply validate some market opportunity, market assumptions you might have when you're first starting out. The way he frames that is let's figure out if it's the right it before we build it right. And I just love that book, and I love that framing. You know, if you don't have a market for what you're building, or if they don't understand that they have the pain point you're solving for, it doesn't matter what you build. You got to do that first. And that's really what the focus of this incubator program is. It's that phase of work. Is there a there there? Is there something worth the hard, arduous path of building some software? Is there something there worth walking that path for before you start walking it? VICTORIA: Right. I love that. Well, thank you both so much for coming on and sharing a little bit more about the program. I'm super excited to see what comes out of the first round, and then who gets selected for the second round. So I'm happy to help promote. Any other final takeaways for our listeners today? DAWN: If this sounds intriguing to you, maybe you're at the stage where you're thinking about this process, I definitely encourage people to follow along. We're trying to share as much as we can about this process and this journey for us and our founders. So you can follow along on our blog, on LinkedIn. We're doing a LinkedIn live weekly with the founder in the program. We'll continue to do that with the next founders. And we're really trying to build a community and extend the community, you know, that thoughtbot has built with early-stage founders, so please us. We'd love to have you. VICTORIA: Wonderful. That's amazing. Thank you both so much. INTRO MUSIC: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. WILL: And I'm your host, Will WILL. And with us today is Brian Douglas, CEO of OpenSauced, helping enterprises discover best engineers in open source. Brian, thank you for ing us today. BRIAN: My pleasure. Thanks for inviting me on the podcast. VICTORIA: Just tell us a little bit more about OpenSauced. BRIAN: Yeah, it's opensauced.pizza is the URL. So I always point that out because it's easy to found. WILL: I love it. BRIAN: And OpenSauced is a platform for engineers to find their next contributions and enterprises to discover the best engineers doing open-source, so... VICTORIA: Right. So maybe tell me what led you to start this company? BRIAN: Yeah, that's a great question. Actually, if you don't mind, I'll start further back. I graduated college in 2008 during the financial crisis with a finance degree. And what I learned pretty quickly is, like, if you don't know anybody in finance, it's a little hard to get a job in a bad market. So I took a sales role instead, mainly because I just wanted to learn. I was very much introverted. I wanted to learn how to talk to people, and have conversation, and communicate. So I did that four years and then got my MBA. And then started learning how to code while building an app, which is...I mentioned before we hit record I learned about this podcast around that time, which is, like, very serendipitous to be on this podcast years later. But, fast forward, OpenSauced, like, because of the whole networking aspect of how I got my job in sales and how I was able to do sales when I learned how to engineer, I knew the connection to open source, or how I learned how to code was, like, a wealth of information. So I made it my career goal to meet as many developers as possible. And then, I was working at this company called Netlify. I was employee number three there. And my role was to basically be a front-end engineer, but where I was actually getting more adoption to the product by doing open source. Like, every time I'd do an open-source contribution, I'd add a Netlify deploy preview manually in my PR. And that would give the maintainer enough juice to review the PR sooner. And I was doing a lot of open-source contribution at the time. So I wanted to build a tool to maintain, like, all the PRs I had opened in-flight that I needed to respond back to or...because back in, like, 2016, notifications on GitHub they weren't the greatest. WILL: [laughs] BRIAN: So I built a tool just to keep up to date on what I had opened and how I can communicate back with the maintainer. And saw a need...actually, I didn't see the need. I used this thing myself, and then in 2020, I started live streaming myself, building more features on top of this, like, CRM tool, and had a few people ask, "Hey, can you add a to this? I'd love to use this, too, with my own database and stuff like that." So I did that. I added . And I say database, like, we actually originally started with no database. We used GitHub Issues as a tracking mechanism for tracking repos and conversations. We've since moved away from that because, now, obviously, GitHub's got way more advanced in how notifications work. But the sort of ethos of the project still lives today, and what we have in the open-source platform. So that's, like, the long tale of how we got to where we are today. And then, I spoke at GitHub Universe on OpenSauced back in 2017. And from that talk, I had GitHub employees reach out to me and ask me to work at GitHub. So I accepted, and I worked at GitHub for almost five years, sort of putting OpenSauced to the side up until last year, decided to go ahead and pursue it again. And at that point, decided to make it a company. VICTORIA: What a cool story. There are so many things in there that I want to follow up on. I'm sure, Will, you also are like -- [laughs] WILL: [laughs] Yes. VICTORIA: I have so many questions. [laughs] WILL: Wow, that's amazing just hearing the story from you [laughs] got a four-year degree in finance, 2008 happened, no job, very hard to get a job because of who you know. And then you go and changed directions to start learning to code. And I love how it's kind of guided your path to where you are here right now. Like, who knows? But would you have been the CEO of OpenSauced if 2008 would have never happened? So it's amazing to see it. So, I guess, because I love the idea of OpenSauced...because I am that developer that wants to get into open source, but it is hard. It is hard to find the issues that you can work on. It's hard to get into the community to do that. So, if you can just explain to me a little bit more as from there, and we can do it from the enterprise portion later. But, as far as a : a developer, what does it look like for me to use OpenSauced as a developer? BRIAN: Yeah, yeah. And that's a great question, too, as well. It's funny how serendipitous the story is today, but when I was living it, it was like, oh, man, I'm never going to get a job. [laughter] Or I'm never going to learn how to code. And I think anybody listening who might be where I was ten years ago, I just want to preface, like, your story is like a guided path through experiences. And every experience is like an opportunity for that sort of one piece of, like, the sort of stepping stone to move on to, like, CEO of whatever your next startup is or senior engineer, or staff engineer, whatever it is. But, to answer your question, Will, we built a Discord, and the Discord itself is how we sort of discovered this sort of onboard ramp into open source. So today, if you sign up to OpenSauced, again, opensauced.pizza, you connect to your GitHub , and you get on-boarded into a flow to ask a couple questions. So, like, what languages are you interested in? And then, what time zone are you in? And the reason for those two things is, one because we're going to do recommendations for projects pretty soon. Everything is open source, so you can literally see the issues that are open about recommendations; happy to take contributions and on it. And then time zone is because communication is pretty key. So, like, if someone is not awake when I see their PR, I have an expectation of, like, cool, I'll write a response, and I'll wait for them to wake up and respond back to that. So the goal there is there's a lot of projects on GitHub, like, 372 million repos is the number off the top of my head. They literally announce this stuff, and they share the data. But of those repos, only 225,000 have more than five contributors. Understanding what you're looking to accomplish first out of doing open source to either share knowledge, or gain knowledge, to get exposure, to get a job, or just to enhance your current job by go try something that's not in the roap of what you're working on. Eventually, we'll start asking those questions around, like, what type of contributor that you want to be, so we can start recommending those types of projects. But I mentioned that 225,000 repo number because there are a lot of projects that don't have five contributors that could use their second contributor, or third, fourth. And my recommendation is always find up-and-coming, like, growth-stage projects. A lot of people want to contribute to React. You had mentioned you did React, Will. That's a really big lift to go contribute upstream to a project maintained and ed by millions of enterprises around the world. But there are tons of projects that go trending every week that have no documentation, that have no REE, that have no structure and are just getting off the ground. Like, those are the best projects that we try to showcase. So, like, that's hot.opensauced.pizza is our sort of up-and-coming project list. And the way that works is like projects that are trending based on our open-source community; we surface those there. There's a lot of work we have to do on that project. That was, like, a Hack Week project we did a couple of years ago as a community. But the basis of that is they're looking to build our recommendation engine off that. So, step one is find a project that is welcoming, that needs some work done, and then find the path in. So the path usually is going to be your CONTRIBUTING.md, which is like established projects will have this. But if you don't find a CONTRIBUTING.md, but you find a project you want to use, chances are you could build that CONTRIBUTING.md and ask the question, so, like, hey, how would I contribute? Like, how can I be ive? Actually, I did this talk a couple of years ago at Juneteenth Conf. It was a remote conference on Juneteenth, which a bunch of Black Engineers we all gave our technical expertise sponsored by Microsoft. And I was talking about the idea of open-source hospitality. The best thing you could do is be that sort of hospitable person, either you're a maintainer or a first-time contributor. Like, be that person to set it up for the next person behind you. And the idea of hospitality, you go to a hotel. Like, you know where the towels are. Like, you know where the soaps are. Like, you know exactly where everything is all the time. And, in open source, like, if we could set up our projects in a very similar fashion, like, not franchise them in a way like the Hilton or Marriott, but set the expectation that there is a way to source information and to interact and operate, so... VICTORIA: Yeah, I mean, I love, [laughs] like, hot.opensauced.pizza. That's hilarious. And I love how you have used humor to...even though it's a very serious product, we're making it more friendly and more hospitable like you're saying. And I like how you said, you know, the journey is cool looking back on it, but it was really hard to go through it. And now you're this wonderful speaker and a CEO. But you said that you weren't actually good at talking to people at first. And you specifically sought to get better at that skill. So I wonder if you would share more about that, how that's impacted your career, and why that's important as a developer to have those communication skills. BRIAN: Yeah, it's like...I have a twin brother since birth, basically. And my twin brother is very extroverted. Like, he actually used to wait tables in college. It was like he was the person that would make you feel very special as a server. Like, he's the type of person that kind of lights up the room when you walk in. His name is Brock. My entire life growing up, I was always Brock's brother. And it's like, oh, you're Brock's brother. And it's like, yeah, I'm Brock's brother. And I'm more of a person, like, if you meet me in person, like, I'm very much reserved. I'm sort of reading the room, waiting for my point to jump in. And I made it a point for me to, like, have enough comfort to speak on a podcast or speak at a conference because I knew that skill set would be valuable. Because I definitely had, in my sales career, definitely got overlooked for a lot of opportunity because folks thought, oh, I don't think Brian could do it. So coming into tech and seeing that when every time I went to a meet up...because meetups also are places where I cut my teeth and got to learn about the industry and the community. They always needed someone to speak. So I was, like, oh, there's an opportunity. I can leverage this opportunity of them always looking for speakers and me always wanting to share knowledge and learn something new to do talks. So my first-ever conference talk was in San Francisco. And I had learned React Native, but prior to React Native, I had learned Objective-C. And then, in between Objective-C and React Native, I learned Swift because React Native and Swift came out the same year. Well, React Native went public, open source, the same year as Swift. So it was like a really interesting year back in; I think it was 2017 where...actually, it might have been 2016. But, anyway, everything came out at the same time. And I was learning iOS development. So I made it a point for me to give a talk. But my pet peeve for giving talks is, a lot of times, people just go directly into the code, and there's, like, no connection to a story, or why do I care about this? So I always bring storytelling into my conversations and talks. So, like, that talk about Swift, and Objective-C, and React Native, I made the comparison of, like...it was the same year that Kanye West took the mic from Taylor Swift at the VMAs or whatever the award show was. And the correlation was React Native took the mic away from Swift because it built similar interactions for JavaScript developers to understand and build iOS applications that was not like Ionic or RubyMine or...I forgot the Ruby one. But, anyway, what I'm getting at is, I just wanted to bring story to this because usually what happens is like, you see cool things, but you never what the name is. You try to find that REPL again, or you try to figure out who that speaker is. And it's usually hard to find it after the fact. So, like, my goal was always to make it memorable, which is why I go by Bdougie because Bdougie is easier to Google than Brian Douglas. Shout out to Brian Douglas, who's based in Ireland who does system engineering, and has a great YouTube channel. Like, I want to be memorable. And I want to make it easy for folks to find me after. So, while at GitHub, when I was developing all this sort of like Kanye West-type speaking and stuff like that, well, literally, I would use Kanye West years ago as the example to understand storytelling. I no longer use Kanye West. I'm now a Beyoncé advocate. [laughter] So I use Beyoncé instead. But I guess what I'm getting at is, like, I just had a goal. And I knew if I could teach myself to code...and it was about 17 weeks it took me from zero to ship a Ruby on Rails app. And I felt confident enough to talk about it. I knew basically anything I could just accomplish just by putting some effort and consistency behind it. So that's the...sorry, that was a little more long-winded than expected. But I just keep able and set goals for myself and try to achieve enough to feel proud about at the end of the year. WILL: Yeah. It's so funny because I recently had a similar situation. At thoughtbot, we try to engage with the community, and one of the ways was writing a blog post. I've never been a writer. It just hasn't been my thing. But I was telling my boss, I was like, I'm going to do that to get outside my comfort zone and to really stretch myself. And at the same time, I was like, why a blog post? Like, I don't know, it doesn't really make sense why a blog post. Well, when I started writing the blog post, I was like, oh, you have to really know, one, what you're talking about in order to write about it. And so I had to really do some research, really had to study it. And I finished it last week. And then, now, looking back over the last couple of months it took me to write that blog post, I'm like, wow, I feel stretched. But I feel really good, and I feel really good about the topic that I did. So that's interesting that you went through that process to stretch yourself and to grow and even learning to code and get to that point. So talking about...you were at Netlify, and then you worked at GitHub. And then you're at your current one OpenSauced. How have Netlify and GitHub, the work that you did there, how has it prepared you for your position right now? BRIAN: You know, actually, that's a great question. I don't know how much thought I put into that. Like, Netlify prepared me because it gave me an opportunity. So I was employee number three, but I had a sales background. And so I got to be an engineer, but they kept always trying to ask me like, you know, business questions and strategy. And, like, I pitched them a 30-60-90 in my interview of, like, what's the growth strategy of Netlify, like day zero when I start? And I go into way more detail in other content. But that prepared me because I got to see how startups work, being so early. I got to see that startup go from seed-funded, just closed their seed round to get their series B is when I left. At GitHub, I got to see what it looked like at a bigger company, which, like, it doesn't matter how big or small you are, like, there's always chaos. Like, GitHub was, like, so much chaos, and there was a lot of good that was happening but a lot of uncertainty at the time I ed in 2018. And then, nine months later, Microsoft acquired GitHub. So then I got to learn stability and what it looks like to...for personal reasons, I always had a budget but never had extra money, even years into my engineering career. And that taught me what it looks like when success meets career. With that being said, like, the problem that I'm solving, I got to learn firsthand while being at Netlify and getting adoption and traction through open source. And then going to GitHub and seeing every single other company that looked at GitHub as a solution to their open-source collaborations and interactions. And then also seeing that there was a hole in just understanding, like, how do you survive? How do you sustain yourself as your career but also your open-source project? Like, a lot of folks want to know, like, what success looks like for open source. Like, how do you get on the trending algorithm? Like, how do you get noticed? It's more than just pushing to GitHub and hoping for the best. There are, like, other things that happen for projects to be successful. And for us to choose the next in the future technologies, it really comes down to community, marketing, and then resources. And those three things end up making projects successful. With OpenSauced, we're working to help inflate some storytelling and add some of those resources to open-source projects. VICTORIA: Great. So you were able to really get, like, the full vision of what it could be if you had a product that became successful and stable, and you knew you wanted to build it on open source. So I love that you really just...you had this problem, and that's what you built the product around. And that ended up becoming the business. What was surprising for you in those early discovery phases with OpenSauced when you were first thinking of building it? BRIAN: I guess what's really surprising is we're not, like, crazy traction today. But we've done a pretty good job of getting, like, 2,000 developers to sign up to it since December. And then the conversations with enterprises so far just by the sheer...like, basically, what was surprising is if you use proper sales technique and you're early stage as a startup, so, like, not necessarily hire salespeople, but as a founder or as a stakeholder, just go talk to your future customers and your s. Everyone says it, but that's actually super valuable. And I think in the same vein of open source, folks they see projects die on the vine, but then you see projects succeed. And I think it also comes down to how often the maintainer of the project is talking to the contributors and the s and also that distinction as well. There are folks who want to contribute code to the codebase, but then there are folks who want to use the codebase. And, like, how do you interact between the two? And how do you cross the chasm for those folks as well? And, a lot of times, it's just fascinating just, like, just by trying, and just by showing up, that's half. It's all cliché stuff, like, I could say, but it's all true. Like, showing up is, like, it's, like, step one. Just show up, do the thing, do the work. And then talk to people is, like, step two. And it's hard to say, like, okay, yeah, because we are not a multibillion-dollar company, like, we're just getting started. So I can't say, like, yeah, we're super successful. But we've survived the year. And we've survived the year based on those two steps, the showing up and then talking to people. Because a lot of times, we could get lost in the sauce, per se, of just shipping code and never talking to anybody and never coming up for air. And I think what I learned, going back to what I learned from GitHub and Netlify, is talking to people and getting that loop going is the best thing you could do for any product. Any early project, any feature you're working on, talk to people about it and see if it's actually valuable for somebody that after you ship it, something will happen. WILL: You're talking about communication is a big thing for a successful project. Have you noticed any other trends that make a successful open-source project? BRIAN: Yeah, that's...Any other trends? Yeah. I mean, AI, [laughs] just kidding. WILL: [laughs] BRIAN: No, I mean, but it also it is true, like, having a trend not sort of following the herd, but catching the herd earlier is extremely valuable. Like, at Netlify, we caught the trend of React. So, basically, Netlify built essentially GitHub Pages but a product and a company. And that was, like, the original project of Netlify. It's expanded so much further from that. But at that time, when I ed, I ed three months before Create React App was developed. So, like, it was a CLI tool to build React apps easy. And, prior to that, React was, like, super complicated to get up and running. Like, you had to know Webpack. You had to know, Babel. You had to make all that glue happen together. And then there wasn't an easy process to go host it somewhere. So the prevalence of build tools like Grunt, and Gulp, and Browserify, they all made it easier to build a static output from React. And that trend is what took Netlify to where it is today. It's like, people needed a place to deploy these static applications. GitHub Pages was like the solution for a lot of folks. Because Heroku, like, why pay $7 for something you could host on S3 for free? But the challenge was S3 it requires way more thought in how you host and take it down and deploy, and then it becomes like a Kubernetes nightmare. So the trend there was, like, people just wanted to have a better developer experience. When it comes to, like, open source, the developer experience in JavaScript has improved so much more. But folks are now looking at the next thing like a Zig, or a Rust, or all these other new languages and server renderings and stuff like that. So I guess when I take a step back, when I look at how I chose things I wanted to work on, and communities I wanted to hang out in...before committing to React...I'm based out here in Oakland, so San Francisco, basically. By seeing the sheer number of RSVPs to the React meetup, it made me confident that React would be something I should pay attention to. When you look at the RSVPs of now all these AI meetups that are happening in San Francisco, like, every single weekend is a hackathon. Highly confident that if you're engineering today, you probably want to know what embeddings are and know how OpenAI works. Not that you necessarily have to build AI stuff, but it is going to be the thing that people are going to be using. So just like we had to learn build tools, and servers, and CDNs prior, now it's all trivial stuff that you can sort of use Cloudflare for free. Like, AI is going to be very similar, and it's probably going to happen much quicker. But, in the time being, the trend right now is, like, you should probably understand whatever the players are in that space so that way you're able to talk confidently about it. WILL: That's really good advice, yep. VICTORIA: Absolutely. And, you know, in my role as Managing Director of Mission Control, or, like, DevOps, SRE platform, I spend a lot of time looking at trends, more on the engineering side. So I think my question is, [laughs] as someone who hires people to work on open-source projects, and who actively maintains and contributes to open-source projects, what should I be thinking about how to use OpenSauced as in my role? BRIAN: For hiring and sourcing skilled folks, we're actually working on a tool right now to make it more discoverable. So, today, when you onboard as an individual developer, you can check a box in your settings to say, like, if you want to collaborate with other folks, you have to opt into it. So if you want to be discovered on OpenSauced, it's in the settings. We'll probably expose that and share more about that in the future, like, in the next month or so. But for, in particular, our flow today for folks looking to find other people to contribute alongside their project is, you add your project to what we call an Insight Page. You click on the tab on the top and create a page with your project. And then, you can see contributions in your project in the last 30 days. And then you can also add other projects like your project, so you can see who else is contributing. So, that way, you can start discovering folks who are making contributions consistently and start to get some stories of, like, if they're interested in collaborating, they'll check that box; if they're not, the box won't be checked. But at least you know the sort of scope of the ecosystem. As an individual developer, we have the onboarding flow, but then we also have highlights. So, eventually, we'll do recommendations to get you to make contributions. But, for now, if you're already making contributions, you can highlight the contributions you've made so that way, you're more discoverable on the platform. And the highlights are very much like a LinkedIn post or a tweet. You just drop in a PR, and then we'll either generate that description for you, or you write a description: I did a thing. This is what it was. This was the experience. And then, now you're attached to the project through not just a code contribution but also a discovery mechanism, which is a highlight. And then, eventually, we'll start doing blog posts, and guides, and stuff like that, as they're written. Like, if you want to attribute your career, and your journey to your participation to, like, documentation updates and stuff like that, those will also be highlights coming soon. WILL: I love, love, love that. MID-ROLL AD: Now that you have funding, it’s time to design, build and ship the most impactful MVP that wows customers now and can scale in the future. thoughtbot Lift Off brings you the most reliable cross-functional team of product experts to mitigate risk and set you up for long-term success. As your trusted, experienced technical partner, we’ll help launch your new product and guide you into a future-forward business that takes advantage of today’s new technologies and agile best practices. Make the right decisions for tomorrow, today. Get in touch at: thoughtbot.com/liftoff WILL: I hear you saying that you have some things that's coming soon. In a high, high level, what are some of the things that you have coming? And what does success look like, six months, a year? What does that look like? Because it sounds like you have some really good ideas that you're working on. BRIAN: Yeah, yeah. So, like, six months to the end of the year, what we want to do is actually start getting more deeper insights to what's happening in open source. What we're doing right now is building the individual developer profile and experience so that way, they're able to be discovered, find projects to work on. And then what's next is there are tons of enterprises and companies that are maintaining open-source projects, SDKs. And what we're seeing right now is we're seeing massive layoffs happening currently in the industry. So like, as of today, I think Facebook laid off 4,000 people, ESPN laid off, like, 7,000 Disney employees as well. And some of those employees are around the Disney+ place. It's a lot of technical engineering stuff. So I guess what I'm getting at is there...we want to be able to see the trends of places that activity is happening and start recommending people to that. But also, we want to give an opportunity for folks who...companies...sorry, I'm avoiding trying to name specific companies because nothing is in contract yet. But certain companies, like, you, don't think of as an open-source powerhouse. So, like, a company we're now talking to right now is walgreens.com. And Walgreens they have tech. They've got open source that they participated. But they're not thought of as a place like, oh, I want to go work at Walgreens and go work on some cloud infrastructure stuff. So, how does Walgreens get exposure? And, like, hey, we're involved in the kubectl, and the Kubernetes platform and stuff like that, like, be aware that there's opportunity here. So we're going to start driving that connection to folks. So, as you develop your career doing open source, you can also be noticed, and folks can reach out to you. And also, I want to stand on the notion of open source is not for everybody. But I also want to point out, like, my entire career in open source has not been nights and weekends. It's always been finding a company that s my interest to do open-source at work. Part of my story is, like, I was getting an MBA. My first kid, who's nine years old now he, was born 11 weeks early. And he's the reason why I built an app because I wanted to build an app to solve a pain point that I had, and ended up building that in 17 weeks. And that turned into opportunity. So I guess what I'm getting at is, like, folks being laid off right now, you might have some extra free time. You might be submitting like 100 applications a day. Consider taking that down to 50 applications a day, and then try to contribute to a couple of open-source projects a month. So that way, there's some more story to be shared as you're in the job market. VICTORIA: I love that you created that app when you had your son and you had that need. And for developers wanting to get noticed and wanting to get their next leg up or maybe even negotiate for higher salaries, what's the traditional way people do that now to kind of highlight themselves? BRIAN: The traditional way what people are doing is they're tweeting. They're speaking at conferences. They're sharing their stories. It's like zero to I'm an influencer in the open-source space. There's no real clear guide and steps to get to that point, which is why we have highlights today. Like, we want to make it low effort for folks to write 200 characters about something they contributed to. We're actually working on something to generate pull request descriptions because I think that's another missed opportunity. Like, when you open a PR in an open-source project, and it says no description added, like, that's a missed opportunity. Like, there's an opportunity for you to share what you've learned, what Stack Overflow questions you looked at, like, how you got to the problem, and why this is the right solution. All should be in the pull request description. And then that pull request should be in your cover letter for your resume so that people can go back and say, "Oh, wow, you did some real work." I can go see the history of your contributions because perhaps the job you got let go from you only worked in private repos. You couldn't really showcase your skills. That now gives you a competitive edge. And I guess when I look into this, like, going back to my original onboard ramp into engineering, I graduated with a finance degree with no network. I had one internship at an insurance company, but that wasn't enough. Like, everyone who I interned with, like, the guy who got a job at the internship, like, his dad was a client, was a big client at that firm. And another guy he worked at a golf course, and he'd be the caddy for all these big finance folks where I went to school. So, once I learned that there's an opportunity to get a job by just knowing people, that changed my entire path. Like, when I got to sales, like, oh, or when I got to engineering, I just knew go and meet people. Go have conversations. Go to meetups. What I'm trying to do with OpenSauced is make that step closer for folks, so they could look up and be like, you know, I've made all these contributions, or I don't know where to start. Let me just look at people who I know and follow in the industry and see where they're contributing, and make that connection. So, like, we've kind of closed that gap without the need of, again, you don't need 100,000 Twitter followers to get noticed. Just make some contributions or show up and ask questions. And, hopefully, that's the first step to establishing your career. VICTORIA: Well, that sounds great for both people who are looking to get hired, but also, as someone who hires people, [laughter] I know that there's a lot of amazing developers who are never going to do a conference talk, or they're not going to post on Twitter. So I love that that's available, and that's something you're working on. BRIAN: Yeah, it's just coming out of my own pain of, like, I was saying, like, looking at the story now, it sounds great. [laughs] But part of that story was like, hey, I was getting severely underpaid as an engineer in San Francisco, living in a one-bedroom apartment with two kids. Like, all that part of the story is like nothing I dwell on. But it's like, all that opportunity and knowledge-sharing that I ended up benefiting from, it's like what I constantly try to give. I pay it forward with folks. And I'm more than happy to talk with folks on Twitter and in OpenSauced Discord and other places because I think there's a lot of opportunity in open source. And if anybody's willing to listen, I'm willing to show them the path. WILL: I'm so glad you brought that up because this is one of my favorite questions I ask on the podcast: So, knowing where you're at right now and your story, you've gone the ups, the downs, all of it. If you can go back in time and know what you know now, what advice would you give yourself at the beginning? BRIAN: Honestly, I would say write it down. Like, one thing that I did is I did a blog post, and that's part of the reason why I was able to find my first job in engineering is I started a blog, which was really for myself to learn what I did yesterday. I tell everyone who I mentor it takes two hours every time you want to sit and learn something new because one hour is to what you did yesterday, and then one hour is to do something new. And so, I usually write it down and then make it a blog post just to solve that problem. I wish I did more with that, like, you know, wrote a book, or created a YouTube channel, or something because all that knowledge and that sort of sharing is actually what got me to level up faster. I was asked by one of my close friends, like, "Hey, how do you do it? How do you accomplish everything you've done in the last, like, 9-10 years?" And I didn't know what the answer was then. But the answer today for my friend, and I'll share this with them, is it's because I wrote it down. I was able to go back and see what I did. And then, at the end of six months, I was able to go back six months and see what I did. It's like the idea of relativity with, like, Einstein. Relativity is the idea of motion and the perception. Like, if you're in a train, it feels like you're just going slow. But you might be going 100 miles per hour, but you don't feel that. And when you're going on your journey, you could be going 100 miles per hour, but you're thinking, oh, man, I failed yesterday. I could have solved a problem. But yeah, you solved six problems while trying to solve for one. It's that situation. So advice for myself, in the beginning, write it down and then share it way more than I did when I started. Because a lot of the stuff I'm like, even in this conversation, I'm thinking, oh yeah, this, this, and this. And I never shared that before, and I wish I did. So yeah. WILL: I love that. Because yeah, I feel like that's development, like, you have some weeks that you're shipping out multiple features. And then other weeks, you're like, I barely got one out, or I barely fixed this one bug that I've been trying to...struggling with the last couple of weeks. So yeah, I like that advice. Write it down. And where you've been, . I just love the example you used, too, because it does seem like I haven't made any movement. But when you look back, you're like, no, you actually made a lot of movement. And you were very successful with what you did. So that's great advice. VICTORIA: I sometimes write things, and then I go back maybe six months later and read them. And I'm like, who wrote this? [laughter] I don't learning this stuff. Oh yeah, I guess I did, right, yeah. [laughs] No, that's so cool. What questions do you have for us, Brian? BRIAN: I'm curious in, like, how do thoughtbot folks stay up to date? Like, what does your involvement in open source look like today? VICTORIA: Yeah, so we are known for being active maintainers of a lot of very popular Ruby on Rails gems. So we're a consulting agency. So we're able to structure our time with our clients so that we can build in what we call investment days, which is typically Fridays, so that people can contribute to open-source projects. They can write blog posts. They can do trainings. And so that gives us the structure to be able to actually allow our employees to contribute to open source, and it's a huge part of our business as well. So if you have a Ruby on Rails project, you're probably using one of our gems. [laughs] And so, when there's other crises or other things happening in an organization, and they want to bring in an expert, they know that that's who thoughtbot is. Of course, we've expanded, and we do React, and now we're doing platform engineering. And we have some open-source TerraForm modules that we use to migrate people onto AWS and operate at that enterprise level with a mix of managed products from AWS as well. And that continues to be, like, how we talk to people [laughs] and get that buzzword out there is, like, okay, there's this cool open-source project. Like, one I'm excited about now is OpenTelemetry. And so we're digging into that and figuring out how we can contribute. And can we make a big impact here? And that just opens the door to conversations in a way that is less salesy, right? [laughs] And people know us as the contributors and maintainers, and that creates a level of trust that goes a long way. And also, it really speaks to how we operate as a company as well, where the code is open and when we give it back to the customers, it's not. Some organizations will build stuff and then never give it to you. [laughs] BRIAN: Yeah. So it sounds like folks at thoughtbot could probably benefit from things like OpenSauced for discoverability. And I get a lot of conversation around in OpenSauced as like, how do I get connected to maintainer of X or maintainer of Y? And the first step is like, how do I even know who the maintainer is? Because when you go to GitHub, you could sort this by last commit date, which not a lot of people know. You can sort the contributors by most frequently and stuff like that. But it's challenging to find out who to reach out to when it comes to packages, especially when people move on. Like, someone created a thing. They have tons of commits. And then they look like they're the number one committer for the past ten years, but they left five years ago. Those are things that we're trying to make more discoverable to solve that problem. But then, going into that thoughtbot thing, is like being able to reach out to thoughtbot and be like, oh, who can I reach out to about this gem? And, say, I have an idea, or we have an issue; how can we get unblocked because we're using this in our product? And I imagine with consulting, there's an opportunity to say, hey thoughtbot...which, honestly, at Netlify, we used thoughtbot to solve some harder problems for us. We were just like, yeah, we don't have the bandwidth to go down this path. Let's go to consulting to unblock us in this arena. VICTORIA: Right. And that was really important to me in making the decision to thoughtbot last year is that it was built around open source. And that ethos really spoke to me as, like, this is a place where I want to work. [laughs] And you can think of, like, if you're looking for vendors, like, oh, I want to work with people who have that same ethos. So yeah, OpenSauced seems like a really cool product. I'd be curious about how we can leverage it more at thoughtbot. BRIAN: We just shipped a feature called Teams, which it's self-explanatory. But, basically, when you build an insight page, you're able to build a team to help the discover process of what's happening in contributions. You get details and reporting on OpenSauced. The goal is basically to unblock teams who are involved in open source together and make it more discoverable for folks who want to find maintainers and collaborate with them. VICTORIA: Will, I know we're running close on time. But I had one more question about what you said around making open source more hospitable. And, you know, you mentioned going to Juneteenth Conf. And I'm curious if you have a perspective on if open source is equitably accessible to everyone or if there are things we can be doing as a community to be more inclusive. BRIAN: Yeah, it's a great question. So the first answer is quick, it's no. The reason why it's no is because we have to it [laughs] where there are inequitable situations. And as much as we want to set this up of, like, I want to say that there's opportunity for everyone to contribute based on no matter where their background, but just by your time zone, makes it inequitable of, like, whether you can contribute to open source. Because if you look at the data and zoom out, most open source happens in the West Coast U.S., so from San Francisco to Seattle. Like, majority of contributions are there. There are reasons for that. Like, California has a very, very expressive clause of like where you can contribute. And, technically, your employer can block you on doing open-source contributions. Unless you sign...like, at Apple, you sign away your rights to be able to do that in your employee offer letter. Sorry, [laughs] not to be a dig against Apple. Apple buy lots of open source. But what I'm getting at is that the opportunity is there, but it's the awareness thing. I'm part of an organization called DevColor. It's an organization of Black engineers in tech. We have squads and monthly meetings where we just talk about our career, and growth, and stuff like that. And I attribute a lot of that interactions to my success is, like, talking to other folks who are years ahead of me and have a lot more experience. But I say this because the majority of the folks that I interact with at DevColor they don't do open source because they all...to be a Black engineer at a level of like senior engineer at Netlify, or a staff engineer, or a manager...sorry, I meant, like, Netflix but Netlify too. You basically had a career path of, like, you probably went to school at a decent engineering school, or you figured out how to get a job at Facebook or Google. And, like, that's pretty much it. And, like, this is a blanket statement. I totally understand there are outliers. But the majority of the folks I interact with at DevColor they have a job. They have a great job. And they're doing the thing, and they're being very successful. But there's less community interaction. And that's what DevColor exists for is to encourage that community interaction and participation. So, at the end of the day, like, there's opportunity to make it more equitable. So things like, every time there's a release cut for a major open-source project, why not go to Black Girls CODE and have them build something with it? And, again, very specific, like, React 19 that's currently being tested, why not go to all these other underrepresented organizations and partner with them to show them how to use this project? Because the assumption is everyone in open source, you got to be senior enough to participate, or if it's too hot, get out of the kitchen. But if we set up a place for people to interact and level up, in three or four years from now, you'll see the open-source ecosystem of that project be completely different as far as diversity. But it takes that investment to have that onboard ramp to even have that connection or conversation about testing early releases with underrepresented groups in engineering. That's where we have to start, and that's what we're trying to do at OpenSauced. We want to make that connection. I have a whole plan for it. I'll share in a blog post. I also mentioned that a lot of these thoughts are on our blog as well. I've been writing blog posts around these conversations. So opensauced.pizza/blog if you're interested. VICTORIA: Very cool. Thank you for that. WILL: I'm just processing on the whole conversation. It has just been great. VICTORIA: Yes. Thank you so much for sharing with us. And I wonder, do you have any final takeaways for our listeners today, Brian? BRIAN: Yeah, final takeaways. Like, if anything at all resonated in this conversation, please reach out, bdougie on GitHub. I'm pretty active with my notifications. So if you @ mention me in a random project, I'll probably jump back in and respond to you. But also Twitter @bdougieYO. And then, I mentioned our blog. We also have a newsletter. So, if you're interested in any of this OpenSauced journey, please us there, and keep in touch. VICTORIA: Wonderful. Thank you so much for ing us today and sharing your story. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at [email protected]. And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. WILL: And you could find me @will23larry This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thank you. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Special Guest: Brian Douglas. Sponsored By: thoughtbot: Now that you have funding, it’s time to design, build and ship the most impactful MVP that wows customers now and can scale in the future. thoughtbot Lift Off brings you the most reliable cross-functional team of product experts to mitigate risk and set you up for long-term success. As your trusted, experienced technical partner, we’ll help launch your new product and guide you into a future-forward business that takes advantage of today’s new technologies and agile best practices. Make the right decisions for tomorrow, today. Get in touch at: thoughtbot.com/liftoff Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Lauren Maffeo is the author of Deg Data Governance from the Ground Up. Victoria talks to Lauren about human-centered design work, data stewardship and governance, and writing a book anybody can use regardless of industry or team size. Deg Data Governance from the Ground Up Follow Lauren Maffeo on LinkedIn or Twitter. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: Hey there. It's your host Victoria. And I'm here today with Dawn Delatte and Jordyn Bonds from our Ignite team. We are thrilled to announce the summer 2023 session of our new incubator program. If you have a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our 8-week program. We'll help you validate the market opportunity, experiment with messaging and product ideas, and move forward with confidence towards an MVP. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. Dawn and Jordyn, thank you for ing and sharing the news with me today. JORDYN: Thanks for having us. DAWN: Yeah, glad to be here. VICTORIA: So, tell me a little bit more about the incubator program. This will be your second session, right? JORDYN: Indeed. We are just now wrapping up the first session. We had a really great 8 weeks, and we're excited to do it again. VICTORIA: Wonderful. And I think we're going to have the person from your program on a Giant Robots episode soon. JORDYN: Wonderful. VICTORIA: Maybe you can give us a little preview. What were some of your main takeaways from this first round? JORDYN: You know, as ever with early-stage work, it's about identifying your best early adopter market and persona, and then learning as much as you possibly can about them to inform a roap to a product. VICTORIA: What made you decide to start this incubator program this year with thoughtbot? DAWN: We had been doing work with early-stage products and founders, as well as some innovation leads or research and development leads in existing organizations. We had been applying a lot of these processes, like the customer discovery process, Product Design Sprint process to validate new product ideas. And we've been doing that for a really long time. And we've also been noodling on this idea of exploring how we might offer value even sooner to clients that are maybe pre-software product idea. Like many of the initiatives at thoughtbot, it was a little bit experimental for us. We decided to sort of dig into better understanding that market, and seeing how the expertise that we had could be applied in the earlier stage. It's also been a great opportunity for our team to learn and grow. We had Jordyn our team as Director of Product Strategy. Their experience with having worked at startups and being an early-stage startup founder has been so wonderful for our team to engage with and learn from. And we've been able to offer that value to clients as well. VICTORIA: I love that. So it's for people who have identified a problem, and they think they can come up with a software solution. But they're not quite at the point of being ready to actually build something yet. Is that right? DAWN: Yeah. We've always championed the idea of doing your due diligence around validating the right thing to build. And so that's been a part of the process at thoughtbot for a really long time. But it's always been sort of in the context of building your MVP. So this is going slightly earlier with that idea and saying, what's the next right step for this business? It's really about understanding if there is a market and product opportunity, and then moving into exploring what that opportunity looks like. And then validating that and doing that through research, and talking to customers, and applying early product and business strategy thinking to the process. VICTORIA: Great. So that probably sets you up for really building the right thing, keeping your overall investment costs lower because you're not wasting time building the wrong thing. And setting you up for that due diligence when you go to investors to say, here's how well I vetted out my idea. Here's the rigor that I applied to building the MVP. JORDYN: Exactly. It's not just about convincing external stakeholders, so that's a key part. You know, maybe it's investors, maybe it's new team you're looking to hire after the program. It could be anyone. But it's also about convincing yourself. Really, walking down the path of pursuing a startup is not a small undertaking. And we just want to make sure folks are starting with their best foot forward. You know, like Dawn said, let's build the right thing. Let's figure out what that thing is, and then we can think about how to build it right. That's a little quote from a book I really enjoy, by the way. I cannot take credit for that. [laughs] There's this really great book about early-stage validation called The Right It by Alberto Savoia. He was an engineer at Google, started a couple of startups himself, failed in some ways, failed to validate a market opportunity before marching off into building something. And the pain of that caused him to write this book about how to quickly and cheaply validate some market opportunity, market assumptions you might have when you're first starting out. The way he frames that is let's figure out if it's the right it before we build it right. And I just love that book, and I love that framing. You know, if you don't have a market for what you're building, or if they don't understand that they have the pain point you're solving for, it doesn't matter what you build. You got to do that first. And that's really what the focus of this incubator program is. It's that phase of work. Is there a there there? Is there something worth the hard, arduous path of building some software? Is there something there worth walking that path for before you start walking it? VICTORIA: Right. I love that. Well, thank you both so much for coming on and sharing a little bit more about the program. I'm super excited to see what comes out of the first round, and then who gets selected for the second round. So I'm happy to help promote. Any other final takeaways for our listeners today? DAWN: If this sounds intriguing to you, maybe you're at the stage where you're thinking about this process, I definitely encourage people to follow along. We're trying to share as much as we can about this process and this journey for us and our founders. So you can follow along on our blog, on LinkedIn. We're doing a LinkedIn live weekly with the founder in the program. We'll continue to do that with the next founders. And we're really trying to build a community and extend the community, you know, that thoughtbot has built with early-stage founders, so please us. We'd love to have you. VICTORIA: Wonderful. That's amazing. Thank you both so much. INTRO MUSIC: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. And with me today is Lauren Maffeo, Author of Deg Data Governance from the Ground Up. Lauren, thank you for ing us. LAUREN: Thanks so much for having me, Victoria. I'm excited to be here. VICTORIA: Wonderful. I'm excited to dive right into this topic. But first, maybe just tell me what led you to start writing this book? LAUREN: I was first inspired to write this book by my clients, actually. I was working as a service designer at Steampunk, which is a human-centered design firm serving the federal government. I still do work for Steampunk. And a few years ago, I was working with a client who had a very large database containing millions of unique data points going back several centuries. And I realized throughout the course of my discovery process, which is a big part of human-centered design work, that most of their processes for managing the data in this database were purely manual. There was no DevSecOps integrated into their workflows. These workflows often included several people and took up to a week to complete. And this was an organization that had many data points, as mentioned, in its purview. They also had a large team to manage the data in various ways. But they still really struggled with an overall lack of processes. And really, more importantly, they lacked quality standards for data, which they could then automate throughout their production processes. I realized that even when organizations exist to have data in their purview and to share it with their s, that doesn't necessarily mean that they actually have governance principles that they abide by. And so that led me to really consider, more broadly, the bigger challenges that we see with technology like AI, machine learning, large language models. We know now that there is a big risk of bias within these technologies themselves due to the data. And when I dug deeper, first as a research analyst at Gartner and then as a service designer at Steampunk, I realized that the big challenge that makes this a reality is lack of governance. It's not having the quality standards for deciding how data is fit for use. It's not categorizing your data according to the top domains in your organization that produce data. It's lack of clear ownership regarding who owns which data sets and who is able to make decisions about data. It's not having things like a data destruction policy, which shows people how long you hold on to data for. So that knowledge and seeing firsthand how many organizations struggle with that lack of governance that's what inspired me to write the book itself. And I wanted to write it from the lens of a service designer. I have my own bias towards that, given that I am a practicing service designer. But I do believe that data governance when approached through a design thinking lens, can yield stronger results than if it is that top-down IT approach that many organizations use today unsuccessfully. VICTORIA: So let me play that back a little bit. So, in your experience, organizations that struggle to make the most out of their data have an issue with defining the authority and who has that authority to make decisions, and you refer to that as governance. So that when it comes down to it, if you're building things and you want to say, is this ethical? Is this right? Is this secure? Is it private enough? Someone needs to be responsible [laughs] for answering that. And I love that you're bringing this human-centered design approach into it. LAUREN: Yeah, that's exactly right. And I would say that ownership is a big part of data governance. It is one of the most crucial parts. I have a chapter in my book on data stewards, what they are, the roles they play, and how to select them and get them on board with your data governance vision. The main thing I want to emphasize about data stewardship is that it is not just the technical of your team. Data scientists, data architects, and engineers can all be exceptional data stewards, especially because they work with the data day in and day out. The challenge I see is that these people typically are not very close to the data, and so they don't have that context for what different data points mean. They might not know offhand what the definitions per data piece are. They might not know the format that the data originates in. That's information that people in non-technical roles tend to possess. And so, data stewardship and governance is not about turning your sales director into a data engineer or having them build ETL pipelines. But it is about having the people who know that data best be in positions where they're able to make decisions about it, to define it, to decide which pieces of metadata are attached to each piece of data. And then those standards are what get automated throughout the DevSecOps process to make better life cycles that produce better-quality data faster, at speed with fewer resources. VICTORIA: So, when we talk about authority, what we really mean is, like, who has enough context to make smart decisions? LAUREN: Who has enough context and also enough expertise? I think a big mistake that we as an industry have made with data management is that we have given the responsibility for all data in an organization to one team, sometimes one person. So, typically, what we've done in the past is we've seen all data in an organization managed by IT. They, as a department, make top-down decisions about who has access to which data, what data definitions exist, where the data catalog lives, if it exists in an organization at all. And that creates a lot of blockers for people if you always have to go through one team or person to get permission to use data. And then, on top of that, the IT team doesn't have the context that your subject matter experts do about the data in their respective divisions. And so it really is about expanding the idea of who owns data and who is in a position of authority to make decisions about it by collaborating across silos. This is very challenging work to do. But I would actually say that for smaller organizations, they might lack the resources in, time, and money, and people to do data governance at scale. But what they can do is start embedding data governance as a core principle into the fabric of their organizations. And ultimately, I think that will power them for success in a way that larger organizations were not able to because there is a lot of technical debt out there when it comes to bad data. And one way to avoid that in the future or to at least mitigate it is to establish data governance standards early on. VICTORIA: Talk me through what your approach would be if you were working with an organization who wants to build-in this into the fabric of how they work. What would be your first steps in engaging with them and identifying where they have needs in part of that discovery process? LAUREN: In human-centered design, the discovery process occurs very early in a project. This is where you are working hand in hand with your client to figure out what their core needs are and how you can help them solve those core needs. And this is important to do because it's not always obvious what those needs are. You might get a contract to work on something very specific, whether it's deg the interface of a database or it's migrating a website. Those are technical challenges to solve. And those are typically the reason why you get contracted to work with your client. But you still have to do quite a bit of work to figure out what the real ask is there and what is causing the need for them to have hired you in the first place. And so, the first thing I would do if I was walking a client through this is I would start by asking who the most technical senior lead in the organization is. And I would ask how they are managing data today. I think it's really important, to be honest about the state of data in your organization today. The work that we do deg data governance is very forward-thinking in a lot of ways, but you need a foundation to build upon. And I think people need to be honest about the state of that foundation in their organization. So the first thing I would do is find that most-senior data leader who is responsible for making decisions about data and owns the data strategy because that person is tasked with figuring out how to use data in a way that is going to benefit the business writ large. And so, data governance is a big part of what they are tasked to do. And so, in the first instance, what I would do is I would host a workshop with the client where I would ask them to do a few things. They would start by answering two questions: What is my company's mission statement, and how do we use data to fulfill that mission statement? These are very baseline questions. And the first one is so obvious and simple that it might be a little bit off-putting because you're tempted to think, as a senior leader, I already know what my company does. Why do I need to answer it like this? And you need to answer it like this because just like we often get contracts to work on particular technical problems, you'd be surprised by how many senior leaders cannot articulate their company's mission statements. They'll talk to you about their jobs, the tools they use to do their jobs, who they work with on a daily basis. But they still aren't ultimately answering the question of how their job, how the technology they use fulfills a bigger organizational need. And so, without understanding what that organizational need is, you won't be able to articulate how data fulfills that mission. And if you're not able to explain how data fulfills your company's mission, I doubt you can explain which servers your data lives on, which file format it needs to be converted to, who owns which data sets, where they originate, what your DevSecOps processes are. So answering those two questions about the company mission and how data is used to fulfill that mission is the first step. The second thing I would do is ask this senior leader, let's say the chief data officer, to define the data domains within their organization. And when we talk about data domains, we are talking about the areas of the business that are the key areas of interest. This can also be the problem spaces that your organization addresses. It also can have a hand in how your organization is designed as is; in other words, who reports to whom? Do you have sales and marketing within one part of the organization, or are they separate? Do you have customer success as its own wing of the organization separate from product? However your organization is architected, you can draw lines between those different teams, departments, and the domains that your organization works in. And then, most importantly, you want to be looking at who leads each domain and has oversight over the data in that domain. This is a really important aspect of the work because, as mentioned, stewards play a really key role in upholding and executing data governance. You need data stewards across non-technical and technical roles. So defining not just what the data domains are but who leads each domain in a senior role is really important to mapping out who your data stewards will be and to architect your first data governance council. And then, finally, the last thing I would have them do in the first instance is map out a business capability map showing not only what their data domains are but then the sub-domains underneath. So, for example, you have sales, and that can be a business capability. But then, within the sales data domain, you're going to have very different types of sales data. You're going to have quarterly sales, bi-annual sales, inbound leads versus outbound leads. You're going to have very different types of data within that sales data domain. And you want to build those out as much as you possibly can across all of your data domains. If you are a small organization, it's common to have about four to six data domains with subdomains underneath, each of those four to six. But it varies according to each startup and organization and how they are structured. Regardless of how your organization is structured, there's always value in doing those three things. So you start by identifying what your organization does and how data fulfills that goal. You define the core data domains in your organization, including who owns each domain. And then, you take that information about data domains, and you create a capability map showing not just your core data domains but the subdomains underneath because you're going to use all of that information to architect a future data governance program based on what you currently have today. VICTORIA: I think that's a great approach, and it makes a lot of sense. Is that kind of, like, the minimum that people should be doing for a data governance program? Like, what's the essentials to do, like, maybe even your due diligence, say, as a health tech startup company? LAUREN: This is the bare minimum of what I think every organization should do. The specifics of that are different depending on industry, depending on company size, organizational structure. But I wrote this book to be a com that any organization can use. There's a lot of nuance, especially when we get into the production environment an organization has. There's a lot of nuance there depending on tools, all of that. And so I wanted to write a book that anybody could use regardless of industry size, team size, all of that information. I would say that those are the essential first steps. And I do think that is part of the discovery process is figuring out where you stand today, and no matter how ugly it might be. Because, like we've mentioned, there is more data produced on a daily basis than ever before. And you are not going into this data governance work with a clean slate. You already have work in your organization that you do to manage data. And you really need to know where there are gaps so that you can address those gaps. And so, when we go into the production environment and thinking about what you need to do to be managing data for quality on a regular basis, there are a couple of key things. The first is that you need a plan for how you're going to govern data throughout each lifecycle. So you are very likely not using a piece of data once and never again. You are likely using it through several projects. So you always want to have a plan for governance in production that includes policies on data usage, data archiving, and data destruction. Because you want to make sure that you are fulfilling those principles, whatever they are, throughout each lifecycle because you are managing data as a product. And that brings me to the next thing that I would encourage people working in data governance to consider, which is taking the data mesh principle of managing data as a product. And this is a fundamental mind shift from how big data has been managed in the past, where it was more of a service. There are many detriments to that, given the volume of data that exists today and given how much data environments have changed. So, when we think about data mesh, we're really thinking about four key principles. The first is that you want to manage your data according to specific domains. So you want to be creating a cloud environment that really s for the nuance of each data domain. That's why it's so important to define what those data domains are. You're going to not just document what those domains are. You're going to be managing and owning data in a domain-specific way. The second thing is managing data as a product. And so, rather than taking the data as a service approach, you have data stewards who manage their respective data as products within the cloud environment. And so then, for instance, rather than using data about customer interactions in a single business context, you can instead use that data in a range of ways across the organization, and other colleagues can use that data as well. You also want to have data available as a self-service infrastructure. This is really important in data mesh. Because it emphasizes keeping all data on a centralized platform that manages your storage, streaming, pipelines, and anything else, and this is crucial because it prevents data from leaving in disparate systems on various servers. And it also erases or eases the need to build integrations between those different systems and databases. And it also gives each data steward a way to manage their domain data from the same source. And then the last principle for data mesh is ecosystem governance. And really, what we're talking about here is reinforcing the data framework and mission statement that you are using to guide all of your work. It's very common in tech for tech startups to operate according to a bigger vision and according to principles that really establish the rationale for why that startup deserves to exist in the world. And likewise, you want to be doing all of your production work with data according to a bigger framework and mission that you've already shared. And you want to make sure that all of your data is formatted, standardized, and discoverable against equal standards that govern the quality of your data. VICTORIA: That sounds like data is your biggest value as a company and your greatest source of liability [laughs] and in many ways. And, I'm curious, you mentioned just data as a product, if you can talk more about how that fits into how company owners and founders should be thinking about data and the company they're building. LAUREN: So that's a very astute comment about data as a liability. That is absolutely true. And that is one of the reasons why governance is not just nice to have. It's really essential, especially in this day and age. The U.S. has been quite lax when it comes to data privacy and protection standards for U.S. citizens. But I do think that that will change over the next several years. I think U.S. citizens will get more data protections. And that means that organizations are going to have to be more astute about tracking their data and making sure that they are using it in appropriate ways. So, when we're talking to founders who want to consider how to govern data as a product, you're thinking about data stewards taking on the role of product managers and using data in ways that benefits not just them and their respective domains but also giving it context and making it available to the wider business in a way that it was not available before. So if you are architecting your data mesh environment in the cloud, what you might be able to do is create various domains that exist on their own little microservice environments. And so you have all of these different domains that exist in one environment, but then they all connect to this bigger data mesh catalog. And from the catalog, that is where your colleagues across the business can access the data in your domain. Now, you don't want to necessarily give free rein for anybody in your organization to get any data at any time. You might want to establish guardrails for who is able to access which data and what those parameters are. And the data as a product mindset allows you to do that because it gives you, as the data steward/pseudo pm, the autonomy to define how and when your data is used, rather than giving that responsibility to a third-party colleague who does not have that context about the data in your domain. VICTORIA: I like that about really giving the people who have the right context the ability to manage their product and their data within their product. That makes a lot of sense to me. Mid-Roll Ad: As life moves online, bricks-and-mortar businesses are having to adapt to survive. With over 18 years of experience building reliable web products and services, thoughtbot is the technology partner you can trust. We provide the technical expertise to enable your business to adapt and thrive in a changing environment. We start by understanding what’s important to your customers to help you transition to intuitive digital services your customers will trust. We take the time to understand what makes your business great and work fast yet thoroughly to build, test, and validate ideas, helping you discover new customers. Take your business online with design-driven digital acceleration. Find out more at tbot.io/acceleration or click the link in the show notes for this episode. VICTORIA: What is it like to really bring in this culture of design-thinking into an organization that's built a product around data? LAUREN: It can be incredibly hard. I have found that folks really vary in their approach to this type of work. I think many people that I talk to have tried doing data governance to some degree in the past, and, for various reasons, it was not successful. So as a result, they're very hesitant to try again. I think also for many technical leaders, if they're in CIO, CDO, CTO roles, they are not used to design thinking or to doing human-centered design work. That's not the ethos that was part of the tech space for a very long time. It was all about the technology, building what you could, experimenting and tinkering, and then figuring out the part later. And so this is a real fundamental mindset shift to insist on having a vision for how data benefits your business before you start investing money and people into building different data pipelines and resources. It's also a fundamental shift for everyone in an organization because we, in society writ large, are taught to believe that data is the responsibility of one person or one team. And we just can't afford to think like that anymore. There is too much data produced and ingested on a daily basis for it to fall to one person or one team. And even if you do have a technical team who is most adept at managing the cloud environment, the data architecture, building the new models for things like fraud detection, that's all the purview of maybe one team that is more technical. But that does not mean that the rest of the organization doesn't have a part to play in defining the standards for data that govern everything about the technical environment. And I think a big comparison we can make is to security. Many of us… most of us, even if we work in tech, are not cybersecurity experts. But we also know that employees are the number one cause of breaches at organizations. There's no malintent behind that, but people are most likely to expose company data and cause a breach from within the company itself. And so organizations know that they are responsible for creating not just secure technical environments but educating their employees and their workforce on how to be stewards of security. And so, even at my company, we run constant tests to see who is going to be vulnerable to phishing? Who is going to click on malicious links? They run quarterly tests to assess how healthy we are from a cybersecurity perspective. And if you click on a phishing attempt and you fall for it, you are directed to a self-service education video that you have to complete, going over the aspects of this phishing test, what made it malicious. And then you're taught to educate yourself on what to look for in the future. We really need to be doing something very similar with data. And it doesn't mean that you host a two-hour training and then never talk about data again. You really need to look at ways to weave data governance into the fabric of your organization so that it is not disruptive to anybody's day. It's a natural part of their day, and it is part of working at your organization. Part of your organizational goals include having people serve as data stewards. And you emphasize that stewardship is for everyone, not just the people in the technology side of the business. VICTORIA: I love that. And I think there's something to be said for having more people involved in the data process and how that will impact just the quality of your data and the inclusivity of what you're building to bring those perspectives together. LAUREN: I agree. And that's the real goal. And I think this is, again, something that's actually easier for startups to do because startups are naturally more nimble. They find out what works, what doesn't work. They're willing to try things. They have to be willing to try things. Because, to use a really clichéd phrase, if they're not innovating, then they're going to get stale and go out of business. But the other benefit that I think startups have when they're doing this work is the small size. Yes, you don't have the budget or team size of a company like JP Morgan, that is enormous, or a big bank. But you still have an opportunity to really design a culture, an organizational culture that puts data first, regardless of role. And then you can architect the structure of every role according to that vision. And I think that's a really exciting opportunity for companies, especially if they are selling data or already giving data as a product in some way. If they're selling, you know, data as a product services, this is a really great approach and a unique approach to solving data governance and making it everyone's opportunity to grow their own roles and work smarter. VICTORIA: Right. And when it's really the core of your business, it makes sense to pay more attention to that area [laughs]. It's what makes it worthwhile. It's what makes potential investors know that you're a real company who takes things seriously. [laughs] LAUREN: That's true. That's very true. VICTORIA: I'm thinking, what questions...do you have any questions for me? LAUREN: I'm curious to know, when you talk to thoughtbot clients, what are the main aspects of data that they struggle with? I hear a variety of reasons for data struggles when I talk to clients, when I talk to people on the tech side, either as engineers or architects. I'm curious to hear what the thoughtbot community struggles with the most when it comes to managing big data. VICTORIA: I think, in my experience, in the last less than a year that I've been with thoughtbot, one challenge which is sort of related to data...but I think for many small companies or startups they don't really have an IT department per se. So, like, what you mentioned early on in the discovery process as, like, who is the most senior technical person on your team? And that person may have little to no experience managing an IT operations group. I think it's really bringing consulting from the ground up for an organization on IT operations, data management, and access management. Those types of policies might just be something they hadn't considered before because it's not in their background and experience. But maybe once they've gotten set up, I think the other interesting part that happens is sometimes there's just data that's just not being managed at all. And there are processes and bits and pieces of code in app that no one really knows what they are, who they're used for, [laughs] where the data goes. And then, you know, the connections between data. So everything that you're mentioning that could happen when you don't do data governance, where it can slow down deployment processes. It can mean that you're giving access to people who maybe shouldn't have access to production data. It can mean that you have vulnerabilities in your infrastructure. That means someone could have compromised your data already, and you just don't know about it. Just some of the issues that we see related to data across the spectrum of people in their lifecycle of their startups. LAUREN: That makes total sense, I think, especially when you are in a startup. If you're going by the typical startup model, you have that business-minded founder, and then you likely have a more technical co-founder. But we, I think, make the assumption that if you are, quote, unquote, "technical," you, therefore, know how to do anything and everything about every system, every framework, every type of cloud environment. And we all know that that's just not the case. And so it's easy to try to find the Chief Technology Officer or the Chief Information Officer if one exists and to think, oh, this is the right person for the job. And they might be the most qualified person given the context, but that still doesn't mean that they have experience doing this work. The reality is that very few people today have deep hands-on experience making decisions about data with the volume that we see today. And so it's a new frontier for many people. And then, on top of that, like you said as well, it's really difficult to know where your data lives and to track it. And the amount of work that goes into answering those very basic questions is enormous. And that's why documentation is so important. That's why data lineage in your architecture is so important. It really gives you a snapshot of which data lives where, how it's used. And that is invaluable in of reducing technical debt. VICTORIA: I agree. And I wonder if you have any tips for people facilitating conversations in their organization about data governance. What would you tell them to make it less scary and more fun, more appealing to work on? LAUREN: I both love and hate the term data governance. Because it's a word that you say, and whether you are technical or not, many people tune out as soon as they hear it because it is, in a way, a scary word. It makes people think purely of compliance, of being told what they can't do. And that can be a real challenge for folks. So I would say that if you are tasked with making a data governance program across your organization, you have to invest in making it real for people. You have to sell them on stewardship by articulating what folks will gain from serving as stewards. I think that's really critical because we are going to be asking folks to a cause that they're not going to understand why it affects them or why it benefits them at first. And so it's really your job to articulate not only the benefits to them of helping to set up this data stewardship work but also articulating how data governance will help them get better at their jobs. I also think you have to create a culture where you are not only encouraging people to work across party lines, so to speak, to work across silos but to reward them for doing so. You are, especially in the early months, asking a lot of people who your data stewardship initiatives and your data governance council you're asking them to build something from the ground up, and that's not easy work. So I think any opportunity you can come up with to reward stewards in the form of bonuses or in of giving them more leeway to do their jobs more of a title bump than they might have had otherwise. Giving them formal recognition for their contributions to data governance is really essential as well. Because then they see that they are rewarded for contributing to the thought leadership that helps the data governance move forward. VICTORIA: I'm curious, what is your favorite way to be rewarded at work, Lauren? LAUREN: So I am a words person. When we talk about love languages, one of them is words of affirmation. And I would say that is the best way to quote, unquote, "reward me." I save emails and screenshots of text messages and emails that have really meant a lot to me. If someone sends me a handwritten card that really strikes a chord, I will save that card for years. My refrigerator is filled with holiday cards and birthday cards, even from years past. And so any way to recognize people for the job they're doing and to let someone know that they're seen, and their work is seen and valued really resonates with me. I think this is especially important in remote environments because I love working from home, and I am at home alone all day. And so, especially if you are the only person of your kind, of your role on your team, it's very easy to feel insular and to wonder if you're hitting the mark, if you're doing a good job. I think recognition, whether verbally or on Slack, of a job well done it really resonates with me. And that's a great way to feel rewarded. VICTORIA: I love that. And being fully remote with thoughtbot, I can feel that as well. We have a big culture of recognizing people. At least weekly, we do 15Five as a tool to kind of give people high-fives across the company. LAUREN: Yep, Steampunk does...we use Lattice. And people can submit praise and recognition for their colleagues in Lattice. And it's hooked up to Slack. And so then, when someone submits positive or a kudos to a colleague in Lattice, then everyone sees it in Slack. And I think that's a great way to boost morale and give people a little visibility that they might not have gotten otherwise, especially because we also do consulting work. So we are knee-deep in our projects on a daily basis, and we don't always see or know what our colleagues are working on. So little things like that go a long way towards making people feel recognized and valued as part of a bigger company. But I'm also curious, Victoria, what's your favorite way to get rewarded and recognized at work? VICTORIA: I think I also like the verbal. I feel like I like giving high-fives more than I like receiving them. But sometimes also, like, working at thoughtbot, there are just so many amazing people who help me all throughout the day. I start writing them, and then I'm like, well, I have to also thank this person, and then this person. And then I just get overwhelmed. [laughs] So I'm trying to do more often so I don't have a backlog of them throughout the week and then get overwhelmed on Friday. LAUREN: I think that's a great way to do it, and I think it's especially important when you're in a leadership role. Something that I'm realizing more and more as I progress in my career is that the more senior you are, the more your morale and attitude sets the tone for the rest of the team. And that's why I think if you are in a position to lead data governance, your approach to it is so crucial to success. Because you really have to get people on board with something that they might not understand at first, that they might resent it first. This is work that seems simple on the surface, but it's actually very difficult. The technology is easy. The people are what's hard. And you really have to come in, I think, emphasizing to your data stewards and your broader organization, not just what governance is, because, frankly, a lot of people don't care. But you really have to make it tangible for them. And you have to help them see that governance affects everyone, and everyone can have a hand in co-creating it through shared standards. I think there's a lot to be learned from the open-source community in this regard. The open-source community, more than any other I can think of, is the model of self-governance. It does not mean that it's perfect. But it does mean that people from all roles, backgrounds have a shared mission to build something from nothing and to make it an initiative that other people will benefit from. And I think that attitude is really well-positioned for success with data governance. VICTORIA: I love that. And great points all around on how data governance can really impact an organization. Are there any final takeaways for our listeners? LAUREN: The biggest takeaway I would say is to be thoughtful about how you roll out data governance in your organization. But don't be scared if your organization is small. Again, it's very common for people to think my business is too small to really implement governance. We don't have the budget for, you know, the AWS environment we might need. Or we don't have the right number of people to serve as stewards. We don't actually have many data domains yet because we're so new. And I would say start with what you have. If you are a business in today's day and age, I guarantee that you have enough data in your possession to start building out a data governance program that is thoughtful and mission-oriented. And I would really encourage everyone to do that, regardless of how big your organization is. And then the other takeaway I would say is, if you nothing else about data governance, I would say to that you automate your standards. Your standards for data quality, data destruction, data usage are not divorced from your technical team's production environments; it's the exact opposite. Your standards should govern your environment, and they should be a lighthouse when you are doing that work. And so you always want to try to integrate your standards into your production environment, into your ETL pipelines, into your DevSecOps. That is where the magic happens. Keeping them siloed won't work. And so I'd love for people, if you really enjoyed this episode and the conversation resonated with you, too, get a copy of the book. It is my first book. And I was really excited to work with the Pragmatic Programmers on it. So if readers go to pragprog.com, they can get a copy of the book directly through the publisher. But the book is also available at Target, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and local bookstores. So I am very grateful as a first-time author for any and all . And I would really also love to hear from thoughtbot clients and podcast listeners what you thought of the book because version two is not out of the question. VICTORIA: Well, looking forward to it. Thank you again so much, Lauren, for ing us today. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at [email protected]. And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Special Guest: Lauren Maffeo. Sponsored By: thoughtbot: As life moves online, bricks-and-mortar businesses are having to adapt to survive. With over 18 years of experience building reliable web products and services, thoughtbot is the technology partner you can trust. We provide the technical expertise to enable your business to adapt and thrive in a changing environment. We start by understanding what’s important to your customers to help you transition to intuitive digital services your customers will trust. We take the time to understand what makes your business great and work fast yet thoroughly to build, test, and validate ideas, helping you discover new customers. Take your business online with design‑driven digital acceleration. Find out more at: url tbot.io/acceleration or click the link in the show notes for this episode. Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Jasper (William) Cartwright is a Freelance Producer, Podcaster, Actor, and Motion Capture & Performance Capture Performer. Chad talks to Jasper about his podcast Three Black Halflings, which is committed to discussing diversity and inclusion within fantasy, sci-fi, and nerdy culture from the perspective of three people of color, what it's like to be in the space, and why representation is super important. Follow Jasper (William) Cartwright on LinkedIn or Twitter. Check out his website at jasperwcartwright.com. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: Hey there. It's your host Victoria. And I'm here today with Dawn Delatte and Jordyn Bonds from our Ignite team. We are thrilled to announce the summer 2023 session of our new incubator program. If you have a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our 8-week program. We'll help you validate the market opportunity, experiment with messaging and product ideas, and move forward with confidence towards an MVP. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. Dawn and Jordyn, thank you for ing and sharing the news with me today. JORDYN: Thanks for having us. DAWN: Yeah, glad to be here. VICTORIA: So, tell me a little bit more about the incubator program. This will be your second session, right? JORDYN: Indeed. We are just now wrapping up the first session. We had a really great 8 weeks, and we're excited to do it again. VICTORIA: Wonderful. And I think we're going to have the person from your program on a Giant Robots episode soon. JORDYN: Wonderful. VICTORIA: Maybe you can give us a little preview. What were some of your main takeaways from this first round? JORDYN: You know, as ever with early-stage work, it's about identifying your best early adopter market and persona, and then learning as much as you possibly can about them to inform a roap to a product. VICTORIA: What made you decide to start this incubator program this year with thoughtbot? DAWN: We had been doing work with early-stage products and founders, as well as some innovation leads or research and development leads in existing organizations. We had been applying a lot of these processes, like the customer discovery process, Product Design Sprint process to validate new product ideas. And we've been doing that for a really long time. And we've also been noodling on this idea of exploring how we might offer value even sooner to clients that are maybe pre-software product idea. Like many of the initiatives at thoughtbot, it was a little bit experimental for us. We decided to sort of dig into better understanding that market, and seeing how the expertise that we had could be applied in the earlier stage. It's also been a great opportunity for our team to learn and grow. We had Jordyn our team as Director of Product Strategy. Their experience with having worked at startups and being an early-stage startup founder has been so wonderful for our team to engage with and learn from. And we've been able to offer that value to clients as well. VICTORIA: I love that. So it's for people who have identified a problem, and they think they can come up with a software solution. But they're not quite at the point of being ready to actually build something yet. Is that right? DAWN: Yeah. We've always championed the idea of doing your due diligence around validating the right thing to build. And so that's been a part of the process at thoughtbot for a really long time. But it's always been sort of in the context of building your MVP. So this is going slightly earlier with that idea and saying, what's the next right step for this business? It's really about understanding if there is a market and product opportunity, and then moving into exploring what that opportunity looks like. And then validating that and doing that through research, and talking to customers, and applying early product and business strategy thinking to the process. VICTORIA: Great. So that probably sets you up for really building the right thing, keeping your overall investment costs lower because you're not wasting time building the wrong thing. And setting you up for that due diligence when you go to investors to say, here's how well I vetted out my idea. Here's the rigor that I applied to building the MVP. JORDYN: Exactly. It's not just about convincing external stakeholders, so that's a key part. You know, maybe it's investors, maybe it's new team you're looking to hire after the program. It could be anyone. But it's also about convincing yourself. Really, walking down the path of pursuing a startup is not a small undertaking. And we just want to make sure folks are starting with their best foot forward. You know, like Dawn said, let's build the right thing. Let's figure out what that thing is, and then we can think about how to build it right. That's a little quote from a book I really enjoy, by the way. I cannot take credit for that. [laughs] There's this really great book about early-stage validation called The Right It by Alberto Savoia. He was an engineer at Google, started a couple of startups himself, failed in some ways, failed to validate a market opportunity before marching off into building something. And the pain of that caused him to write this book about how to quickly and cheaply validate some market opportunity, market assumptions you might have when you're first starting out. The way he frames that is let's figure out if it's the right it before we build it right. And I just love that book, and I love that framing. You know, if you don't have a market for what you're building, or if they don't understand that they have the pain point you're solving for, it doesn't matter what you build. You got to do that first. And that's really what the focus of this incubator program is. It's that phase of work. Is there a there there? Is there something worth the hard, arduous path of building some software? Is there something there worth walking that path for before you start walking it? VICTORIA: Right. I love that. Well, thank you both so much for coming on and sharing a little bit more about the program. I'm super excited to see what comes out of the first round, and then who gets selected for the second round. So I'm happy to help promote. Any other final takeaways for our listeners today? DAWN: If this sounds intriguing to you, maybe you're at the stage where you're thinking about this process, I definitely encourage people to follow along. We're trying to share as much as we can about this process and this journey for us and our founders. So you can follow along on our blog, on LinkedIn. We're doing a LinkedIn live weekly with the founder in the program. We'll continue to do that with the next founders. And we're really trying to build a community and extend the community, you know, that thoughtbot has built with early-stage founders, so please us. We'd love to have you. VICTORIA: Wonderful. That's amazing. Thank you both so much. INTRO MUSIC: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Jasper William-Cartwright, Game Master for hire, Actor, Creative Consultant, Podcaster, Co-Host of The Performance Capture Podcast, and Co-Host of one of my favorite podcasts, Three Black Halflings. Jasper, thank you so much for ing me. JASPER: Hey, no, thank you so much for having me. And, man, with that intro, I almost feel... CHAD: [laughs] JASPER: I almost felt...I was like, oh, I feel cool. Those are some fun things. [laughs] CHAD: I almost started with a Heeello robots. JASPER: [laughs] CHAD: But it doesn't really have the alliteration that hello Halflings does, so... JASPER: Sure. I don't even know how the hello Halfling started. Like, I'm going to have to go back and listen to some of the earlier episodes again because I genuinely have no idea how it happened. And now it's gotten to a point where it's unyieldy. Every episode, I feel like I have to get a little bit further and a little bit higher. And I'm like, this can't be good for people's ears, so, [laughs] yeah. CHAD: So I know what the show is, but in your own words, what is the Three Black Halflings Podcast? JASPER: The Three Black Halflings Podcast is a show which is committed to talking about diversity and inclusion within fantasy and sci-fi, and sort of anything that nerdy culture touches, we try to cover it from the perspective of three people of color, what it's like to be in the space, and why representation is super important. CHAD: I want to talk about the origin of the show and how you got started. But I was introducing someone to the show previously because I try to tell everybody I can about the show. [laughter] I've noticed in the beginning when you started, there was a lot of low-hanging fruit, like, we can dive into this stuff and educate people. And over time, you've introduced actual play where you're playing Dungeons & Dragons on the show. And I think it's changed a little bit, and it's still great. But I always also recommend people go back to the beginning. And I think a lot of the episodes are sort of timeless. They're not about the news of the day. They're diving into particular topics and discussing either the impact or the problems that they have or how to play them better. JASPER: Yeah, definitely. I think you're absolutely right. It's been a weird thing where because we've become more popular and we're kind of more in tune with the TTRPG space; I think that typically what has happened for us is that we've spent less time really digging around for, you know, what's some stuff... all the things that we can explore. And we're a lot more kind of like, what's the beat of the moment? If that makes sense. And I think that's why we haven't done as many episodes like that. And also, just because we...I just think that the audience is changing. And the way that people consume our content is changing. It tends to go in cycles for us where we'll do a batch of very topical episodes then we'll do more really nitty gritty kind of game design episodes. And so I think a lot of it does depend on the sort of moment, what's going on. There are still a bunch of episodes that we have planned. And obviously, we have the Halfling University series which is coming out currently, which is a more retrospective look back on poignant things throughout the history of nerd [inaudible 3:11] and nerd culture. So I like to think there's a good variety on there. CHAD: Obviously the show, especially I think when it started, had a very heavy focus on Dungeons & Dragons, which I love. People who know me [laughs] know that I love Dungeons & Dragons. JASPER: [laughs] CHAD: And I've been playing it for a long time. And as someone playing it since I was a teenager, I didn't realize until I got older and learned a lot more...and certainly, the show went a long way to sort of educating me about how not only the origins of some of the tropes of fantasy and Dungeons & Dragons but just in general how to have inclusive play. When you're playing with a group of people, and to bring it back to a non-Dungeons & Dragons specific thing, this is true, I think, in any group of people. When you're surrounded by a group of people who look the same as you, are from the same area, have the same experiences, you don't realize what's missing from that table, and that's true in our companies, and it's true around a TTRPG table too. JASPER: Yeah, I completely agree. And I think that's the same for a lot of us. I doing a big post after I'd been doing the show for about six months, and it was just like, I was very open when I started the show that a lot of what I wanted to talk about I wanted it to be a safe space for me to explore some of these things. Because I grew up in a very White middle-class area, and therefore I had a lot of the blind spots that I would see my friends of color call out my White friends for or whatever it may be. And so I was like, okay, it's time for me to educate myself. And I wanted to do it in a safe space, in a place where I could learn from great people. Obviously, we had other co-hosts of the show who are fantastic people, but we had things like sensitivity consultants and people like that come on. I always like to shout out James Mendez Hodes, who, if you ever want to do a bit of a deep dive into fantasy...and you said, Chad, the historical basis for some of the stuff that we use, and he wrote some really incredible stuff. And so a lot of it was about me trying to educate myself as well and kind of put in that work. I thought there was a value there in doing it in an open forum in sort of saying, hey, I'm a person of color, and I'm also trying to figure this out, you know what I mean? CHAD: Mm-hmm. JASPER: Because I think that a lot of the time, the barrier for anyone who doesn't belong to a minority group is like, oh, man, I don't want to burden someone else with my own understanding of this thing, and I don't want to ask the wrong questions. Or maybe I don't even know where to begin in educating myself. And so there was something about the three of us and me particularly kind of being very open about the fact that we were learning about this too and that there might be things that...mistakes or things might slightly be out of place but that we have that openness and willingness to learn. And I think that in today's internet culture where everyone is so kind of reaction-based, it just felt important to me that we had a space where we could sit in and talk about stuff and really be open with each other in a way that we knew we'd all be able to shake hands and be like, cool, that was a good session or whatever [laughs] it was today, and not be like, I hate you, you know what I mean? Because someone had made a mistake, or misspoke, or something like that. And I think you're absolutely right. It's something I've started to do a bit more of recently, which is doing diversity and inclusion talks and coaching for companies because I think a lot of the lessons that I've learned through doing this show, especially around things like language and how you set up a work environment to suit people of color and more generally, minorities, it's a slightly continuous pursuit in the sense that you always have to be kind of open and learning. And I think also it provides a...what I think is best about it is that it provides such richness to your work environment. We always say on Three Black Halflings that we want you to take these things and use them to enhance your game. Like you're saying, if you have the same people with the same experiences all the time and that's all you ever hear, then, of course, you're going to get a pretty one-sided experience. And then, if you expand that out to include people from halfway across the world who have a very different experience, they're going to see things differently. And I can almost guarantee there'll be a problem that you and your team have been stuck on for like months, and someone from a different perspective will come in and be like, boom, there's the problem, or that's how we get around it because they have a different frame of reference to you. And so I always try to...it sounds really awful to say sell it, [laughs] you know, not trying to sell diversity and inclusion, but I always want to try and go further by saying it's not just about getting different faces in the door. It's about enriching the work that you do and allowing your team to do the best work that they can. Just the quantity of difference between the kinds of things like games that I used to run, you know, to link it back to Dungeons & Dragons, versus the games that I run now, just having had this wealth of influence from other people and different experiences is incredible. And I think it holds true for every element of my work. So I work as a producer a lot in lots of creative fields as opposed to just podcasting. And it's improved tenfold just by having a diverse group of people that I draw from their experiences in my pursuits. So I think it makes a big difference. CHAD: I think it's the idea that you wanted a safe space, and so you created a public podcast on the internet. [laughter] JASPER: Yeah, I can see how that sounds now. [laughter] CHAD: I assume that you've had to navigate being in public spaces talking about diversity, inclusion. I'm sure that that has been difficult at times. JASPER: Yeah, for sure. I think just to clarify that as well, [laughs] because I am definitely aware of how it sounds, I've always been a very, like, I don't care attitude, you know what I mean? CHAD: Yeah. JASPER: In the sense that I felt like I needed what I was going to make, if that makes sense. What, I guess, I meant by a safe space is I wanted people to have the safe space of listening to it. I was getting the safe space as far as I was concerned because podcasts aren't a reactionary medium, which is lovely. So thank God your audience isn't sat here just saying everything that you said wrong and correcting you. People are probably shouting at me for stuff that I've said already on this episode. [chuckles] So it's definitely a fine line, like you said, to put something out on the internet. It's a very, very public thing to do. But it definitely just felt like, for me, creating somewhere where people could just disappear a little bit and encounter these things in a way where they're not going to be called out, or they're not going to be kind of threatened. There's no risk of cancellation or whatever if you say the wrong thing or whatever it is. It felt important. And yeah, we've had to deal with...I will say this; it's kind of tricky to sum up the things that we've dealt with because I think a lot of stuff is still so systemic in the sense that just even down to the opportunities that you get and things like that where you kind of go like, huh, they started in this space like two months ago, and they have twice the followers we do. And they're getting loads of money for doing these streams. [laughs] And you're going to go, like, hold on, what's going on here? CHAD: Yeah, there are three people on this show. They have ten times the Patreons that we do. [laughter] JASPER: Yeah, exactly. CHAD: Why might that be? [laughter] JASPER: Yeah, exactly. Exactly that. And that's one side of it. And then, to be honest, the most it's happened...and this is quite a recent thing, which I don't even think we've really spoken about on the show was the reaction to the...so for anyone who doesn't know Dungeons & Dragons, there was a recent controversy where Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast threatened to repeal part of the license, which allowed creators to freely kind of use elements, not all of them, but some elements of the Dungeons & Dragons game and the Dungeons & Dragons IP for content basically. And they wanted to repeal it, and they wanted to start bringing in more checks and balances in of what you could and couldn't do. And they wanted to start taking cuts of the profits and all this kind of thing. And anyway, the reaction was, as you can probably imagine, not great. Us content creators are ostensibly the lifeblood of this game, especially in of its online presence. So we ended up getting the opportunity to interview one of the executive producers at Wizards of the Coast, and we put it on our YouTube. And it's hilariously one of the most viewed pieces of content that the Three Black Halflings has, full stop. And the reaction is so strange because you have people that get super angry at this guy for being corporate, and this and that, and the other. And we were like, okay, that's fine. So that was the first wave of reaction. Then it was like, he's a racist against White people. And we were like, whoa, okay. And then it turned into you're racist because you didn't call him out for being racist against White people. And then, eventually, I think it just found its way to the trolls who are now just being openly racist about it. So it's a very strange dynamic of seeing that play out in of it literally depending on the amount of people that listened to it, do you know what I mean? It didn't hit troll numbers yet, like; it needed to be more popular to hit troll numbers. So part of me does wonder if we just haven't quite got to peak troll numbers [laughter] with the main podcast. I'm sort of readying myself with a spear and a shield, so I'm like, okay, trolls are coming. CHAD: It's like a double-edged sword. You want to be more popular but at the same time, hmm. Part of what I'm getting at is I think the work you do, even if you take sort of systemic racism out of it, the reaction to diversity and inclusion topics out of it, it's not easy to be an independent content creator, then you add that on to it. So how do you keep going? You've been doing it for three years now. What's your day-to-day like? How do you keep going at it? JASPER: I mean, the rewards are just huge. I got to go to the Dungeons & Dragons premiere the other day. I went to a party in the Tower of London and had people coming up to me. Everyone knew who I was at the Tower of London at a party in the Tower of London. And when I say Tower of London, I want to clarify that it wasn't a function room attached to the Tower of London. CHAD: [laughs] JASPER: We were in the Tower of London. I was having champagne, sipping it next to Henry VIII's armor. CHAD: [laughs] Amazing. JASPER: It was absolutely wild and being there and people coming up to me and being like, "We love what Three Black Halflings does. We think it's a really important voice in the community. And you guys absolutely like..." you know, because I was sort of like, oh God, I can't believe we're here or whatever. And people would be like, "No, no, you absolutely deserve to be here. It's so important that you guys are here." So I think that has a huge impact. People in the community, the way that we've been embraced there's so many shows and so many people who are creating content that are working so hard who don't have nearly the platform that we have. And I think that is, A, a testament to us and the hard work that we put in. But it's also a testament to just how important what we're doing within the community is. And I still don't really think there is a facsimile for Three Black Halflings in the industry in the sense that we're a talk show. We talk about heavy topics a lot of the time, but we do it with a smile on our face. And we try to laugh as much as humanly possible, you know what I mean? Because the whole premise of this show was that Black joy can be a form of protest. So we wanted to be like, hey, we can talk about serious stuff without having to cry and feel crushingly horrible about it, you know. [laughs] And I think I guess that's how I feel whenever I feel like I want to cry or feel crushingly horrible about my workload or how hard it is to make the show is that I go, this is kind of the point, you know what I mean? This is why we got into it because I think that this is going to make it easier for someone else to do the same thing or someone else do something even better, and that, for me, is incredibly rewarding. But I will caveat all of that by saying we've started to generate some money through ad revenue and Patreon, everything like that. And it's actually...this show has given me the opportunity to leave my full-time day job, which was still kind of creative. I was working in animation before this. And I loved that job, but now I get to be my own boss. And it's been a really steep learning curve learning how to do work-life balance when you're your own boss because you're like, I could really disrespect my time here, you know what I mean? [laughter] I can get a lot done today. And I go, no, I have to spend time with my fiancée. I have to eat food. I have to sleep. I have to drink water. I think a lot of the process has been about that. And I think, especially recently, I've gotten much better at kind of giving myself that work-life balance, and that makes it a lot easier for me to carry on. Because I feel like we've gotten to a point where I can be honest with the community as well and say, "Hey, we're having a late episode this week because there are some kinks with the edit," or something. [laughs] And people are just like, "Yeah, it's fine." So I was actually having a consultancy session for someone yesterday. And one of the big things I kept saying to them was, as a content creator, you have to realize the world is not going to crash and burn if you don't hold the standards that you've set for yourself. Because the chances are your audience has much, much lower expectations, and that's not because they don't think you can do it. It's just because they understand that you're human, and they want you to do well, you know what I mean? So if ever I feel like, oh no, Three Black Halflings has really messed up, I'm like, this episode sounds terrible. And we put it out and, ugh, and I'm there twisting myself into knots and making myself feel horrible. And then I go to the Discord, and everyone's like, "Oh, that sounded a bit janky. Oh, well, I'm sure they'll sort it out." [laughs] It's just like, it's absolutely fine. So taking pressure off of yourself, I think, is something that I think is really important if you're trying to pursue, especially if you're trying to start out in pursuit of something like this because, yeah, it's super easy to drown yourself [laughs] in all of the kind of stress and anxiety about putting content out. CHAD: You mentioned ads, and you mentioned Patreon. I think it was...was it last year that you ed a podcast network? JASPER: Ooh, it would have been a year before. CHAD: A year. JASPER: So I've been with Headgum, I think, for nearly two years now. CHAD: Wow. What sort of prompted that, and what does being part of a network give you as a podcast? JASPER: Hell yeah. ing a network ostensibly is just like ing a kind of family of other shows. I guess the closest equivalent really is sort of having your show picked up by Netflix or a broadcaster or something like that. It's sort of like you're bringing your show to that family. And then the most common thing...every network is obviously slightly different and will have different kinds of structures that they offer certain shows depending on the money they generate, all that kind of thing. But the most common one is effectively; you are now in a group that can all each other and can all benefit each other by doing ad swaps because ad swaps typically is the absolute best way to improve podcast performance, mostly just because the journey is super simple. It's like, hey, do you like the sound of this podcast? Well, the link to it is in your description. You have to click twice. You have to go into the description, click on that link, and then hit subscribe, and you're done. That's all you have to do, and it will be there. And you know it'll automatically tee up in your feed and all that kind of stuff. So things like pod swaps and everything like that are by far the most effective for spreading the word about your show. And it also just helps you really hit specific target audiences where you go; we have great metrics that we can see of like, the average age of our listeners, how they identify gender-wise, music they listen to typically, what the average Three Black Halflings listens to. I think when you roll all of that information together as a part of a network, you have a huge bank of data, which they can then use to kind of market you in the best way and push you out in the best way. And then, on top of that, most networks will have some sort of ad revenue like sort of system or tech, I guess, is probably the best way of putting it. And certainly, for some networks, they almost run like tech companies, how I imagine tech companies run. You're probably about to tell me, "A lot better." [laughs] CHAD: Don't worry about it. [laughs]. JASPER: But, for instance, Headgum has Gumball. So Gumball is their ad sales sort of site, which has software which allows you to basically...everyone can go, and you can book ads just by looking at the podcast, seeing how many s it has; again, it has a breakdown of demographics and things like that that you can look at to see if that will marry up with whatever product you're pushing out. And then that will automatically set up a prompt for me to then read the script, it, and then that will put a dynamic ad in the middle of an episode, however many episodes until a certain amount of impressions are delivered. So, again, that will be very unique and different depending on which network you . But ostensibly, I'd say those are the two main things is pooling of resources amongst a family of different podcasts and then some sort of promise of ad revenue or ad sales. Most of them also have an ad sales team where they'll go and hunt out more specific spots for your show. So, for instance, we just got sponsored by, I think it was Penguin or maybe Random House. Actually, maybe it's Random House who are publishing three little additional books to go in and around the Dungeons & Dragons movie. So we just did a little ad for them. And that was, again, the sales team kind of going out and being like, oh, we can see that you're looking for advertising places. Why don't you come and on this Dungeons & Dragons podcast? [laughs] So yeah, stuff like that, I think. Those were, I'd say, the main areas, and then it'll kind of depend...some podcast networks will help with editing. They'll have almost like a house style. So they'll sort of...they'll say, oh, we'll do the editing for you because we want to marry up all the shows so that they have a similar sound CHAD: Is Headgum doing some editing for you and not on other episodes, or…? JASPER: No. Headgum pretty much does...one of the best things [laughs] about it is we have an incredible sound designer; shout out to Daniel. He's actually one of the sound designers of God of War, if you can believe that. CHAD: [laughs] JASPER: He's won several awards for sound design. He basically has almost like a little side hustle, which is him and a group of his friends who do podcast editing for Headgum. He does our main shows and our actual play shows. They were like, "Oh yeah, they can help you out with your actual play shows." And then me, as the incredibly stressed-out producer that was also having to listen to multiple hours of my own voice a week, went, "What about the main show as well?" CHAD: [laughs] JASPER: And they were like, "Yeah, fine." [laughter] I was like, "Thank you," [laughs] because I can't bear listening to myself. I don't mind editing, and I'm not bad at it. But listening to my own voice is not on my list of to-dos. [laughs] CHAD: It sounds like, overall, that being part of a network has been positive for you. JASPER: Yeah, hugely. CHAD: That's awesome. MID-ROLL AD: Are your engineers spending too much time on DevOps and maintenance issues when you need them on new features? We know maintaining your own servers can be costly and that it’s easy for spending creep to sneak in when your team isn’t looking. By delegating server management, maintenance, and security to thoughtbot and our network of service partners, you can get 24x7 from our team of experts, all for less than the cost of one in-house engineer. Save time and money with our DevOps and Maintenance service. Find out more at: tbot.io/devops. CHAD: Let's talk about...I'm making the assumption...I didn't dwell too much at the beginning of the episode that people understand what Dungeons & Dragons is, but maybe that's too big of an assumption. But it just seems so much more popular now [laughs] than it ever had before. So I feel like I can at least say Dungeons & Dragons to people, and people are like, even if I don't actually know what it's like to play, I know what it is, at least now. [laughs] JASPER: Yeah, yeah, you got an idea of what it is. Yeah, for sure. [laughs] CHAD: But let's maybe, at this point, take a little bit of a step back. And Dungeons & Dragons is more popular than it has ever been before. I think that that's really exciting for creators like you because it must feel like there's more opportunity than ever. JASPER: Yes, yeah, absolutely. And I think that...so this actually, I think really ties into something that I've been doing a little bit of research on, which is...I can't say too much at this point, but I'm putting together a convention. Part of the idea behind this convention was that I've noticed there's a really big trend towards experience-based entertainment. We love movies. We love going out to bowling, all that kind of stuff. But real full immersion-based experiences, I think, are...post-lockdown, everyone's like, yes, give me all of that. I've been cooped up in a house. I want to be whisked away as far away as possible. And so I do think that is part of the reason why Dungeons & Dragons has started to become even organically more and more popular. Because I just think the idea that instead of, I don't know, just sitting around on a Friday with some friends talking, or just watching a movie, or whatever it may be, that you can kind of with your friends go off and take part in something that feels epic and larger than life and really allows you to abandon for just a couple of hours some of the strains and pressures on your life. I think, again, post-lockdown, that just feels like such an appetizing thing [laughs] to be able to do. And I just think with then the general acceptance of nerdiness as mainstream culture; people are just a lot more willing to be like, well, if I'm going to watch a movie with a dude who has a suit made entirely of iron and says really corny lines and shoots laser beams out of his chest, I probably could be okay with pretending to be a goblin for half an hour. CHAD: [laughs] JASPER: Whereas I think before, people would have been really like, no, no, no, we don't do that. I only watch, I don't know, Kubrick movies or something. Do you know what I mean? CHAD: Yeah. JASPER: Like, that's their form of entertainment. CHAD: Yeah, that trend really resonates with me. Even before the pandemic, escape rooms and that kind of thing were becoming really popular. JASPER: Yes. CHAD: I mean, there are escape rooms everywhere now. [laughs] JASPER: One of the things that I found out as I was coming up with the idea for this convention...I was talking to a buddy of mine, and he basically owns an event space, which has a cinema in it, and it also has a little theater. And he ran over; I think it was last summer, a "Guardians of the Galaxy" themed kind of experience where you walked around, and you got to meet some of the characters and stuff like that. And then next door in that building, they were showing the "Thor: Love and Thunder" movie. And despite the fact that the experience was three times as expensive as the "Thor: Love and Thunder" movie at the cinema, that experience sold out almost instantly. And the "Thor: Love and Thunder" movie was struggling to get people on the seats; you know what I mean? But I was like, but "Thor: Love and Thunder" is a Guardians film, you know what I mean? All of them are there. It's ostensibly a "Guardians of the Galaxy" movie, and yet people are going to see a "Guardians of the Galaxy" experience, which I don't even know if it was like an official thing...rather than seeing the movie of it. So I just think, yeah, like you said, this trend for escape rooms and all that kind of stuff just really resonated with me that I was like, yeah, that's...like, if I had to choose, if I was in a privileged position and could afford to go to that thing, I'd be like, pssh, yeah, I'd probably go to the "Guardians of the Galaxy" experience rather than just, eh, I don't have to watch the film. I could probably get it on Disney Plus in like two weeks, so...[laughs] CHAD: Yeah. Have you ever been to a secret cinema in London? JASPER: Yes. I did "Top Gun: Maverick" Up here in Manchester. CHAD: [laughs] I went to the "Star Wars" one a few years ago. JASPER: Nice. How was that? CHAD: I guess, actually, it would have been five years ago. It was amazing. So for people who don't know, secret cinema is you're ostensibly going to see a movie, [laughs] but they build up an entire experience with improv actors themed to the movie that you're seeing, and you don't know where it is. It's technically a secret. They send you the location of it. You go there, and you're whisked away into the world of the movie. JASPER: Yeah, I did a "28 Days Later" one. [laughter] Yeah, that was one... CHAD: Horrifying. JASPER: Yeah, that one was a little much, honestly. [laughs] I was like, I love this movie, but I don't feel safe sat in this cinema [laughs] because I've just walked through three fields filled with zombies and I ran for half of it. [laughs] So, I don't know, I was like, my heart was still racing as I sat down to watch the movie, which I think in many ways, did enhance the experience because I was sort of looking over my shoulder for half of it. [laughs] CHAD: And when people who haven't ever actually seen Dungeons & Dragons played before, I often describe it as we're just telling a story together. Or maybe if they're a little less intimidated by improv because some people are into it, it's like an improv show where you can basically do anything you want or say what you want to do. And then you roll the dice to see whether it actually happens or not. And that's really at the base level all it is. JASPER: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. [laughs] CHAD: And I think you're right; people are more open to that idea of an experience or a game like that than they ever have been before. JASPER: Yeah, for sure. There are so many things that you can kind of fall back on if you're not someone who is super comfortable with improvising or whatever. And I think that's what the game provides is it provides enough structure for you to then just kind of, honestly, because, you know, you do just kind of forget that you're doing it really after about 10 minutes of slight awkwardness when you start with a new group because the game provides you with almost like the fuel. You'll be like, oh, I don't know if I can do this or whatever. And it's like, okay, just go ahead and roll me a d20. And then you roll in that 20, and everyone loses their minds around the table. CHAD: [chuckles] JASPER: And suddenly you're like, okay, I'm in this. I'm the barbarian, and I'm getting angry. And I run in there, and I kick the door down, you know what I mean? And suddenly, you're sat there watching this person who was super nervous five seconds ago stood up on their feet screaming at me as the DM telling me how they eviscerate all these bad guys. So yeah, definitely, the game provides a very good structure for that. CHAD: With this...you mentioned building this experience for a convention. Do you want to talk more about that? JASPER: Yes, I can talk about it in very broad . I just can't go into the specifics of when, and the whos, and stuff like that. But ostensibly, the idea was to do a...I got really interested by this idea of reclaiming fantasy. It was kind of like this thing that kept going around in my head. And I was like; I wonder if there's a way that we could see our...again, specifically geared towards minority groups. It's what I know well and a community that I want to continue to serve. And I was like; I wonder if we can create a space where it's specifically for them, explicitly for them in the sense that I think there are a lot of spaces that are explicitly for non-minority groups, you know what I mean? I think a lot of the traditional conventions typically are those things. But I think we get very afraid of creating something where we...people with the purse strings usually go, oh no, you can't exclude people, and I'm like, we're not excluding people. We're just making it very specifically for someone else. And a lot of it was...it then came from the idea of seeing "The Rings of Power" trailer get released. And then the thing that's trending on Twitter is like; there were no black elves, not yes, we've got a black elf, you know what I mean? And I suddenly was like, I really want us to have a space where we can be celebrated in fantasy, et cetera, without having to have that caveated as like seeing it as some sort of diversity hire or whatever. Anyway, this snowballed through going to things like D&D in a Castle and combining it with this idea of reclaiming fantasy of, like, what if we did it inside of like a stately home or a castle? What if we made this event and we really made it that you as a minority can be there and celebrated in the space where you've got, like, Baron, what's his name, on the wall? CHAD: [laughs] JASPER: And it's this White dude from 500 years ago, do you know what I mean? And it's like, I just really loved the idea of a room full of minorities really feeling welcomed and like they were a part of this space, and just realizing minorities we've been around forever, you know what I mean? [laughs] There's never been a point in human history where people with Brown skin haven't been here. We've always been here. So I guess it was just about really realizing that when we sat there watching, I don't know, Pirates of the Caribbean, and there's like two Black people in the swamp. It's like, no, no, no, no, we would have been everywhere, [laughs] do you know what I mean? We would have been everywhere. And we can be celebrated in these spaces too. These don't have to just be White spaces, and they don't just have to be for a very specific group that they have been traditionally for in the past. [laughs] And yeah, the reaction to this sort of pitch, if you will, was overwhelmingly positive. CHAD: That's good. JASPER: And it really took me by surprise, actually, because I was sort of thinking, yeah, I'm really sticking it to them with this pitch. CHAD: [laughs] JASPER: And then everyone was like, "Yeah, we love it." And I was like, oh, right. CHAD: [laughs] JASPER: Okay, yeah. [laughs] I was sort of doing that, and I had to climb down a little bit and be like, okay, awesome. Let's talk about it. What I think is really exciting about that it's just that I really think that conventions and everything can do more in of delivering experience. Like myself and my fiancée went to Comic-Con a couple of years ago. And I her feeling like, oh, it was just a little bit flat. And it was just sort of...I thought that there'd be more kind of grandeur to it, almost like there'd be more...it was just other than people cosplaying; there wasn't a lot of theater to the whole thing. It was just like in these massive warehouses, and add a little bit of that theater in, have some of those actors, have some of the music and the sound and everything, really give people a place to go and explore and enjoy exploring. And I kind of keep thinking in my head it's like LARP lite, you know what I mean? CHAD: Yeah. JASPER: It's like LARP still with the kind of commercial interaction that you can still go and meet your favorite people. You can still get gs. You can still get previews of things. You can still buy things that you've been wanting to buy all year and that you can only get when you go to a certain convention, and all of the kind of normal convention tropes but really just explicitly labeling it on the bottle: this is for minority groups. Because I honestly think if we explicitly label it like that as well, we'll start to get away from a lot of the things that have plagued conventions for far too long when it comes to making people feel comfortable in those spaces. And quite often, my biggest tip when it comes to diversity and inclusion with companies as well it's just like, put it on the bowl. Like, if you really believe it, have it front and center. Don't tuck it away in like a D&I bit on your website. Have it there so that everyone can see it. Everyone knows when they come to work with you; this is what you stand for. This is what you believe in, things like that, so... CHAD: That sounds awesome. And it's a really good illustration of the idea which we've talked about on the show in previous episodes is that when you are used to being in the majority all the time, and that is the default, when something is being done that's different than that, it feels like you're losing something. It feels like you're under attack. That's a total natural feeling. JASPER: Yes, yes. CHAD: So it's like, that sounds like a great experience. I would love to experience that, and I'm being excluded because I'm White; that's not fair. But that's coming from a position of you've been in those safe spaces for yourself in a world that's been entirely tailored for you. So you haven't realized that you've had that all along. JASPER: Yeah, absolutely. And the beauty of it is..., and this is where it's even better for people in the majority, which is that we have zero intention of making an unsafe space for anyone because that would be wild. So even the spaces that we create for minorities explicitly will still be safe for you as well, you know what I mean? But I think, like you said, it's that reaction, which, again, I get it completely because, as I mentioned earlier, I was there. I've been there. I've been in a space where I suddenly go, oh, I'm part of the problem, and it feels horrible. Like, it's not nice, and it's a really challenging thing, which you have to be comfortable with, and I think everyone should be comfortable with it. Whether you're a minority or not, everyone has blind spots. Everyone has biases. It's a huge part of human interaction. And honestly, in a modern world with the way that social media is, I don't think you can live without biases and without assumptions because you see new people, thousands of new people every day if you want to just by scrolling on your Twitter feed. So to be in this zen place of just like, I will accept everyone only on their merits, and I will not judge anyone would be impossible and maddening, I think. So it's a perfectly normal thing to exist with those biases. The thing that we have to get better at is going, cool; I've got those biases. Now it's time to let them slide, like, to move them over there and to not get defensive if someone calls them out. Like, that's the trick. That's the magic trick. That's pulling the rabbit out of the hat. That's what you got to get comfortable with. CHAD: Yeah, awesome. Well, I really appreciate the conversation, and I really appreciate you taking the time. I know that you get married in less than a week from now. JASPER: I do. I do get married -- CHAD: So congratulations in advance. JASPER: Thank you so much. Thank you. CHAD: If we could just take a few more minutes at the end to maybe nerd out about the Dungeons & Dragons movie, which I know you went to the premiere for, and I just saw this weekend... JASPER: Oh please, let's do. Absolutely. CHAD: It was funny because I think you've said exactly how I left the movie feeling, which was they captured the spirit of what it's actually...like, it was just fun. And Dungeons & Dragons is fun in a way that is not like "Lord of the Rings" [laughs] or just super serious fantasy, right? JASPER: Yeah, yeah. I can't even think of the last time we had a fantasy movie that was like, you know, other than, I don't know, "Your Highness" or something that was just like, I don't know, yeah, whatever that was, you know what I mean? Something that was like an actual movie and didn't take itself too seriously, yeah. CHAD: Yeah, I'm so happy because you could have easily have seen it, like, no, we need to do something super serious and to compete against "Game of Thrones" and "Lord of the Rings" and all that stuff. And to feel like, you know, this was made by people who get it and represented what I love was really exciting. JASPER: Yeah. And I think that what it did for me is I think it lays the groundwork for them to explore more serious places because now they will have that trust that they understand what it's like to be at the table and how to do that. And then I think this is where the real skill is going to come in for them to curate more of these which is like...that, I think, is the art of a really good DM. They can have you absolutely roaring with laughter one minute and then sobbing in like, you know, and it's like an hour's difference, [laughs] you know what I mean? Between the two places. And that's then the next step for these. But I think this was absolutely the tone they needed to strike for this, especially for this first kind of outing. I think they really needed to say, hey, we get it. We understand what it's like, just displaying purely unhinged actions and things, which I think that's the bit that feels D&D for me is when a character...and I think I won't go into any spoilers, but I think you'll probably know the moment I'm describing when a very clear solution is laid out in front of you in big, green letters, for instance, and you choose to do something truly, truly unhinged and wild. Because that was what you decided you were going to do ahead of time. It's such a D&D thing to do. [laughs] And I loved that. It was one of my favorite moments in the movie. And I just thought that perfectly encapsulates the nature of it and the thing that you don't get to see in "Game of Thrones" or whatever because you don't get the Nat 1s or the Nat 20s, I think in the "Game of Thrones." Everything's like 7 to 12; you know what I mean? CHAD: [laughs] Right. Right. JASPER: Everyone is relatively skilled, so they can't just, like, you know what I mean? You can't have the mountain versus the Viper, and the mountain just trips over a rock and brains himself on the floor. CHAD: [laughs] Right. JASPER: You know what I mean? Because that would be a Nat 1, but that would be ridiculous because the mountain is an incredibly skilled fighter, and therefore, it wouldn't work like that. CHAD: Yeah, yeah. I found myself grinning throughout, aside from the moments where I was laughing, just like, oh, that's...yes. JASPER: [laughs] CHAD: Just the whole thing about planning and how he's a planner. JASPER: Yes. [laughs] CHAD: Oh, that is so D&D. And just at the end, the way that that battle lays out, I just feel like it just captures everyone's act in the six-second increments in a D&D battle. And everything's happening all at once, and that's what that battle was like at the end. JASPER: Yeah. And it also just props for like a really good magic fight. CHAD: [laughs] Right. JASPER: Like, I don't even know what the word is, but we have been convinced for years that Harry Potter had good magic, but no, he doesn't. CHAD: [laughs] JASPER: Harry Potter has wand-fu, and it's terrible. It's like; it's not particularly pleasing. It's basically the same as "Star Wars." It's just like a little laser pistol type, piu-piu-piu. CHAD: [laughs] JASPER: That's effectively what Harry Potter becomes. And then to see Bigby's Hand and spells like this be used in the ways, like, it was just so fun. And also, it really teaches the importance of flavoring your attacks and how much life you can bring to a game, to anything, by just adding that little bit more, like, that little bit of extra sauce on top. I think Holger the Barbarian does a perfect job of this in the movie where she's always using improvised weapons, and the way that she fights it's, oh, it's very, very pleasing to watch. And you're sat there going, yeah man, barbarians are so cool. But half the time when you're in a game, you'll just be like, yeah, I run up, and I attack with my axe. It's like, no, give me more, give me more. Tell me how and why and stuff like that. So I agree; I think they did a great job. And I was also just grinning from ear to ear [laughs] during most of it. CHAD: I feel like I could talk to you all day. JASPER: [laughs] CHAD: But I really appreciate it. If folks want to either get in touch with you, we mentioned at the top of the show you are a Game Master for hire, and you do games remotely, right? JASPER: Yes, I do. I do. I do. CHAD: So where are all the places that people can find you, get in touch with you, book you, all that stuff? JASPER: Heck yeah. If anyone knows about my GMing for hire, it's you. [laughter] You had me DM for you for, in total, like, 29 hours in the space of a week. [laughs] CHAD: Yeah. So we brought Jasper and we had the thoughtbot summit where we got the company together in person and so Jasper came and he DMed two sessions with two different groups for us, which was awesome. And then I went to D&D in a Castle, which you mentioned earlier in the show. It's where you go to a castle in the UK and play D&D for three and a half days straight basically. It was an amazing experience and Jasper was an incredible DM. JASPER: Thank you. And if anyone is interested in hiring me as a DM, like I said, I do consultancy, whether it be D&I consultancy or podcast to help you grow podcasts and things like that, or even just get started. Most of that information is on my website which is jasperwcartwright.com. You can find me on all social medias. I'm usually pretty good at responding to people in there, and that is just @JW_Cartwright on all of my social media. So yeah, go follow me, and I've got a bunch of really exciting stuff coming up, so it's a good time to follow me. [laughs] CHAD: Awesome. You can subscribe to the show and find notes for this episode along with a complete transcript at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at [email protected]. You can find me on Mastodon @[email protected]. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks so much for listening and see you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Special Guest: Jasper (William) Cartwright. Sponsored By: thoughtbot: Are your engineers spending too much time on DevOps and maintenance issues when you need them on new features? We know maintaining your own servers can be costly and that it’s easy for spending creep to sneak in when your team isn’t looking. By delegating server management, maintenance, and security to thoughtbot and our network of service partners, you can get 24x7 from our team of experts, all for less than the cost of one in-house engineer. Save time and money with our DevOps and Maintenance service. Find out more at: tbot.io/devops Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Noelle Acosta is Founder and CEO of Noula Health, a data-driven platform that uses personalized hormonal health data to deliver tailored care. Victoria talks to Noelle about helping patients with uteruses to better understand their bodies by providing them with hormonal health data that's unique to them and providing them with individualized care they deserve at their fingertips through a virtual app. Noula Follow Noula on LinkedIn or Twitter. Follow Noelle Acosta on LinkedIn or Twitter. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. And with me today is Noelle Acosta, Founder and CEO of Noula Health, a data-driven platform that uses personalized hormonal health data to deliver tailored care. Noelle, thank you for ing me. NOELLE: Thank you so much for having me, Victoria. It's a pleasure to be here. VICTORIA: Wonderful. I'm excited to learn more about your product today that you're building. Can you just tell me a little bit more about it? NOELLE: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I feel like, [chuckles] one, you could work here. You did a phenomenal job of sharing what Noula is. But here at Noula, we are a virtual care platform that really empowers women and patients with uteruses to better understand their bodies by providing them with hormonal health data that's unique to them. Based on that information, we're able to provide them with the individualized, tailored care that they deserve at their fingertips through a virtual app. VICTORIA: Wonderful. And I'm wondering what led you to think I need to make this company. What happened in your life where you decided this needs to exist in the world? NOELLE: Really it stems from my own personal brush with an undiagnosed chronic condition where I truly was the one in five women who felt dismissed, denied, and ignored in the traditional healthcare settings. And that is really something that's actually unified us all as a team here at Noula. We have the shared frustration in of the gaps that we experienced overall; not one, two of our health journeys looked alike. And so during this time, I found myself really just kind of banging my head against a wall where I had these ongoing symptoms that disrupted every aspect of my life, not just my physical health, but it became really very much an emotional roller coaster as well. Because despite having access to care and wonderful employer-sponsored health insurance, I was finding that my doctors were essentially brushing me off, attributing it to stress. And it really led to me kind of just having this inner monologue and questioning myself as, like, is this in my head? Maybe it is stress-related. This doesn't feel normal. Should this be normal? And so I, just like 70% of millennials, turned to Google as my medical companion. I lost trust in healthcare settings and just turned to do research around what could be possibly causing the symptoms in my overall health. And I just refused to believe that this was my sense of normalcy. And through my own research, I started finding things like my ethnicity and my environment could have an impact in the symptoms that I was experiencing. I was dealing with chronic pelvic pain, irregular periods to the point where I was actually menstruating for seven months straight. I had horrible migraines. And so I just really turned to these medical journals to try to figure out and uncover what my body was telling me. And so, based on that research, I finally went back to the doctor demanding an ultrasound, where they ended up finding over 40 abnormal follicles and cysts on my ovaries. And even at that point, my treatment plan was a Band-Aid fix. And so, ultimately, I really felt like the system fundamentally failed me. This Band-Aid fix was essentially, hey, we'll put back your former birth control method and call us when you're ready to have a baby, and we'll figure it out then. And so, to this day, I actually haven't received any additional care, guidance from any clinician despite being in and out of the doctor's office with the symptoms. And so I ended up being diagnosed with a condition called PCOS. Again, from my own research, I learned that Mexican women with PCOS, so yours truly, we have the most severe phenotype that puts us at the highest risk for other complications that are beyond just reproductive health. It increases my risk for diabetes. It increases my risk for hypertension. And these are ultimately very costly to my health. And I was just frustrated. I thought, why am I learning about this through my own research versus the doctor's office, where it really felt like a one size fits all approach to care? And so, based on my experience, I started talking to more and more women. And I found that I wasn't alone with this shared frustration. We see that 80% of people who menstruate suffer from hormonal imbalances. And more often than not, women are juggling with more than two chronic conditions at a time. And so it's truly something that I felt as a patient that we were missing to feel empowered in our health and actually feel seen and heard. And then, when I actually spoke to clinicians as well, they felt that they weren't set up to care for their patients in the way that they wanted to care for them. VICTORIA: And I'm wondering how those women and the people you talked to started to inform the roap for the product that you were going to build. NOELLE: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, truly, the voice of those , and these patients are the center of our lighthouse in of how we shape our product roap ahead. And so, ultimately, it really came down to us initially doing customer discovery. So I was really surprised to see how many people were willing to talk about their experiences navigating their health as a woman or a person with a uterus. And that was really telling in itself because I've heard from folks where they had to pay others with gift cards to have this conversation about how they might navigate certain workflows as it might relate to the products they're building. But naturally, these folks wanted to talk about their experiences. So we kind of tackled this in a couple of parts, one, I was going out into my own network, reaching out to friends of friends, posting in Nextdoor Facebook groups, really asking for 15 minutes of people's times to learn about their experience. And within two weeks, I had almost 100 customer discovery calls booked where these women were wanting to talk about their frustration and what they wished they had in of the care that they wanted. And so that was point A, like, okay, I think we're onto something. Our gaps in our experiences are shared across the board. And this is the pain that not only I experienced, or the Noula team has experienced, but that hundreds of women have experienced. The other piece, too, is, believe it or not, you know, we're constantly doing customer discovery as an early-stage company. But when we launched our beta, we launched with an initial hypothesis. But we saw that what our were coming in for more aligns with their hormone health than what we initially thought, where we thought majority of folks would be coming to us at a family building stage. And then even [laughs] truly through social media, our TikTok channel alone when we lead with these persona stories it helps drive this just natural virality to it. And daily, we have folks reaching out to us asking if what they're experiencing is normal or what they should do. And so they're coming to us because we really fill this very prevalent gap in care today. VICTORIA: It must be really reassuring on a personal level and also on a business level that you found a problem that you can really help and make a difference with. NOELLE: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's frustrating that we are all bonded and unified by this experience. But ultimately, we'll continue to use the voice of our as our guiding light to shape our roap ahead. And actually, that's what you see today with Noula. We took the learnings from the beta. We took the conversations that we've had with so many and just women and folks outside of Noula to really shape what you see today. VICTORIA: That's wonderful. And you already mentioned one surprise that you found in your customer discovery process. I wonder if you could even tell me a little bit more about any hypothesis you had that you found from research; the outcome was quite different, and that changed your business strategy. NOELLE: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So we have always seen ourselves as truly being this co-piloted partner for women in their healthcare journeys for life. But when initially launching our beta, we thought our niche today is going to be folks navigating family planning, so people who are looking to start a family in the near future, actively trying to conceive, pregnant, or recently postpartum. So we built a beta around that. And it was very low-code. This is before I had any technical talent [chuckles] on our team and essentially no money. And so, we built this low-code/no-code beta and launched it. We brought on about 100 folks to this closed beta. And with that, we built the product with that hypothesis in mind that we're going to be targeting specific stages. But what ultimately happened is as we were onboarding the 100 s, we found over...with each onboarded , we started to see the scale tip where all of a sudden, 80% of those s very much had a story that mirrored my own experience with health. They were coming to us because they suspected that they had a hormonal imbalance or these unexplained symptoms that they didn't know what was causing them. Several of them had been diagnosed with conditions like PCOS, endometriosis, or fibroids. Many of them were dealing with unexplained period pain and irregular menstruation. And so we started to scratch our heads to be like, oh, wow. Okay, so these folks are actually coming to us for a different reason than we had [chuckles] initially anticipated. They're using the product differently. And also, they are far more engaged than our initial hypothesized s, which were pregnant people. And so while we have been able to really create a product that is able to adapt with these s over time, we found that that messaging and creation of a safe space for those s was incredibly important, and we wanted to lean into that. VICTORIA: That's really cool. And maybe talk more about creating that safe space in dealing with healthcare data. Were there any special considerations you had to bring into building your tech stack with those really delicate elements? NOELLE: Yeah, yeah. I mean, ultimately, safety and security of their data and honoring that privacy. We will never sell any data whatsoever. And I know that was a concern for many and still is since we've seen in the news this has been happening with other apps and stuff where they're selling health data to social media sites. So honoring and protecting that privacy, first and foremost. The other piece is we had to also empower our care team to our in the best way that they can with the information that they had about their unique health. And so, unfortunately, our were coming to us at such an emotionally turmoil time in their lives that they wanted answers. They were frustrated. They were saying, "Why is this happening to me?" We had to really ensure that we could be that empathetic ally for them, empower them with information, and really arm them with tools to use inside and outside of the clinic to get the answers that they deserve. VICTORIA: Right, and I see that. So on your site, there's a quiz you can take about your symptoms, and then you can sign up for what's ultimately going to be a home test kit. Is that right? NOELLE: Yes, yes. So s are able to sign up for Noula at no cost to you. So you can start free tracking your symptoms, and these symptom trackers are going to be customized to you. So based on... similar to the quiz that you mentioned, you'll be able to answer questions about what you're experiencing, what your goals are. And Noula will make recommendations of what to track within the app itself. You can then track your symptoms that you select over time and get this customized snapshot to build this true picture of your health. You can then continue to add on to that snapshot of your health through that home hormone test. So you don't necessarily need to purchase the test if you don't want to. But you have the ability to test your hormones to get a clearer picture of your baseline hormonal health. And we're able to really help arm you with that information about your body. And then, from there, beyond just that information from that data set, you have access to empathetic coaching from medical experts. All of our care coaches are ed nurses. So you do have that expert at your fingertips who's there to really steer and guide you every step of the way. And that was something that I actually felt was missing from my own experience when navigating my own symptoms pre-Noula. I found myself running these tests [chuckles] on my own, like ordering tests online trying to figure out what was going on. And just kind of hit this wall where I said to myself, I don't know how to interpret these. I don't know what to do with these. I don't know how to talk to my doctor about this. What do I do? VICTORIA: That's so interesting. And I heard you mentioned empathy a few times and how important that is. Would you say that's one of your core values that you bring into founding a company like this? NOELLE: Oh yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So I actually studied to become a doula. And so some of the pillars that we were trained in were really ing our clients in these four primary pillars: ensuring that we can them with physical , emotional , informational , and advocacy. So really, those four pillars together have really steered us to create this foundation of empathetic care. And so that is truly integral to our brand and who we are, how we deliver that care, and also in such an inclusive and culturally competent way. VICTORIA: It sounds really important what you mentioned; building an app requires a lot of trust to be able to give you your data and trust that the results that you're getting are helpful. So I really love that that's a part of your core value that you bring to the organization too. NOELLE: Yeah, I think it was something that was really important to us from the very beginning, especially because we are a BIPOC and queer-co-founded company. It's rare that we see ourselves in the ecosystem, not just as founders [chuckles] but even just in how care is designed for us. So we wanted to ensure that we were creating this space where everyone can see themselves. And it's been so reassuring to hear from and even just folks who find Noula on their own that they finally feel like they're seen and heard as an individual with Noula. VICTORIA: Well, that might be the answer to my next question, which is what keeps you going, and what's the wind in your sails that keeps you pressing forward with this? NOELLE: [chuckles] It's definitely that I think being able to hear from our how Noula has helped change their life, even it is just a little bit where they feel more confident, where they feel ed, and they don't feel alone means everything to us. And the other piece is I feel incredibly proud when have actually tuned in to listen to their bodies. And despite their experience feeling brushed off in the traditional healthcare setting, they really listen to themselves and turn to Noula. And there have been cases where we help these folks to the point where because of Noula (One member is actually popping up in my head specifically.), they were able to find that they had a hereditary thyroid condition before it worsened because of Noula. And so that in itself was so powerful because their experience in the clinic was very much more like, well, no wonder you're fatigued and no wonder you have brain fog. You have a baby; what do you expect? VICTORIA: Oh, I love that; what a powerful message. And I think that speaks to the power of having systems in place that are designed with those people in mind. NOELLE: 100% yes. Mid-Roll Ad: When starting a new project, we understand that you want to make the right choices in technology, features, and investment but that you don’t have all year to do extended research. In just a few weeks, thoughtbot’s Discovery Sprints deliver a -centered product journey, a clickable prototype or Proof of Concept, and key market insights from focused research. We’ll help you to identify the primary flow, decide which framework should be used to bring it to life, and set a firm estimate on future development efforts. Maximize impact and minimize risk with a validated roap for your new product. Get started at: tbot.io/sprint VICTORIA: So what does success look like in the immediate future and in the longer term for Noula? NOELLE: I think today, our success is very much qualitative. I think with health, especially digital health, it's a long game. And so today, we're measuring success by those member stories, by hearing from them that, again, this is a place where they finally feel empowered in their health. They have the tools that they need to unlock the best version of themselves so that they can get the care that they envision on their . So really, just through that qualitative piece. Patient satisfaction is another huge factor as well. We supercharge our algorithm based on the identified and pooled hormonal health data so that we can continue providing tailored recommendations that are personalized to each . So in my example, my Noula experience might say, okay, we know that Noelle is a Latina woman who has PCOS. Other people who might have had similar symptoms to her have found these recommendations or tracking these symptoms to be really helpful for them, and so that's something that I would try. And so really just, again, creating a space where you're not alone is huge. And so that's where we really lean into the qualitative piece. And as we grow, we also incorporate the quantitative success metrics as well. So how are we measuring impact in of health outcomes so that we can also just inform the system to deliver better care? Because, I mean, there's just so much unknown about the female body specifically. It wasn't until 1993 that women were even required to be a part of a clinical study. So there's just a lot of gray area that needs to be addressed to deliver better health outcomes overall, especially when health outcomes amongst women in the U.S. is so poor. VICTORIA: And as a woman in the U.S. who has hormones, I 100% get the value and the potential for an app like this. Have you had that same positive reaction from investors or from other people who are looking to your group? NOELLE: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, the investors who really understand it and get it, unfortunately, do because either they or someone they loved has been impacted by a hormonal imbalance or by being dismissed in the traditional healthcare settings. So similar to how the Noula team and our have been unified by these experiences, we find that outside as well with investors. What makes me really proud, too, is connecting with clinicians. Like, our Medical Director, Dr. Marieme Mbaye, who is a highly rated physician in New York City, turned away from practicing medicine to Noula because she even felt like her hands were tied behind her back with the type of care she can deliver. And so it's always incredibly reassuring when we hear from clinicians that this is why care should be designed to really proactively look out for groups of people who are often overlooked, which, sadly, tend to be women and people of color. VICTORIA: Right, almost like it was designed that way in the system. [laughter] NOELLE: Yep. VICTORIA: That's great. I'm glad that other people are seeing that benefit. And what hurdles do you see on the road ahead for where you're going with Noula? NOELLE: As we are bringing on , the more that we've built this trust with our member base, the more they want from us [laughs] in of us truly just being their end-to-end care delivery partner, and we would love to get there. But as a very early-stage company, we have to build things quickly but one thing at a time. So oftentimes, I feel like, okay, we have this huge leap to make to deliver the care that our are asking for, and so it's a blessing and a curse where they're like, "We love this so much. Can you be my doctor? I don't want to go to another doctor." Or, "Can I get this through you and only you, or do I need to go somewhere else?" VICTORIA: Well, that must be a great feeling to have. But also staying focused, like you mentioned, would be a challenge, and being able to get done within your capabilities. But it's funny because I think there's a huge demand in this market [laughs] that we've had similar kind of demand for other women's health-focused products or people with uteruses too. Clearly, something is broken. [laughs] So you've got a lot of great work you want to get done. Is there anything really already planned in your roap that you're super excited about? NOELLE: Yeah. And we'll be rolling out insurance-covered telehealth appointments very soon, so that's one thing that I'm particularly just incredibly excited about because I think it does...how we got to delivering that was through the from our . And so I think that, in turn, will allow us to take one step closer to truly being that healthcare delivery partner for all on all those levels. Very, very excited about that because it very much aligns with our mission to deliver accessible and equitable care. VICTORIA: Yeah, that's a huge capability, and especially considering in some areas, there just might not be access to doctors or hospitals that you can go to in person, so... NOELLE: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, only 50% of U.S. counties have access to OBGYNs and with the average appointment length only being 15 minutes. Like, again, physicians have their hands tied behind their backs because that means per OBGYN, they're managing about 3,500 patients, which just isn't feasible or scalable. VICTORIA: Wow. Yeah, that's a lot of patients. [laughs] Well, I want to go back to some folks that you mentioned earlier on your team and just tell me about how it all started coming together with building your team at Noula. NOELLE: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So my co-founder and CTO, her name is Suzie Grange. She is an absolutely wonderful, brilliant engineer. Her and I actually worked together at our previous employer company called Maven Clinic. So at Maven Clinic, I was responsible for helping lead sales and business development through some growth milestones. And Suzie was the founding engineer over at Maven. So she was there for the long haul, for over seven years. And so she had left Maven before I did. And once I took the leap into building Noula full-time, her and I reconnected, and we welcomed her to the team as a co-founder and CTO last year, which has been so instrumental to how we've built our product to date. We actually [laughs] ran into fun challenges many startups will where we've had to recently rebuild our entire tech stack and truly couldn't have done this without her and our back-end engineer as well. And so she's just been incredible. And then we also brought on our medical director, as I shared, Dr. Marieme Mbaye, who was a practicing OBGYN based out of Brooklyn, New York City. And she has also had experience advising for women's health startups like Natalist to Frame Fertility and others. VICTORIA: Got it. So you found your technical co-founder, or you maybe already started together and then got the technical expertise there. You mentioned taking the leap to do Noula full-time. What was that decision like for you emotionally? NOELLE: It was a really big decision, and it was also a very vulnerable decision on my part. And so I'm going to open up about this because I think it's important to also recognize that this is a scary decision for all founders to make. When I was dealing with these chronic symptoms, that was back in 2019, so this was before I ed Maven Clinic. And I knew I wanted to build something to change the system. But I thought the best way to ensure what I was going to build were to be successful was to contribute to a company, learn as much as I could, fail fast, fail forward. So I ed Maven. I was there for almost two years, and that experience alone was instrumental. But ultimately, what really drove me to make the leap and place this blind faith in myself and just jump into this unknown abyss was after another health scare. I promise you I'm healthy. But I went through...in early 2021, I had a massive seizure in my sleep, and I was hospitalized where they thought I had a brain tumor. And I just sitting in the ambulance. And this was during COVID, so I had to go alone. I was hospitalized alone. And I sitting in the ambulance, and I don't know why this sticks with me so much, but I seeing the light of the street lamp, and I was just looking at it. And I thought I'm not ready to leave the earth without making an impact here. And so I told myself, I was like, if I make it out of this alive, I'm going to do whatever it takes to change healthcare and make the impact that I want. And so I did just that. I'm okay. I don't have a brain tumor, thank goodness. And I trusted myself trusted that the conversations that I had with friends, family, and other people who shared those experiences with me would serve as our lighthouse to building an incredibly impactful product that would reshape the future of health for good. VICTORIA: Oh, that's incredible that you had that experience that made you think about what really mattered and what you wanted to do with the rest of your time. It sounds like you had friends and family to you along the way with that decision, right? NOELLE: Yeah. And a lot of them didn't get it. To this day, my mom's like, "Don't you want to go to med school or be a nurse?" [laughs] I'm like, "No." [laughs] But yes, absolutely had their . VICTORIA: Oh, that's wonderful. I mean, I can see that, even if you have a good idea that some people might be like, "Don't you need a job?" [laughter] NOELLE: Exactly. And that's exactly the kind of position I was in. I said, okay, I need to make a game plan. And when I quit Maven, I had ed an accelerator program called Visible Hands, which was designed by POC founders. And for three months, you got a small chunk of money. And I worked backwards, I said, okay, within this three-month period, I need to prove that Noula is a venture backable business. And so I worked backwards with how much savings I had left to continue ing myself. And that gave me till...so the program started in September, and I had basically saved enough money for myself through end of February, maybe end of March is stretching it, of 2022. And so, I worked backwards from that date and closed an oversubscribed pre-seed round in February. VICTORIA: Wow. NOELLE: So that was really...it was very challenging. I don't think I've...I worked harder in my life than I ever had before. And so yeah, that's really kind of where we're at today. And it made me one of less than 100 Latina women to ever raise a million dollars, which is wild. VICTORIA: Awesome that you were able to do that, and sad that the number is so small. [laughs] NOELLE: I know. And I did the math, and we said, okay, 0.4% of venture dollars go to Latina founders. I need to have 200 meetings just to get one yes. And so I was chasing as many meetings as I could and chasing nos as fast as I could because I thought the sooner I could get a no, the quicker I could move on to the next. VICTORIA: So, really trying to weed out people who just weren't going to be a good fit. [laughs] NOELLE: Right. VICTORIA: That makes sense. But ultimately, you were able to find someone who aligned with you. Was there a checklist or some kind of way that you used to decide if those investors were going to be right for you? NOELLE: Yeah, I think, ultimately, the connection to our mission. At the early stage, they're making a bet too on founder fit, and so I wanted them to, one understand and feel confident in myself as a founder. And so I wanted to see that on the call. And then two, I also wanted to ensure they understood that this was a problem. And so there were some investors where they didn't understand the problem or why anyone would need this. And some of them didn't understand things like what menstruation was, not even kidding. [laughs] I didn't have any...at that point, I was like, I don't have a single check. I had to make the decision, like, this isn't going to be the right partner for me. And so those were kind of my two main criteria, like, do I believe they're going to be the right partner in helping us accelerate just my vision and ing me as a founder? Do they believe in me and in our vision? And two, do they understand the problem and the impact? VICTORIA: Right, that makes sense. So then that kind of empowers you to continue doing the work that you know you should be doing. NOELLE: Right. VICTORIA: Well, I wanted to ask you a little bit more about TikTok too, and how you used social media to raise your brand awareness. NOELLE: [laughs] So, our TikTok strategy, I'm embarrassed at how long it took me to make our very first TikTok [laughs] because I probably spent way too much time trying to figure it out. But our TikTok strategy really aligns with our brand strategies. Our core pillars in of that really come down to leading with empathy, so showcasing real, raw, authentic stories from real people. So we can show, like, you are not alone in this. And then two, educational pieces as well. So we have a series called Dear Noula where anyone can write in anonymous questions to Noula. And our medical director, Dr. Marieme Mbaye, will answer those on TikTok. And so, really, what's helped drive the virality in our TikTok strategy is the marriage of that approach where one of our most viral TikToks is one of me with my ultrasound behind me. And then another one that's very educational based around what your vaginal discharge might be telling you. And so there's that blended approach to just, again, showing those real stories with digestible educational bits of content has really helped us build that brand awareness and also just the trust in our brand as well. VICTORIA: That's great. And I think that's something that a lot of startups might be thinking about marketing-wise. Like, how do they use those types of tools to really connect with people? And I like the approach that you've taken with being educational and with being very real, [laughs] which makes sense. Okay, so we asked about what your biggest challenges were on the horizon. What do you think are the biggest opportunities that you could potentially take on at Noula in the next six months to a year? NOELLE: What I'm particularly very excited about with Noula is our ability to adapt with s over time. So what we often see with a lot of digital health solutions, especially in women's health, is they tend to be very stage-specific. You use this product for fertility-related stuff, this one for pregnancy-related stuff, this for postpartum-related stuff, or STIs, for example. So they tend to be very specific. And what I'm particularly eager to showcase is truly how Noula is designed to adapt with those folks over time, so from menstruation through menopause. And the more that you use Noula, the longer you use Noula, the more customized insights you'll have about your unique body to inform providers to deliver that individualized care. So truly, the thing I'm looking forward to most is time, seeing how Noula can truly fit patients' lives versus the other way around. And also being in a position where our solution isn't tied to just a reproductive stage. It's truly encoming our whole health beyond just reproductive organs but taking into genetics, lifestyle, environment, stress, sleep, nutrition, et cetera. VICTORIA: That's very cool. So kind of expanding into even more tailored patient data and services that you can provide over time. NOELLE: Yeah, and, I mean, this is information that most people's doctors don't have access to. VICTORIA: Yeah, I could see that. And, I mean, anyone who's used a menstrual tracking app you can predict things based on the longer time period you've been tracking it, right? NOELLE: Exactly, exactly. VICTORIA: That's very cool. I'm excited to see it come out. And I think by the time this podcast airs; you'll have launched a new product. Is that right? NOELLE: Yeah. So by the time this podcast launches, we'll be completely launched. I will have the app and care coaching available for anyone to use, sign up for, and it's really, really exciting stuff on the horizon. VICTORIA: That's super cool. Well, my last question for you is if you could go back in time to when you first started Noula, what advice would you give yourself? NOELLE: I tend to be a perfectionist. So I'd say just ship faster; don't chase perfection because things are going to change. I learned that from the beta itself, where we spent time building this product that we wanted to be so perfect. And again, [chuckle] what we learned was that the initial cohort of s who we thought would be our biggest advocates and earliest adopters of Noula was not true. And so being okay with your first iteration as being imperfect is okay. Some of the best advice I actually got after we launched our beta was that if you're not embarrassed by your MVP, you launched too late. VICTORIA: [laughs] That's really funny. It should be kind of awkward, right? NOELLE: Yeah. Isn't that great? [laughs] VICTORIA: That's really good. [laughs] NOELLE: I wish I had heard this before. I [laughs] spent so much time trying to perfect this to the T. [laughs] VICTORIA: I think we're going to maybe print out a banner that says that and hang it behind [laughter] our screens or something. Yeah, I love that. And I love just how much went into the customer discovery and how you were flexible to change your hypothesis for what was going to work for people based on that. NOELLE: Yeah. And I think one thing that really helped, too, just honestly from my sales background, was I was very mindful of not leading a horse to water when doing customer discovery. So I think often we hear that, you know, we ask very pointed questions to try to lead folks to say, "Yes, I would use your product," or, "Yeah, that sounds useful." I purposely asked very open-ended questions like, "Walk me through your experience navigating your health," and just listened. And that allowed me to find patterns across the number of conversations that I had that ultimately led us to build the beta in our product that you see today is through those very open-ended questions and hearing from s themselves as far as what they thought was missing versus me saying, "If we build this feature, would you use it?" VICTORIA: That's very cool. And I learned a lot just from taking the quiz on your website. [laughs] NOELLE: Oh, awesome. [laughs] VICTORIA: So I'm really excited to see what you all come up with next. Are there any final takeaways or thoughts you want to leave for our listeners today? NOELLE: We'd love to hear about your experience using Noula. So you can use Noula free for a limited time. We're offering 30 days of free care coaching for anyone that signs up and discounted access to the hormone testing. So just really excited to share with the world because it's about damn time we get the care that we deserve. VICTORIA: Absolutely. Thank you so much for ing us today. And you can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript of this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at [email protected]. And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Sponsored By: thoughtbot: When starting a new project, we understand that you want to make the right choices in technology, features, and investment, but that you don’t have all year to do extended research. In just a few weeks, thoughtbot’s Discovery Sprints deliver a -centered product journey, a clickable prototype or Proof of Concept, and key market insights from focused research. We’ll help you to identify the primary flow, decide which framework should be used to bring it to life, and set a firm estimate on future development efforts. Maximize impact and minimize risk with a validated roap for your new product. Get started at: tbot.io/sprint Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Neal Bloom is a Managing Partner at Interlock Capital, a community of founders, investors, and subject matter experts. Victoria talks to Neal about what he finds attractive about startups and companies he's excited about, out of all the pitches he receives, how many he gets to say yes to, and when working with a team, what he uses to manage information and s for investors. Interlock Capital Follow Interlock Capital on LinkedIn, or Twitter. Follow Neal Bloom on LinkedIn or Twitter. Check out his website and blog! Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. And with me today is Neal Bloom, Managing Partner at Interlock Capital, a community of founders, investors, and subject matter experts. Neal, thank you for ing us. NEAL: Hey, thanks for having me. It's so great to be here with you. VICTORIA: Fantastic. I'm excited to finally get a chance to talk with you. I met you at an investor hike that you organize once a month. NEAL: A founders' hike, yeah. I get up nice and early on the first Wednesday of each month in Torrey Pines in San Diego. And we hike up and down the hill with ocean views. It's not a bad day. VICTORIA: It's a great way to start the morning, I think, and to meet other people, other builders of products in technology. So tell me more about your work at Interlock Capital. NEAL: Sure. It really kind of organically happened that I became an investor, but not planned at all. I have an aerospace background then built my own edtech and talent tech marketplace. I call it the LinkedIn for students is really what we built as our first startup called Portfolium. We sold it, and I got really into startup communities, especially because of some people who helped me with my first startup. I want to be a part of building an even better ecosystem for others. And that turned into a podcast, a blog, an event series. And once I had the capital from my exit, turned into angel investing as well, too, and really just found that as I got to know people over time, the more and more I got to know them, the more certain ones stood out that said, wow, I don't just want to help them for the good of it. I also just want to be along for the ride. And I started writing checks to other founders. So that was the beginning of my investor journey about five years ago. And over COVID, a whole bunch of other later-stage experience operators, either founder-level or executives at tech companies, said, "I want to learn to do this. Can I do it alongside you?" And we created Interlock Capital as an investment syndicate. A group of us can share and utilize our brainpower, our time, and our capital to help companies. It's kind of our focus. So that's why we call it a community because it's not just kind of a one-way pitch us, and we'll write you a check. It's very much get to know the people, find the exact right domain experts who have subject matter expertise, who've been there and done that before. If they like the company and they want to personally invest, then we go to the greater group and say, "Hey, everyone, who wants to this deal specifically?" So 18 investments later from Interlock Capital, we now also have an investment fund. So now we write two checks into every company. We do our syndicated style, the hat, if you will, "Hey, everyone, anyone want to invest in just this deal?" And then match it from our fund. And we're writing between $300,000 to $500,000 checks into early-stage software or/and software plus hardware companies. VICTORIA: What an incredible journey. And I love that it's led you to creating a community as part of what you do as an investment capital group. What do you find interesting about these startups and these companies that you want to be interested in? NEAL: Part of it is how much you learn about yourself, to be honest. I get to meet three to five new founders a day in a variety of ways, whether it's straight Zoom and pitch, or grab a coffee, or see them on a hike. We're kind of constantly introducing ourselves to each other. There's a bit of learning about how to size someone up to a certain regard. So you're kind of building this inner algorithm of how to top-prank people and their ideas. That's one interesting way that I never thought I would be doing professionally. There's a lot that we say versus what we do, and that's a data point that I have to keep track of because I get pitched amazing ideas that will literally change the world for so much better. And you get really excited about it, and you get invested in it. And I call it founder love. You fall in love with these founders specifically and almost say, "I don't even care what you're working on. I just want to work more with you. How do we do it?" So there's a lot of that. So there are some dating aspects [laughs] in of founder dating, like getting to know people. There's the determining how do we date towards marriage? Meaning, I'll write you a check, and I'm along for the ride for the next ten years. And then there's the kind of relationship maintenance which is okay; I wrote the check, now what? Where can I be helpful to the company? How can I anticipate their needs so that they have to think one more thing of how to satisfy me? It's quite the opposite way around. I'm trying not to be a barrier. I'm trying to work for them while they're sleeping. So yeah, it's really interesting the kind of the relationship aspect that goes into getting to know and helping founders take their ideas and turn it into reality. VICTORIA: That's very cool. And I have talked to people who have met you and talked to your company and just how ive and helpful you all are even if you choose not to invest. So I think that's a really valuable resource for people. And I wonder, do you think it's something unique about the San Diego community in particular that is exciting right now? NEAL: I think so. I think San Diego specifically has always had this culture of give-before-you-get mentality, and so we kind of lead with that. There are a lot of people moving here. And you could choose many places that could be great, like LA versus San Diego, and there's a certain kind of person that chooses here versus somewhere else. And what I have found is there's a certain kind of give-before-you-get cultural mentality here that somehow people pretty quickly and come with. And so that's an underlying greatness here. There's also because of the great environment we live in, by the beach, healthy lifestyle. I think we choose to work on things that maybe are also satisfying, just like our personal lives, meaning we work on things that matter, that are going to change the world, that are life-changing. That's not to say that we don't need certain other kinds of technology. I'm sure at some point, we felt we needed Twitter, and maybe we don't feel like that now. [laughs] But here, it feels like everyone's working on very impactful things, and I think that's really special to think about. Some examples of that is we've got an interesting subset of the SaaS world in nonprofit tech. So GoFundMe was founded in San Diego. They have since acquired three other nonprofit tech SaaS companies in San Diego, like Classy. So that's kind of interesting. You've got people who want to build a business that services nonprofits, and now they're all under one roof. So yeah, I think there is something special. We can dive deeper into some of the other sub-industries or categories that are interesting here, too, if you're interested. VICTORIA: Well, I could talk about San Diego all day. NEAL: [laughs] VICTORIA: Because I'm a fairly new resident, and I'm in love with it, obviously. [laughs] But let's talk more about products that can change the world. Like, what's one that you're really excited about that you've heard recently? NEAL: Ooh. I would start a little high level in certain categories that I'm really liking. I like things I'm seeing in the infrastructure space right now, meaning, you know, whether it's pipes and our water utilities, and I would include that in energy and EV, you know, kind of a mobility piece. There's even the commercial side of mobility, so trucking and freight. That whole infrastructure layer is really interesting to me right now. A certain company that, full disclosure, we invested in recently is a company called EarthGrid. They have a product that is boring holes tunnel-wise underground, but they're using just electricity and air, so plasma. And it's fascinating. They can bore holes 100 times the norm right now. They don't need to potentially trench, meaning they don't need to cut above the surface. They can just dig for miles straight underneath the ground, so they can go under things with that. And really a lot of the expensive pieces, closing lanes on freeways or highways to put fiber in or plumbing and all that. So it's really interesting to see that. Now, one element is the technology is interesting. But they have a plan to actually own their own tunnels that go across the entire United States. So they don't just want to be a device that they're going to sell to everyone. They want to actually own their own utility that has major tunnels across the United States. So that's fascinating to me because that's like think big, think exponential around that. So that's one area that's kind of fascinating to me. VICTORIA: That's super interesting, and thinking about the impact it can have on making power more secure for more people, things like that. There are just so many problems to solve, and so many are people trying to solve them. [laughs] - NEAL: Yeah, exactly. And they have a clean tech angle in that there are a lot of different ways to dig and tunnel that includes chemicals, and so their big thing is to not do that. Some of their background is installing these kinds of lines in the EV space for solar s. So they have a big kind of clean and sustainability focus there. And our infrastructure is aging big time. We've got 100-year-old bridges and pipes and other things that it's really interesting to see the government put money into. And so that is another aspect, a business model, per se of infrastructure. You have the government putting billions, if not trillions, into upgrading our infrastructure, which as an investor, I like to hear that there's free capital out there in forms of non-dilutive funding to help these along, and that's existed for hundreds of years. Cars and oil industry got these kinds of subsidies, and then the EV and solar s. So that's a good area that I like to look in as well is where is there additional large-scale funding to help these products really get to market? VICTORIA: That makes sense. And so you're meeting three to five founders a day, and you're watching where the funding is available. And out of all the pitches that you receive, how many do you really get to say yes to? NEAL: Oh, it's small, I mean, one to two a month if that would be a lot, and those could take a few months to work through. The best way for us to invest is to get to know the people for as long as possible. So I kind of mentioned that relationship aspect. I want to see how people operate. I want to see how they build product. I want to see how they get to know their customer and iterate and bring that back into design thinking. And so that's a big piece is getting to know and see the people do the things that they're saying. Man, there are so many companies that I like on paper, whether it's oh my God, amazing team, or, oh, cool, the product. Yes, love that idea. And then you have to look at everything together, the timing, the valuation that they want, the team. Has this team been there, done that before? So there are a lot of elements that go into it. Like I mentioned, you have this founder love where you fall in love with the people, and maybe the rest doesn't work out or vice versa. But yeah, I think each investor comes at it differently. So my area because I built two tech companies that were talent tech-related, meaning connecting people for opportunities; my investing style is very team and talent and recruitment-focused, meaning what are the superpowers of the founders? Are they aware of their weaknesses and their strengths? Have they filled in those gaps by finding co-founders that are complementary and opposites? And then my partner, Al Bsharah, he is a super product guy, and he wants to break the product and see, how can you break it? What are they thinking product roap-wise? That's his first go-to. And so, for us, we're super complementary in that regard. So we will assess the same company in very different ways and then come together and say, "Let's share our scores, share our rank. Where do you think this company sits at in all these different areas and boxes?" And so that's a great way, that complementary skill sets as investors. We utilize those strengths together. So yeah, it's hard for a founder to know that. A founder who's building a product, the person on the other side of the screen, they're meeting me. They're not going to know my algorithm. They're not going to know what I value more than something else. So there's this whole dance. I wish it didn't have to be that way, but it is a dance. It's a negotiation. And that's why I build a community because I'd really rather take the gloves off and get to know people when they're not raising capital, when they really are just inspired by innovation and by customers, and they're just excited, and they're building product. That's the time I want to get to know them and see how they iterate before the capital question comes in. Because when it's capital, it tends to feel a little transactional, and that's just not the name of the game per se. VICTORIA: It makes sense. And I'm curious, working with your partner who has a specialty in product, has there ever been a big surprise that he presented with you that you would never have thought of without that product perspective? NEAL: Oh yeah, absolutely. I think there are many times now where either the company is really touting a specific piece of their product, whether it's a certain kind of technology that as a non-product builder either I think, wow, that's unique. That's special; that's novel. And I go to my partner, who really is an automation expert in of product building, and boom, can whip it out in a second and say, "I could that with Zapier," or now ChatGPT. So I think there are those elements that are good checkpoints of putting too much...maybe I get too excited about uniqueness or a novelty of a product. And then there's the opposite. There's the team undersells their product, and really they're touting, hey, we have a background in this industry. So we're going to go build because we know how to get into that industry. Our uniqueness is go-to-market, so they think. And it turns out, hey, you're really underselling the product here. There's something special about your vision system here or your data set that you're using to build your ML model. So I've seen a variety of both of those. I think we're going to see more and more right now where ChatGPT and other AI models are going to show that maybe the tech exactly like AI isn't the specialty. That's going to be a democratization across the board. We're just going to expect that everyone can build a baseline product. So how are people going to differentiate on the product? That's where I'm really excited to see where product stands out now that more and more people have more tools at their disposal to build a good product. VICTORIA: Yeah, I'm excited for that too and to see which experiments with AI really pan out to be something useful that becomes part of everyday life. Do you have any instincts on where you think you're going to see the most out of AI innovation in tech? NEAL: AI is such a big word, and it feels so buzzwordy right now. But actually, in San Diego, we have a deep history in the high-level AI, and it starts with analytics. We have a deep, deep bench of analytics talent here. In fact, Google Analytics was founded in San Diego under the name Urchin Analytics and acquired by Google in 2004. VICTORIA: Oh. NEAL: And so you have these big analytic models and builders here that is interesting to tap into. I kind of bucket it in a few areas. I look at the vision aspect, so motion capture, motion classification, image classification. That's really interesting that I think we'll see a lot of that that applied to blank. I'm seeing that applied to life sciences, so cancer detection through some sort of imaging. Obviously, the mobility aspect, whether it's self-driving or driver assisted for blank, whether that's drones, self-driving trucks, all those areas. That's one area interesting from the AI piece. Natural language processing which there's a piece of ChatGPT to that regard. I think it is really interesting from what is your dataset? What are you tapping into? I'm also seeing that applied to digital health, whether it's clinical trials bringing AI models there, whether it's taking genomic data and saying, let's build better clinical trial classes. Maybe we don't need 500 patients when we can build the best 30 patients to enter a trial because we've got genomic data on our side. So yeah, I think I'm more looking at certain industries and saying, what is the right AI model for it? And I think that's pretty exciting. MID-ROLL AD: Are you an entrepreneur or start-up founder looking to gain confidence in the way forward for your idea? At thoughtbot, we know you’re tight on time and investment, which is why we’ve created targeted 1-hour remote workshops to help you develop a concrete plan for your product’s next steps. Over four interactive sessions, we work with you on research, product design sprint, critical path, and presentation prep so that you and your team are better equipped with the skills and knowledge for success. Find out how we can help you move the needle at: tbot.io/entrepreneurs. VICTORIA: So tell me, you know, at Interlock Capital, when you're working with a team, what do you use to really manage all of this information and these s for your investors? NEAL: Yeah, it's a great question. We decided to build our own products in-house thanks to my partner Al who's a great product builder. At the end of the day, there are a few different funnels we are managing within Interlock Capital. We're managing our customer, which really is the startup. We want to make sure we're keeping track of them on whatever timeline. And so we use CRMs, basically, to manage funnels per se. So that's startups. Then there's the deal flow sharing, so these are other VC firms, maybe other service providers, where we're sharing companies with each other. And then we have investors, so we're using CRM for managing our investors, like our limited partners, our LPs. So that's basic CRM. Luckily, we were able to use an off-the-shelf product called Streak for that. But what we do uniquely is we want to engage in two directions our investment community, meaning we want to get to know them, get to know everyone's expertise so we know when to tap them to say, "Hey, can you help on this deal?" And help is very broad, meaning it could be to give it a quick look before I've even met them to say, "Is this something I should even be looking at?" Or I've already met the team, maybe spent a few hours with them. And I'm asking for a deep dive with an expert to say, " a call with me after you've reviewed a deck and help me ask harder questions." So there's that aspect of we wanted to figure out how do we get to know our people in our group? Because we're hundreds now. So we decided to build a platform off Bubble.io and Airtable basic no-code where we could build a light profile of everyone. So everyone self-selects a number of profile aspects about themselves. It's also where we're starting to keep data and documents for them as well too. So whether it's tax documents or other forms, we can have it all in one spot. And then lastly, when we do decide to make an investment in a company, we write a very detailed memo that starts in Google Docs but then gets built into our product, the Interlock platform. And so in that memo which could honestly be 10 to 20 pages of diligence, in our language only, what are the pros, cons, and risks? We also showcase who is on the diligence team, what their specific expertise is to this investment, if they're personally investing or not. We really want to show conviction from the diligence team. And then we've built in some really cool features where you've got a Q&A board that you can upvote other people's questions about that investment. You can watch a video right there and then about the company, and then you can commit to the investment itself on our platform, saying, "I'm interested in this deal specifically. Here's the amount." And boom, we take you over to a third-party platform to just sign in and wire. So that's current day the product that we decided to build. We've got this whole product roap that we've built out that we want to build out more. We would love to automate a little bit more of our deal funnel so that a certain company that we meet maybe they get to a certain stage that we know we're ready for diligence. We can auto-ping the ten people that have that specific domain expertise. So luckily, we built out the profiles about everyone. Now we need to start building some automation in there so that maybe I'm not the bottleneck. I'm going to meet three to five companies a day, I mentioned. That's three to five follow-ups that I need to do. I'm never going to be as fast as the founder wants me to be on getting back to them and saying, "Here's our next steps." So if we can utilize the greater body of people that are in our investment community, that's where we'd love to build out some of the pieces next as well. So automation is kind of the hope there. VICTORIA: That's great. And I love that you're able to take advantage of these low-code tools to build something that worked for you. What was your initial approach to figuring out how to build this in a way that worked for your group? NEAL: Well, we looked at a lot of existing products first, and there are. There are these angel syndicate websites like AngelList is a big one, you know, a consumer-facing platform where if you're interested in investing, you can a group, or you can a dozen groups and just get an email when they have a new investment opportunity. And so we looked at...first, it was survey what's existing out there already. Start building a product feature must-have or is nice to have list for us to get off the ground within Interlock. And then determine the pros and cons of building off the shelf, the time and cost, and maintenance versus using something that already exists. So that was a big piece, just assessment upfront before we do anything. And I think learning the landscape was big for us. I find that building tools for startups there's a lot, but there are also not a lot of mature ones because there's just not a lot of money out there to be made. There's not a billion-dollar industry of making a website to invest in startups per se yet. So that was another thing as well. It's just understanding will the companies that we choose off-the-shelf products-wise will they still be there a year or two or three from now? And ultimately, we decided, you know what? We got to build it ourselves if we really want the two-way communication, not just one-way. We didn't see everything out there. And I think the piece you always underestimate is the maintenance over time as well as all the third-party tools and apps and services that you end up needing and using and how do they play into the maintenance role as well too. We've definitely had elements of our product break because they're no longer ing that tool anymore. So those are all aspects that you can do as much as you can self-assessment upfront. There's obviously the maintenance piece that goes into it down the road as well too. VICTORIA: That makes sense. And then, in this way, you have control over it, and you can change it as often as you want. NEAL: Totally. VICTORIA: And as much as you like, if you have the time. [laughs] NEAL: One piece that I think we have never planned or expected is that because we built it and it's super unique, there are many other angel groups who have come to us and said, "Can we use your tool? Like, yours is better than anything that exists." And we did not build ours with a commercial aspect in mind at first. We can't just clone an Airtable and be like, "Here we go. Here's your product. It's Bubble and Airtable," because if it breaks for them, we're on the hook for that [laughs] as well too. So I don't think we thought through too much around a commercialized product when we built out our own. But because we've been pinged so many times about, can people use it? It's on our mind now. Like, it literally is on our list of priorities of hiring either part-time or full-time a product builder to go back in and commercialize aspects so that we could actually maybe turn this into a product one day, this whole investment community manager software. VICTORIA: That's really cool. And it's funny, talking to founders, there's always a story about how you set out to do one thing, which was build a community around startups and founders in San Diego, and then you end up building a product, [laughs] right? NEAL: Yup. VICTORIA: And getting something marketable later that you never even intended. NEAL: Yeah, I mean, I think the big learning there is, one, listen to your customer first, then go build products. And so yes, you said it exactly; we wanted to build a community where we could be more engaged with our customer. And as we heard more and more from our customer, it told us what to build. And I always find that from other startups, that's a great model to follow as opposed to build and then go determine if there's a market out there for it. VICTORIA: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So it's interesting that you've had this experience of building tech startups from scratch and then now investing, and then now you're back [laughs], and you have a product again. NEAL: [laughs] VICTORIA: So I wonder, if you could go back in time starting Interlock Capital or when you started your companies, like, what advice would you give yourself if you could travel back in time and talk to your past self? NEAL: Oof, so much. Spend a lot of time getting to know yourself, not just what you're good at but what you like to do business-wise. And I actually see those are two different things. Sometimes the things we like to do we're not as good at, but yet we want to spend more of our time on it, and maybe it takes us longer to do it. So do some self-assessment. I would have done that more on myself. And I'll give you an example, I, for whatever reason, like to brute force certain things like our email outreach, whereas my partner loves to build automation campaigns for it because he built a software in the email space. I know I could learn a quick automation route [laughs] to do certain things, but for whatever reason, I love sometimes the analog version of things. And that's good sometimes, and sometimes there's no time for that. So learn a lot more about myself, what I like, and what I'm good at. And then the opposite, what I don't like doing, what could I shed as quickly as possible and could hire for in some way or another, trade my time or capital for time. And then, only then, once I know myself better, then go find the perfect partner that complements everything. It's the opposite of me in that regard, opposite in network, opposite in skill sets, and in that regard too. And so I think my first startup, we were carbon copies of each other. We were both aerospace engineers who kind of wanted to do the same thing who lacked emotional intelligence at the time. So yeah, that's a big learning. But I didn't know enough about myself at the time. And it took hardship to learn the hard things. Honestly, entrepreneurs seem to learn by doing more than anything. So you can only tell an entrepreneur so much. Sometimes they're just going to have to go and figure it out by running through a wall. That's one thing I would have changed about myself in that regard. I also probably would have, even earlier during college, gotten more internships to just test myself professionally and know what environments I do well in, meaning big companies, small company, or hands-on mentorship and management or hands-off certain kinds of skill sets. How could I be presenting more often versus just kind of behind-the-scenes doing? All of those I probably could have learned quicker about myself the earlier I would have put myself in those situations as opposed to getting my first job and working at one place for five years. That's a long time to dedicate to learning one culture about that I thrive in. But you live, and you learn. VICTORIA: I love the drive to keep learning and to be like, you know, don't expect to be good at everything [laughs] that you want to do. I think that's fantastic. And what do you see success really looking like for yourself in the next six months or in the next five years? NEAL: This year, this calendar year is really about getting the fund up and running. So we've raised an initial tranche of capital and got through this calendar year to get the full capital we want for the fund in. And we're being really picky about that. We really want operators, so that just takes time to go and meet the right people that maybe have recently exited, so have a little bit of time and have a little capital and now want to spend time with earlier stage companies. So that's a big piece of this year. I also, on the community side, want to scale it a little bit. I've found recurring...like the founders' hike is a really consistent and easy way to build community, just meet new people, get to meet 30 people at once instead of maybe 30 coffee meetings to meet those people and just kind of selectively choose who is good to follow up with. So building and scaling, thinking about how to scale community growth is another area, and hiring a little bit around that. So hiring either a community manager and understanding what does that role even mean? Because it's vague in a variety of scenarios. I think we as a company could utilize it. But I think even San Diego could really benefit from someone professionally community-managing all of us. I don't even know what that means yet. And I'd actually push that back on you. Like, you're recent to town. You've started to meet people in a variety of venues. What's the community management void that you see that exists locally? VICTORIA: Oh, great question. I'm actually going to the Annual March Mingle tonight. This episode will come out a little bit later. NEAL: I'll be there too. VICTORIA: Oh, I was like, I'm going to interview you and probably see you later. [laughs] NEAL: Awesome. VICTORIA: Yeah, I think what's interesting about what I've experienced so far is that there is a thriving community. People show up to events. There are a lot of different focuses and specialties. Like, there's the San Diego Design and Accessibility meetup, which had over 30 people over and has a lot of great content. The tech coffees usually have your standard crew who comes. I'm in North County in Encinitas, and then there's Downtown San Diego. And I think you and I have talked about this, that there isn't as much of a major hub. And people are kind of spread out and don't really like to travel outside of their little bubble, which isn't necessarily unique to San Diego. [laughs] I think we've seen this in other areas too. So I think deciding where and how and maybe just building that group of community organizers too. One thing we had in DC was we would have a meetup of all the meetup organizers. [laughs] NEAL: Ooh. VICTORIA: They were just the people who are running events would get together and meet each other and talk and get ideas and bounce off, and maybe that exists in San Diego, but I just haven't tapped into it yet. NEAL: Well, that's a great, great, great, great point because, yeah, learning from others. Everyone is out there doing. Let's learn what's working and what's not. I do that actually from community to community. I do compare...I'll pop into a city on personal travel, but I'll look for, say, the Neal Bloom of Phoenix or something [laughter] and share quick notes. Something Startup San Diego started... when Startup San Diego started ten years ago and became a nonprofit shortly thereafter, it wanted to be the convener of all the organizations that help startups. And so there became kind of the startup alliance, I think, where it was all people who run different startup orgs, mostly nonprofits or just meetups getting together. And that hasn't come back since COVID, and I don't know if anyone's thought to bring it back. So this is a great time to think about that. Let's do it. Let's absolutely get the startup community alliance back together and sharing what's working and what's not. Something else that I think matters as we're coming out of COVID and really matters also for product is it feels like curation matters way more than anything before. Like, we value our time more. We want to be home a bit more. And so we're only going to go to the things that we know there's some value out of it as opposed to, oh, I'll show up to that thing. It sounds cool. I get free pizza. So the curation piece, I think, is interesting to think about, like, how do you scale curation? Because if you make smaller groups and make it more valuable, you still can't make a group for everyone. Someone's always going to be missing out. That's a piece when I think of how has product worked really well for that? Obviously, product has done amazing things on curation with using filters and ranking and other things. How do you do that in real-time for community? VICTORIA: Yeah, that's a really cool idea. And it's interesting talking with organizers from Women Who Code DC who are still there and coming back from COVID. They were all virtual events, and now they're having part virtual and part in-person. And it's interesting where some people really want to get back to the in person and see people in real life. The virtual is also still a very good option for people altogether across the board. So, yeah, I think you're 100% right on the event has to be kind of worth it. [laughs] And how do we make that real? But we still have all these other options for connecting with each other too, and we should take advantage of this. I love that here if we're going out in person, you're on a patio. [laughs] You're outside. Even though it's pouring down rain right now so we're probably going to get rained out a little bit. NEAL: I don't think I realized how outdoorsy we already were until this recent rain, one, because COVID forced everyone outdoors already. So for the last three years, we've only been going to places that have been outdoors. But then I realized, wait, every coffee shop I go to already is just open air. Every brewery, every restaurant is open-air. We've got it pretty good here. March Mingle, as big as it is, which it's like you're 17, 18, maybe 20, it's always an amazingly cool crowd and a crowd that I don't always see at every event. It's not the same, same people. It's a crowd that just comes to March Mingle. VICTORIA: That's super cool. I'm excited to see you there later. And maybe by the time we've aired this episode, I'll have actually posted about it, so it won't be a surprise [laughs] for anybody. But I love that. Okay, so, wait, that was...did we talk about six months and five years into the future of success? NEAL: We didn't. We just talked this calendar year. Five years out, professionally, I think a well-oiled community, multiple funds under management that maybe have realized, like, let's have one with different focus. Maybe there's an infrastructure tech fund, maybe there's a diabetes tech fund. I'd love to explore the curated focused thesis aspects because it's easy to be pretty general when I'm meeting so many interesting companies, and I have so many experts at my disposal. Maybe it makes sense to have multiple smaller focused funds in that regard. I think five years out; also, we will have probably weathered some financial storms, probably be on the upswing of that, and therefore maybe there are some exits that would have happened in town. There's certainly a number of late-stage tech companies that have been at it 10, 15 years that a lot of early investors and employees with stock are just kind of waiting for a liquidity event, and I really think by then we will have seen that. And that will be really interesting to see if and how people recycle their capital back into the community, both from investing, from giving philanthropically, and then their time as well. Sometimes when you have really big success, it's easy to check out and leave, and I'm hoping we're getting ahead of that cycle now. We're getting people to put some skin in the game now so that when the exits happen, they stay connected because they're got some investments in the community. So I'm really hoping that we've closed the wheel on the flywheel of capital, recyclable capital here in San Diego five years out from now. VICTORIA: Oh, I really like that. And I think it makes sense from that idea of if you've benefited from being able to run your own company and to work with all these people in San Diego that when you exit, you invest that back into the community and grow future companies with it. NEAL: Exactly. I mean, someone helped you, all of us, and they're just ahead of us. It kind of behooves all of us; then, to each stage and phase we go forward, we should look back and say, "How can we help someone behind us?" And we started this conversation that is a very San Diego culture thing. And so I'm really excited to see when that line bends back on itself, that flywheel closes. So the other aspects of that is we're starting to build some crossroads with Tijuana. We tried before COVID, and we're trying again now. And I'm really excited to see the long-term effect of connecting these cross-border communities. And then we talked about some technology, five years out, man, if GPT is updating so quickly now, I can't even imagine what AI is building product by itself five years from now. And where do the humans play a role in that? People love the splashy headline articles of here's where AI is going to replace your jobs. I'm thinking quite the opposite. I'm so excited for the new jobs to emerge that don't exist right now, for us to complement technology, that, you know, we'll be doing things that are better than humans. So that's a whole piece of technology and product that I'm excited to see play out. VICTORIA: I agree. I think that it's humans plus machines make the most impact, right? [laughs] NEAL: Exactly. VICTORIA: It by itself won't do it. But I think that's fantastic. What a great note to kind of end on. But is there anything else that you want as a final takeaway for our listeners? NEAL: One, I'd love to meet you if you're building an interesting product. I'd love to connect you into our community, so that's a self-serving ask. Find me on LinkedIn or Twitter; probably, Twitter's easier. Write me that you heard me on Giant Robots Smashing Into Others. Absolutely would love to hear that loop. Also, come check out San Diego sometime. Come our founders' hike. If you're listening to this, pretty much we have it on every first Wednesday of each month. We'd love to welcome you into the community here. And if you have an idea for a startup but haven't started yet, that's a great time to be talking and thinking how could I iterate way sooner than you would have thought. So don't wait to get started on something; just start talking to people about it. Don't be afraid to share your product ideas. No one's going to steal it. So I would just tell people to get started sooner than you think. And the world will benefit from you putting that out into the universe. VICTORIA: I love that. Thank you so much for sharing and for being a guest on our show today, Neal. We'll have links for how to get connected with you in our show notes. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at [email protected]. And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Special Guest: Neal Bloom. Sponsored By: thoughtbot: Are you an entrepreneur or start-up founder looking to gain confidence in the way forward for your idea? At thoughtbot, we know you’re tight on time and investment, which is why we’ve created targeted 1-hour remote workshops to help you develop a concrete plan for your product’s next steps. Over four interactive sessions, we work with you on research, product design sprint, critical path, and presentation prep so that you and your team are better equipped with the skills and knowledge for success. Find out how we can help you move the needle at: tbot.io/entrepreneurs Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Brian Feretic is the Founder of Blossm, a community marketplace to buy, sell, and trade plants. Victoria talks to Brian about how coming up with the concept happened, getting started in a very scrappy way and then filling in gaps, and opening up the app to have full marketplace functionality with buying, selling, and trading capabilities. Blossm Follow Blossm on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or TikTok. Follow Brian Feretic on LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido or Tori. And with me today is Brian Feretic, Founder of Blossm, a community marketplace to buy, sell, and trade plants. Brian, thank you for ing us. BRIAN: Hey, it's great to be here, Tori. VICTORIA: Great. I'm excited to hear more about Blossm. Why don't you just tell me a little bit more about the concept? BRIAN: The concept actually happened at the end of 2019, and I'd already been a plant enthusiast for a couple of years. I was actually just going on my way to surf in my town of Ocean Beach, San Diego, and I stopped by this garage sale. And when I came back to pay my neighbor, I brought this rubber plant that are propagated just as a neighborly gift. She flipped out. She was ecstatic. She's like, "Oh my God, I'm such a huge plant person. Thank you so much. Why don't you come into my backyard, and I'll give you a plant tour, and you can pick something out." And what was cool about this was it wasn't just like a simple exchange. It was like this hour-long interaction with someone that lived four blocks from me that happened to be this big plant nerd like me. And I got her whole story. She went through all these different species I didn't know about. And then, she helped me pick one out, which I still have to this day. It's this crassula succulent. When I was walking home with my new plant, I was like, oh wow, I got to go the app for this. I would have never known this person that lives four houses away was a big plant person like me. And when I got home, I searched the App Store. I did a Google search. I just couldn't find what I was looking for, which was basically this plant-swapping plant-connecting platform where I could find fellow plant nerds in my neighborhood. And so that kind of set me off on this path. I did some more research and decided...I was like, you know what? I'm going to commit to this and make this happen for myself and for my community. VICTORIA: Well, what do you think makes someone a plant person [laughs] or like a...how did you describe yourself? A plant nerd? What sets that apart? BRIAN: We'll say it's like on a spectrum where people can shift along the spectrum. But I'd say when people start treating their plants more than objects and more what they are. They are these living things. They're beautiful. They bring people joy. I find it therapeutic to take care of them. And then the beautiful thing about it is that these plants grow, and you can propagate them and share them with your friends. And I think that is a critical aspect of this whole plant person thing. VICTORIA: So the plants have become a little more like pets, and you can grow them in a way that creates a community around your friendship and your local area. BRIAN: Yeah, exactly. That was actually the early signal about this whole plant world is that I saw people creating plant-dedicated Instagram s as if it was your dog or cat. And that was something that I realized this is a different type of person. This is a very ionate person willing to, like, they're so proud of their plant babies, we call them. [laughter] VICTORIA: Right. And it's funny, you say, plant babies. When I think of people I know who I would consider plant people, they do talk to their plants like their babies. They're like, "Oh, it's so cute." [laughs] Or they're like, "Oh, he's not feeling so well." So I think that's great. And so you started to do some research into this community, into this group. What surprised you about your early findings? BRIAN: This was actually something that I didn't realize until I dug deeper was that I thought that it was only going to be a local thing. People wanted to experience what I did with Sondra, who's the neighbor I swapped with, this in-person connection, swapping, checking each other's gardens out and houseplants. But I learned very quickly that people ship plants to each other not only within your own state but across the country, and this is global. And I was just like, how do people ship plants? Turns out I do it all the time, almost weekly now, for years. That aspect was critical to realize, all right; this plant community doesn't necessarily have to be bound by physical in-person distance. It can connect online, and people share all over via shipping. VICTORIA: That's really cool. So you decided that there's a whole international community. So is that when you decided to really start building something like an application to help people? BRIAN: I just throwing this idea out to a lot of different friends, like, various backgrounds. And I was like, "Hey, what do you think of this idea about connecting people through this shared love?" And there is not one person who thought it was a terrible idea. And then I talking about it with a roommate at the time, and basically the same thing. I was like, "Hey, man, imagine people connecting through the shared ion. Who knows? Maybe even love can blossom." And he was like, "Dude, that's what you should call it." I was like, oh, that's a great name. It's about three and a half years now, and it's stuck ever since. VICTORIA: I love that, [laughter] about sharing love, and how the name came about, and just starting with your friends and people you knew and bouncing ideas off of them. But your background is not specifically in technology. So what about your background applied? And what did you have to learn new to take along this journey? BRIAN: So my whole career, I've been involved within the science sector. I actually moved to San Diego to pursue graduate school in neuroscience. I was very curious about kind of full neural networks and how those contribute to behavior. Actually, the Ph.D. program I wanted to get into at UCSD, there's a specific lab doing this really cool research with this new innovative imaging technique. And I applied twice, and I didn't get in. And so I went into biotech. But I would say probably two things helped me. I realize now going through this entrepreneur path, things that helped train me for this, was definitely a graduate school where you're pretty much broke the whole time. My lab didn't have too much funding, so you had to be really resourceful and creative to figure stuff out with minimal resources. And that's perfectly summed up the last couple of years, just like figuring stuff out. We have no money. How do we get awareness of our product when we can't spend, you know, we don't have ad spend or marketing budget? And it just kind of requires you to get creative and think outside the box and just really think, all right, what do I do here? And I came up with some hacky-type strategies that have been very effective. [laughs] VICTORIA: Well, very cool. It sounds like you found your team now to start working with you on this in a very scrappy way. So how did you fill in those gaps, maybe in your knowledge or your background on how to get this done by the people that you grew around you? BRIAN: For me, it wasn't too difficult. Well, one, my background. I was very naive with tech at the time and just programming in general. So my first task, I laid out three options. It was like, one, I can learn how to code. I dabbled in it for a week, and I was like, man, there's no way. [laughter] Two, I was like, I can outsource it, maybe somewhat cheaply, but I don't want to spend all my savings on it. But more, I knew that, you know, say you come out of MVP product, the product always is growing, adapting, evolving, or you encounter bugs. And I could just see how full of friction the process would be if I had to, like, all right, we have found a bug, send the contract out. They have to accept the contract. And I just knew progress would be too slow to operate in that fashion. And the third option was, like, find a technical co-founder and pursue this dream with, you know, a buddy. I was like, all right, who do I know that is in the computer stuff? And that was my thought. And my first guy I pitched it to was a friend I went to college with at Bucknell University. And he was like, I think, "This is a good idea." But he's like, "I'm going to retire probably in five years, and this is going to be a very lengthy thing." He's like, "I'm not interested." The second guy was extremely down for it, but it turns out he didn't know how to do any mobile app development. He uses a consultant. [laughs] And so the third and who I ended up working with was my surfing and climbing buddy Nick Mitchell. I just knew he did computer-type stuff. I pitched him the idea, and he was like, "What's up with this plant thing?" VICTORIA: [laughs] BRIAN: And I was like, "Oh, dude, this is a rapidly growing market. I know the ins and outs really well. I know this audience. I'm one of them." He wasn't sold until he heard an NPR piece talking about the houseplant boom. And then his father sent him an article from the New York Times saying how millennials are embracing houseplants and driving this new houseplant market. And so I think this was maybe end of December, now in 2019. And he hit me up, and of course, he's like, "Oh, dude, I want in. Let's do it." But I also wanted to make sure I knew he could actually do what was the task at hand. [laughter] So I had my other first friend vet his GitHub and stuff just to make sure. [laughs] VICTORIA: Oh, cool. [laughs] BRIAN: And he was like, "Yeah, you know, he looks good. Worth a shot." And it turns out Nick is excellent. He did all the front end, back end. He built this whole app basically from scratch. It's pretty amazing what he's capable of. So I got it right on the third try. [laughs] VICTORIA: That's funny. And I'm not surprised it came from networking in the climbing community, either. BRIAN: Right. There's a lot of smart...definitely a lot of smart people in the climbing community. And those are like my closest friends now. So it was kind of cool to find someone in that place. VICTORIA: And I've been climbing with friends before, and you're talking about work or whatever. And they're like, "Oh, yeah, I'm also like an Azure architect," [laughs] like some specific skill that's related to what you need. And I think it's a similar cultural mindset of people you want to be working with too. Maybe that's just me. So, okay, so you found your partner. You had someone who had all the skills that you needed to make this happen. How long did it take until you really had something you were proud of? BRIAN: So, for me, I was laid off in August of 2019. I was working at Celgene, and they got acquired by Bristol Myers Squibb for like 72 billion, so massive merger. And I was kind of getting over the field. And so I was already basically unemployed. Nick, when we started actually working together in...we'll just call it January 2020. We started working on it casually, and then the pandemic happened. And then he got laid off. And he did about a three-month stint before he got another job at ServiceNow. But within those three months, he really cranked out like a full MVP. And then I had about probably at least 60 or 70 people I knew beta test the product for and just initial thoughts. And so that was like a very critical time where we were all locked down. We have this cool idea. Let's just crank this out. So we had an MVP pretty quick. And then we actually launched it in June 2020. And I was already very stoked about the product. As long as it did its core thing, which is connecting people through this shared love, I knew it was like a proper test, a good enough test to see if this is a worthy endeavor. VICTORIA: That's really cool. So was there any surprising that you got from that initial beta testing? BRIAN: Yeah. [laughs] So the initial concept was essentially like a Tinder for plants. [laughter] And I was just thinking about this idea, like, if people could just swipe on plants they've ed, and then if both people liked a particular plant and they swiped on each other, and they matched, it would open up a chat that would connect them. And it took the...one of the issues with bartering, in general, is people are like, "Oh, I'd love to swap that with you." And they're like, "Oh, what do you want to swap? What do you have?" And a lot of times, people don't align with what they have and what they want to swap. So I figured that would get this kind of friction out of there, but still, the core was connecting people. And then, very quickly, people found it fun. And this is still a feature right now on Blossm, which we've moved to the homepage. And it got a lot of engagement and interactions on it. But one of the simple changes was like, all right, maybe this is not the optimal way to present these plants people are ing. Nick actually drew a lot of inspiration from OfferUp. And he was like, "Oh, this is very simple. This is a very clean way to present these things." So we started getting inspiration from OfferUp, and we changed that kind of swipe card functionality just to a scrollable grid. And that was a great insight on his part, and some of that has been core to the product from that point on. VICTORIA: That's so cool. So I can just go in the app and see a whole list of plants that people are willing to trade. BRIAN: Right. Actually, I would say another thing that happened very early on, too, was, once again, bartering is not the most efficient way to exchange things with each other. And within weeks, we're seeing people being like, "Oh, well, what do you want to swap?" And then people are like, "Oh, well, I don't want to swap for that. I already have that." And then other people are like, "Hey, I don't want to swap anything. I just want to buy it." And then other people are like, "Hey, I don't have anything. but how do I get stuff for you?" So right away, we opened it up to full marketplace kind of functionality with buying, selling, and trading. And we didn't have necessarily any payment system to facilitate that. We would just connect people. And then they would use Venmo, or Paypal, or Cash App, or things like that. VICTORIA: That makes sense. MID-ROLL AD: Now that you have funding, it's time to design, build, and ship the most impactful MVP that wows customers now and can scale in the future. thoughtbot Liftoff brings you the most reliable cross-functional team of product experts to mitigate risk and set you up for long-term success. As your trusted, experienced technical partner, we'll help launch your new product and guide you into a future-forward business that takes advantage of today's new technologies and agile best practices. Make the right decisions for tomorrow today. Get in touch at thoughtbot.com/liftoff. VICTORIA: Now you kind of got your core features figured out, and you see people engaging with the app. What are you the most excited about on the horizon in your roap? BRIAN: We're about to actually finish the TechStars accelerator next week. Next week is our demo day. It's been such a great experience, and I feel blessed. But during this time, we're really figuring out, like, what's our big vision with Blossm? And we kind of went back to really harp on, like, we're more than just an e-commerce or marketplace. We're like this special ionate community where people can do this buying, and selling, and trading. One of the things that's been the trend for years now is instead of just photos; we're about to integrate some video functionality. This is a lead in to the bigger goal. And the idea is creating this...we're calling this full plant experience focused around live video where people can engage with each other on this totally different intimate level and can really showcase their plant collection and give each other a plant tour. How do you take care of this plant? Is another big topic that always comes up. It's just hard to really decipher what's wrong with something just from ecstatic images. And we imagine we could have live plant help. And then people can just show their plant up to the camera and showing a really holistic view of what's going on. And so this vision of live with video and creating a more complete plant experience centered around really using the community as this way to promote that and really build that even further. VICTORIA: That's very cool. I think I've talked to you a little bit before about this giant fiddle fig I have in my office. [laughs] It's going to the ceiling. And I got it from Home Depot, so it may not be the highest quality. And I've asked you about, like, is it alive? It keeps dropping leaves. So if I had a video and I could just show you around and show you where the leaves are browning a little bit and where it's not growing, I could see the value in having that interaction like that. BRIAN: Yeah, exactly. No one's doing that. And definitely, we want to keep innovating the space. We were first to market many years ago. And then, actually, we have some direct competitors that are blatantly just copying us, like copying email templates, features. And on one hand, it's flattering, but also we realize we have to be careful about positioning and making sure we stay ahead of the curve. And we think this is going to be the future and something that delivers really extreme value to this demographic. VICTORIA: Absolutely. And you mentioned you're a part of a tech accelerator. Could you tell me a little bit more about choosing which program you went to and how that's affected your overall approach to your app? BRIAN: Yeah. So last year, we added two more team , so actually Nick's younger brother, Calvin, we poached from Amazon, which felt really good. [laughter] And then we had another friend, Ari Olmos, who we knew had experience in the startup world. He started, or I think he was, co-founder or CEO of a few other social mission startups. So he understood just the fundraising process was probably the most critical trait we're looking for, just someone that can help refine our systems, our processes, things like that. So now we're a team of four. And we were like, all right; we need money if we want to keep this alive. And I've been full-time since the idea conception. Ari ed full-time. Nick and Calvin both had jobs. But we just knew it's critical for a high-potential startup like ours to really grow; we needed some sort of fundraising. And it seemed logical. We gave our shot at proper fundraising with some angels and VCs last year. There were very encouraging signs, but didn't necessarily translate to any checks being written for us. And then we applied to a bunch of accelerators; Y Combinator and TechStars were our top two. We got a few rounds of interviews from TechStars, and the director, Ryan Kuder, who's great; he's actually based in San Diego. And I credit him to definitely being a key component here because I knew he really liked us. He saw the really good complementary team we built. We had a pretty mature product with traction and an active base. And we accepted, and it did a lot of things for us. It was our first proper fundraising beyond a Kickstarter. So Nick and Calvin became full-time once we got in. And then we just had this, like, you have access to this massive network and get this really detailed one on one mentorship. We had almost six or seven mentors that we met with weekly. They're always available to help. And probably the coolest thing about it is they're just there to help you. There's no two-sided, like, I'll help you if you can help me. We are here to help you build, grow, accelerate your business. And they gave us really good insights on direction, really formalizing how to build in systems that will last much longer than the three month-program that essentially just mimicked a lot of stuff we've done on the program within our own team, like hosting little daily stand-ups every day. We've always done weekly meetings but using that time more efficiently, knowing how to test and measure more effectively. They've really just refined our company to be a proper business instead of four dudes trying to make this cool plant app. VICTORIA: That's really cool. And I wonder now, like, after you've had this experience, what advice would you give yourself if you could go back in time to when this all started? BRIAN: First thing that popped in my head was...and I kind of knew this going into it, like, this is a big project that needs time. Things that prevent startups usually is, one, you don't execute, or you just don't start it at all, or you give up too soon. And I guess I would tell myself, hey, things are going to be all right. Like, just keep sticking with it. And you're getting all the signals; this is something substantial and worthwhile. Just be patient, stick with it. Survive those valleys, and there are peaks on the way. And getting into TechStars was the ultimate validation. Yeah, I feel extremely blessed to be in it. And I think we're poised to do big things this year. VICTORIA: That's very cool. So you've mentioned those peaks and valleys and how much time you have to spend on this type of starting a company [laughs] and building an app. How do you balance that with also having a regular life and going surfing and climbing? BRIAN: It's tough to find your specific balance and especially during the accelerator where I didn't want to waste any opportunity. So there were a lot of times...I think January was a month straight no days off. And actually, I was injured so I couldn't surf, climb, or even play piano, so all my outlets. But just be okay with setting aside time to where you don't think about work at all. And it took me a few months to reach that point. And I found that as long as I have one activity or some exercise per day, either I surf or climb, I'm good. I don't mind working 12-plus hour days if I do one of those. And then just to allocate one day of the week where I am like, I do a couple of hours in the morning. But one mostly day of don't think about work, just enjoy life. And that has been enough for me to feel refreshed going into next week. And so I think I got a good rhythm, and I got a good formula for what works for me. It might be different for other people, but it's important to set aside time where you don't think about it. VICTORIA: Right. Yeah, just to turn off your brain. Sometimes I find, like, you know, you mentioned surfing and climbing helps you do that because you really just can't be on your phone [laughs] when you're out there sometimes. BRIAN: Right. It's kind of funny because I'll almost say it's a catch-22. But sometimes, those things can be distracting, but they're also necessary for you to be focused if that makes sense. [laughs] VICTORIA: Yeah, totally. Let me bring it back to plants. What is your favorite house plant that you have right now? BRIAN: Man, it's changed over the years, but I do have one. It's like the most popular high-in-demand one; it's the Monstera albo. Its common counterpart is the Monstera deliciosa, which is all green. This one has white variegation on the leaves. They're just inherently beautiful plants. And anyone that sees it can be like, "Wow, that is gorgeous." But I have one specific one, and why it's my favorite is that years ago, I was telling a climbing friend about the app, and I guess the app is out by now, but telling her about it. And she's like, "Oh, my grandmother was a huge plant person. My mom now takes care of them. I think she has one of those Monstera plants with the white on it. It was my grandma's though." And I was like, no way. I have to see this. And when I get there, she has this massive one, incredibly mature and old. I think she said it was almost 50 years old. I can't even believe this. VICTORIA: Wow. BRIAN: And then I asked her. I was like, "Hey," [laughs] I was like, "Can I have a little bit of that?" [laughs] And she was like, "Oh yeah, just go ahead. This is a plant. I'll grow it back." And I felt a little bad because I took a nice big cutting like multiple leave cutting. And she absolutely did not care and just was so happy. Turns out she had three of these like big mother plants. There's one cutting that had very low variegation, so it showed barely any white on it. Over time, I grew it out. Every subsequent leaf kept showing more and more white. And now it's just so beautiful. I check up on it every day, and every new leaf is just more beautiful than the next. And it's a special one. And it was gifted to me by my friend's mother. It started off like you can say a lowly variegated plant, and now it's just thriving and beautiful. So it has some history, and it came from a friend. So without a doubt, that's my favorite one. [laughs] VICTORIA: That's very cool. Yeah, I know those Monsteras that you're talking about. They're really interesting-looking plants. I kept one alive for a short time, and I'm very proud of myself for it. [laughs] So I'm interested in using Blossm to keep my plants alive possibly. But that's awesome. Thank you so much for sharing that. What else can I ask you? Is there anything that I should ask you that I haven't yet? BRIAN: Well, we could actually segue from what you just said. This is an interesting thing. So I think everybody who's been through this has gone through this exact process. So they have a couple of plants. They're like, what's wrong with my plant? How do I take care of this? And they go down the Google rabbit hole, or they happen to buy one of these plant ID plant care apps. Usually, they're like freemium. You get a couple of free tries, and then you have to buy a subscription or whatever. I also did this. And I was like, you know what? These apps suck. They just don't work, or they're too general. The best plant advice you can get is from other plant people because there are so many variables. Like, which growing zone are you in? What kind of light do you have? What's your ambient humidity, temperature? All these factors come into play on how to properly care for your plant and what could be wrong. And the best advice I've gotten was from other plant people. And so we have, like, beyond the marketplace grid, we have this fully functioning community forum essentially like a Facebook group in a way where people can post questions about what's wrong with my plant, or what plant is this? Or share memes and just nerd out. And it's been such a critical component I think of Blossm to cultivate this community. But it's also just very functional and effective because really the only way to get that advice and care information is by interacting with other people. That's something we want to build upon in the future too with that whole live and video capabilities. VICTORIA: Yeah, that makes sense. Just a funny story, sometimes I'll call my mom who's a big plant person, and ask her questions, and she's like, "Well, you should go check that book I got you." [laughter] It's like, it's not helpful at all. [laughs] But yeah, no, I think that's right. I think people get excited about AI and image recognition. But sometimes it's still easier to get a real effective answer from a human. BRIAN: Yeah, I'd be curious with the whole AI getting its spotlight right now. And without a doubt, I could see applications there for it. Right now, I don't think that exists, but I'm very curious and excited to see what happens with all of it. It's going to be cool. VICTORIA: Yeah. Well, that's awesome. And I am excited that what Blossm does is really create this community around plants and learning about them and with the people around you. Do you have any final takeaways for our listeners? BRIAN: Hmm, final takeaways, you know, shameless self-promotion; if you love plants or you're getting into plants, Blossm is tailored for the plant person, which is what I think makes it special. And more general, I never intended to be the entrepreneur. I never intended for Blossm to be like, oh, this big tech company. I just had something I was super ionate about and wanted to see come alive for myself and for other people. Without a doubt, that ion paired with perseverance, I think, are critical attributes to follow any idea to the end or to some level of success. So don't be afraid to take that leap. By no means has it been easy. It's been the most difficult thing I've ever done but also the most rewarding. It's been really fun too. So if you got a cool idea, maybe try to build it out, find a good co-founder, a good team. Give it a go and create something for everyone. VICTORIA: Well, I really loved your story, Brian. I think you've found your niche. You built something. You took advantage of the time you had when you had it, and look where you are now. [laughs] I'm very excited to see what comes next. BRIAN: Cool. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. This has been lovely, and yeah, stoked to listen to the next episodes too. VICTORIA: Excellent. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, you can email us at [email protected]. And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Special Guest: Brian Feretic. Sponsored By: thoughtbot: Now that you have funding, it’s time to design, build and ship the most impactful MVP that wows customers now and can scale in the future. thoughtbot Lift Off brings you the most reliable cross-functional team of product experts to mitigate risk and set you up for long-term success. As your trusted, experienced technical partner, we’ll help launch your new product and guide you into a future-forward business that takes advantage of today’s new technologies and agile best practices. Make the right decisions for tomorrow, today. Get in touch at: thoughtbot.com/liftoff Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Etienne de Bruin is Founder of 7CTOs and Author of CTO Excellence in 100 Days. Victoria talks to Etienne about his book, founding 7CTOs, and keeping your technology sustainable by inspiring and motivating technology teams and people to work together and build complex systems. CTO Excellence in 100 Days 7CTOs Follow 7CTOs on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or YouTube. Follow Etienne de Bruin on LinkedIn or Twitter. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. And with me today is Etienne de Bruin, Founder of 7CTOs and Author of CTO Excellence in 100 Days. Etienne, thank you for ing me. ETIENNE: My pleasure, Victoria. Thanks for having me. VICTORIA: You're welcome. I'm excited to talk with you today. I hear that you recently published your book. Is it today actually the day it came out? ETIENNE: Today is the day. The book was finished about; I would say, three months ago. So I have had great anticipation now for many, many months. And you caught me on the day, so I feel like today is my birthday. VICTORIA: [laughs] Well, I feel honored that you chose us as your first stop [laughs] in your marketing push for your book. So tell me, what in your experience led you to begin writing this? ETIENNE: Well, as you mentioned, I founded 7CTOs. I think it's about ten years ago now. I myself am a CTO type. I've had a career of basically being born to code in South Africa, which took me to Stellenbosch University in South Africa. I then ed a startup that took me to and then landed in the U.S. in San Diego. And my whole journey has been a progression from individual contributor and really having great coding skills through the messiness and the intricacies of building startups, contributing to startups, and ultimately being in the role of CTO in startups. And what led me to founding 7CTOs was just a realization that I didn't have the I needed. I felt like I was going to many meetups, which was mostly oriented towards coding and sort of different new technology stacks and frameworks, or I was going to cocktail hours with vendors who were trying to sell you something. And I really felt the need to just be with my people so that I could, in a safe, and consistent, and able way, share the challenges that I was experiencing. It was really from this place of founding 7CTOs, talking to hundreds of...I've probably spoken to thousands of CTOs by now. I've also placed people. I've connected people. I've seen people companies because of connections I've made. And one of the things I saw that really bothered me was finding a great company in search of a CTO reaching out to me, talking to me about the role, me finding or through my network connecting them with a great CTO, only to find that a few months later either the relationship fizzles or even worse, the person did not succeed at the new company. And I just felt like you can have two people, a great founder, and great CTO, individually wonderful people, ostensibly well-suited to work with each other, but then make some basic mistakes that then lead towards not the desired outcome. And so I was really torn whether I should put some thoughts into a book or into some blog posts about what I think the first 100 days should look like in a fledgling relationship. And that's ultimately how the book was born. So long, long, long, long answer, Victoria. But that's where it all started. VICTORIA: No, that's great. I try to ask deep questions that get full answers back. [laughs] ETIENNE: You nailed it. VICTORIA: So I appreciate that context, yeah. So you talk about how to be successful in those first 100 days, which is critical to ing a new leadership team. What are some common mistakes that you mention that a CTO might make? And on the reverse side, what are some wins you could do early on to build trust? ETIENNE: I think a common mistake that I see is a bit of an identity issue. The CTO s an organization and is eager to deliver value, and I think that that value is oftentimes misplaced. And what I mean by that is you hit the ground running thinking that there's all this stuff that you have to deliver in order to prove that you can make an impact, to prove that you were the right choice. And I think there's an innate desire to impress your new employer, which I don't think is limited to the role of CTO. But I think for the CTO, this looks like some technical achievements and impact, problem-solving. And I think what I like to see is the first 100 days being used to slow down a little bit, to listen, to be curious, to be open to building relationships, to have a longer view on what exactly is the system that you're ing. And I think to a fault; sometimes people will ignore the system they're ing and just start delivering value. And I think that that can often be misinterpreted or misunderstood. And then, if that is misunderstood in the first few months, then that really sets a tone for the rest of the tenure that I think puts the CTO on the back foot to deliver at a pace that maybe is unsustainable, so... VICTORIA: I love that you said staying curious because I think what you can see is a tendency for, I don't know, what I've seen; maybe you've seen this too. [chuckle] But some people have a problem that they solved in a past situation, and they think that that is now the solution to every problem that they come into in a new organization, and maybe it is. But I think dealing in complex systems, having curiosity as to why decisions were made in a certain way can lead you to a better understanding of the business if that resonates with you at all. ETIENNE: Yeah, I love that you said that. I'm a huge fan and student of complex systems. And so you just spoke my love language. VICTORIA: [laughs] ETIENNE: But that's exactly what happens. And I think that sometimes the debilitater of powerful and impactful people is the problem that you observe is maybe tainted by what you saw in the past. It might be a similar challenge, a similar problem. But what you solved in the past was part of a completely different system, different entities, different relationships. And I think that by nature because the CTO is used to solving thousands and thousands of problems, there may be a bit of complacency around what is it exactly that I'm observing is the challenge here? Why exactly was I hired? What exactly does success look like for them, for the people that hired me, for the system that I've come into? And I think the tendency is to ignore all of those questions and focus on how do I feed my own need to feel valued and start solving problems in sort of a whack-a-mole style? And I have found, even in my own experience, that there are some seriously unintended consequences that can arise from solving people's problems for them in ways that they are not used to, or they don't understand, or in some places just fully disagree with. And I think if you are not patient and take sort of 100 full days to just chill out and really enjoy learning about the system that you're ing, I think you're setting yourself up to fail or to at least be very unhappy. VICTORIA: Right, setting yourself up for some fun conflicts [laughs] to solve if you come out right out the gate. And I think maybe, too, the first 100 days the chilling out and learning, you also have time to build empathy and build trust with people so that when you do bring up suggestions, they're maybe a little more willing to listen, right? ETIENNE: Yes. And I think it's not uncommon to say, "Oh, well, I'm going to onboard myself. It's going to take some time before I show value." And I think there is a general sense that when the executive s a company that, it's going to take some time. But I think that the temptation to jump into fiery situations is great, great in a bad way. It's a great temptation. And my book and my approach suggests that you take a step back and focus on a completely different area of the company, which is its people and its systems, and what success looks like for those people before you start jumping in and asserting your way of doing things. VICTORIA: And you mentioned a question that I was going to ask, like, what does success look like? Or say you're a CEO, and you're trying to hire a CTO; what does success look like? What kind of value do you think people should expect from someone in a CTO role? ETIENNE: Fundamentally, I think I might not be swimming in the mainstream on this topic. I don't believe that the CTO is a technical role first. I believe that the CTO is the Chief Technology Officer but is primarily a business role. And by that, I mean being a member of the C-suite, you are tasked, just like all the other of the C-suite, to grow a company in a sustainable way. And whatever that middle letter is, is your domain and your expertise, and that's cool. But that T is surrounded by a C and an O, which in most cases has a fiduciary responsibility to the organization. But also, first and foremost, you are a first-class member of the C-suite. And so my book talks about this, but you are there to in with the executive leadership team and to help that team towards success. And so what that looks like for me is you are wrestling on what the targets are for the company. You participate fully in that. You then allocate a budget. In other words, you allocate cost towards how you can achieve those revenue goals. And then, with that budget as CTO, you then are budgeting towards a team that you believe can get the technology implemented that will ultimately produce the revenue. So think about revenue target, technology budget, technology people. Now, these are all in the C-suite. These are just entries on a P&L. These are entries on the balance sheet. These are things that ultimately are abstracted towards company growth and company success. So with that, the CTO then turns into someone who wrestles with the tech teams, like, what are we going to implement? What ideas are consistent with our company principles and our vision? What does innovation look like? How do we inspire people to our organization to do so? That, to me, is a fundamental role for the CTO, to inspire people to the organization but also to be someone who implements and ideates on that journey. So I think a CTO succeeds when there is revenue growth, and that is due to budget being spent in an effective way to attract amazing people to ultimately build technology that is sustainable that then feeds into tech revenue that ultimately helps the company achieve its goals. VICTORIA: That's great. Yeah, I like that you said sustainable and the importance of people and how that relates to keeping your technology sustainable. And I'm curious if you could share more about what practices a CTO could bring to a new organization to facilitate that inspiration and to really motivate technology teams and people to work together and build these systems. ETIENNE: I think that speaks to my earlier answer, which is the investment in people and investment in understanding the systems that exist. So whether you are a CTO, that is the first time a company ever scales and grows into having that role being created, which, you know, most tech startups these days will have the role of CTO allocated and available. The important thing to understand for you as someone stepping into that role is that your teams have a construct. They have an impression. They have an image, either of your predecessor at that company or their experiences with leadership and technology at their previous companies. And I think it's extremely important to understand how you're being seen as a leader in the company and as CTO and that that vision of what people have of you is not necessarily based on your actions, your reputation, your good mornings in the mornings and your good evenings in the evenings. It really is based on people's constructs about what their experience has been of a CTO in their career, or like I said, the previous CTO, your predecessor. And so I think that it's critical as you step into this role that you take the time to bring that change to show people your ways, to show people what is important to you in a way that's not a bull in a china shop. But when you break stuff, and you come in, and you announce your presence, and you assert the new way of doing things, I think that that is met with suspicion and concern most of the time. And so I think if you can show people in the little things that you care about them, you're listening to them, you're curious about the system they're operating inside of, I think that that sets you up to then come in with the big ideas later on. But again, the emphasis being later on, past the 100 days. I talk about this in the book where introducing your tech strategy, introducing your way of doing things really comes a lot later in the 100 days than is maybe the preconceived notion. VICTORIA: And you also mentioned a few times what the CTO should be doing and a lot of great questions that you ask, like, what does success look like? How do we build this together? And finding ways to maybe generate more ideas than just what you would come up with with your team, you're more powerful. ETIENNE: Yes. And I think tag teaming on to that is a lot of times...and this is actually really a confounding thing that I've come across, which is the C-suite won't always understand what the role of CTO actually is. And teams won't always fully understand what the role of CTO is. When you talk about a CMO, or a CRO, or a CFO, I think you can generally understand what they're supposed to be doing. That isn't always clear for the CTO. And it's amazing how many times I have gotten the question, well, we knew we needed someone to help us with the tech, but we don't really know what it is that you do, or what you should be doing, or what success looks like. I think not making the assumption that people know what you're there to do is a form of showing some respect and humility. And this is why always when I'm in executive meetings, when I'm in stand-ups, or I'm in some sort of an architecture meeting, I will almost without fail I will say, "As the role of CTO, this is what I bring to the meeting," or "This is what the role of CTO would be looking for as an outcome of this conversation." Or "As the role of CTO, it is my job to ensure that our development capacity increases," to just never assume that people know what it is that you're there to do but to show them, I think, the respect and the courtesy that the role of CTO has a certain place in whatever meeting or brainstorm session is going on. VICTORIA: I think that makes sense, too, because I could see, you know, especially you mentioned with people who maybe have had past experiences with CTOs that are not the most positive. If you bring up an idea in a meeting, everyone thinks, well, that's the solution. That's what the CTO wants. And it might not. Everyone might not feel comfortable, like, without you caveating; this is why I'm bringing this up. You know, we're here to brainstorm and not for me to just tell you what to do. [laughs] ETIENNE: Yes, yes. And that's why I will often...honestly, this might be a real tip for people listening. But I will actively divorce who I am from the role that I'm in. And it enables me to have difficult conversations. It enables me to assert leadership without dominance. And that is to just say, "Hey, Sandra, in my role as CTO, this is what I am looking for in your growth or in your career path." Versus, "Hey, Sandra, I want you to..." or "I need you to..." And I think the subtle difference there is to just assure someone that you're operating in a capacity that the company expects from you versus somehow having your identity wrapped in the outcome of a conversation. And that really has been a very powerful tool for me as I integrate into new companies or as I need to navigate tricky conversations. VICTORIA: I appreciate you sharing that. I think hopefully that will be a great point for someone who's maybe struggling with something similar at this time. And maybe there are other common questions or themes that come up when you're talking to all these CTOs in organizations that you can share. ETIENNE: By the way, if your name is Sandra and you're listening to this conversation, I totally made up the name Sandra, so I'm not referring to you, Sandra. VICTORIA: [laughs] ETIENNE: Okay. I think an interesting thing that I've noticed is given the stage of my company, have I addressed all the things that I need to by now? And I think that is such an indication of the times that we live in. Technology is always changing. Expectations are always changing. Clearly, if you're in a technology innovation company, things are rapidly changing. It's funny because some things just stay the same, i.e., people problems and all that. But as far as technology landscape goes, I think that there is a little bit of a daunting feeling that, hey, I'm CTO in this company, but I don't know if I am where I need to be at compared to what other successful companies let's say, for instance, a series A company is doing. And as CTO, am I applying, am I showing up in the way that great CTOs of other series A companies are showing up? And so I would say that's problem number one is, am I operating at the level that I should be that my company is expecting of me? That's a real challenge that CTOs have. And I think level-setting expectations communicating where we should be at is a skill that I think is missing from a lot of people who are in that role. And I think it's because we get to the roles of CTO by being people who rapidly solve problems or speedily deliver on technology. And we start associating speed with being good at our jobs, and I really think that that is wrong; that is just wrong. When you're in an executive role, patience and spending the extra day or the extra week fighting for the extra month, I think, is actually a very important role that the CTO plays in the C-suite. And so if you have an underdeveloped sense of your own leadership style, an underdeveloped sense of your being and your essence and what it is you actually bring to the table, I think you end up just being sort of a knee-jerk tech person that just implements what other people want you to so that you could be valued for what it is that you do. Versus having that solid executive presence inside of a company that really influences and can shape the vision of the organization. VICTORIA: Yeah, I think that's super interesting how common that question is. And I wonder if it gets to sometimes creating a shared understanding between the executive team about the technology and why certain things are important or not important. I wonder if you could talk about any maybe major trends that you see executive teams trying to take advantage of that are either positive or negative. ETIENNE: The thing I've seen the most, which has had the greatest impact on, I think, executive teams, at least from my vantage point, is the desire to adopt some sort of business playbook or a business operating system. I think one of the most popular ones is the EOS model, Entrepreneurs Operating System. Gino Wickman, I think, wrote the book "Traction." And so it's caused a big trend with companies to try and streamline their operations by following the EOS model. And I do think that that might be the wrong solution to the right problem for many companies. What I mean by that is, again, we're talking about blueprints. What works for one company isn't necessarily going to work for the next company. The way you set goals, the way you set your so-called rocks, or the way you set your quarterly goals, or even working by quarter if you think about a quarter, it's such an interesting...it's really a Wall Street concept. It's three months. It's really so arbitrary. And I think that I see C-suites trying to adopt a business operating system that other companies are doing without really the necessary work being done as to, hey, what compels us through our culture, who we are, how we like to do things, what it is that works for us? And I will see some C-suites sort of spin their wheels a little bit on trying to adopt other systems when really all it takes is for them to do their own work to see what is the value stream? What does it look like inside of their company? I actually encourage, and I think I talk about this in this book; in days 60 to 70, I talk about learning to improvise. And I think this is where I look to the CTO to use their spidey senses and their logical deduction skills, their deconstruction skills to observe what is actually happening inside of the C-suite and to facilitate conversations around what is it that people need? How do we improvise on systems that we already have? Or how do we deal with missed expectations? And I do think that the CTO can play a wonderful role inside of the C-suite to facilitate those conversations. But I see inside of C-suites, the role of CTO being relegated to the IT person or just the tech person. And I think that victimization goes both ways. But the C-suite, where the CTO is actually facilitating hard conversations and able to do the decomposition of a complex system or the deconstruction of an often repeated problem or challenge that the company is experiencing, could really push the C-suite into a different track of thinking that could be super beneficial to unblocking some stodgy issues they've been facing. VICTORIA: That makes sense. And it reminds me of trying to adopt agile right when it was first becoming popular and committing so hard to a framework that you don't look at what works for your team [laughs] and works for the specific technology and tools that you have. So it makes sense to me that the CTO could bring an experience like that into applying frameworks to how the business operates. ETIENNE: Absolutely. And I think that's really when dogmatism could be your enemy. And, again, CTO s a company, knows a certain set of skills in order to accomplish things, dogmatically tries to apply that because they are the so-called expert. And then they fail, or they're unhappy, or there's misunderstanding because we had these high expectations for you. Your interviewing was brilliant, and you said all the right things. But then, when you walked into the organization, your desire for acceptance and delivering value trumps your opportunity to be the new person and be curious about what is actually happening and what is actually going on. This should be so obvious, but when you walk into a C-suite, there are obviously existing relationships between all the different of the C-suite. And I advocate for being a student of those relationships. Understand the history that exists between the CEO and the CFO. And these could be very great newbie conversations to have with these various of the C-suite. "Hey, so when did you the company? Hey, why did you the company? Hey, wait, which company did you come from? What drew you to this company? Where did you used to live? Why did you move?" I think these are such incredible nodes in a complex relational hierarchy that can give you some very sound ideas as to, oh, well, why does the CEO constantly challenge what the COO is saying? Or why does the COO seem sured all the time? You, as CTO you, would do very well. I mean, as any C-suite member, any leader would do well to seek some insight and perception into what is going on for people. VICTORIA: That makes sense, right? If you're going to have influence, you have to kind of understand what are all the connections and energy that's going around in the team? ETIENNE: Absolutely. Mid-Roll Ad: As life moves online, bricks-and-mortar businesses are having to adapt to survive. With over 18 years of experience building reliable web products and services, thoughtbot is the technology partner you can trust. We provide the technical expertise to enable your business to adapt and thrive in a changing environment. We start by understanding what’s important to your customers to help you transition to intuitive digital services your customers will trust. We take the time to understand what makes your business great and work fast yet thoroughly to build, test, and validate ideas, helping you discover new customers. Take your business online with design‑driven digital acceleration. Find out more at tbot.io/acceleration or click the link in the show notes for this episode. VICTORIA: And maybe you can tell me more about 7CTOs and what that community can mean for someone who's growing in this role. ETIENNE: 7CTOs, like I said earlier, I founded it...I almost said 100 days ago. I founded it ten years ago. And it was as I mentioned, the genesis of the story, which is important, is I co-founded a company with two people. I wrote the first lines of code for our product. In fact, I wrote the whole version 1 myself. And as the company grew and as the company grew beyond what it was that the three of us were comfortable with, I noticed that my CEO ed an organization a peer group organization. My COO ed a peer group organization. And I just saw this transformation in them that I really ired. I was actually really envious when they were able to start taking what they've learned from their peer groups and bring them into our company to start operating more efficiently. And so, it was just natural that I would look for something for CTOs, and I couldn't find anything. I actually tried to sort of more generic business leadership groups like Vestige or EO even. And I found that I wasn't really with my people. I wanted to feel like I was with the geeks who could talk all day about tech and development and probably watch the same movies and read the same books or inspired or laugh at the same jokes. I wanted to find my people who were facing the same problems and challenges that I was, i.e., scaling companies beyond the things that we knew, beyond the things that we were comfortable with. And I wanted to have deep conversations with those people. So I wanted to be able to share my insecurities or the politics that I was facing, or the anger that I was feeling, or not feeling seen or heard. I wanted to have deep, meaningful conversations with my true peers in a regular meeting setup that was confidential and fun. And I couldn't find that. So I decided to host a few meetups. My first meetup was actually in Old Town, San Diego, at my buddy's restaurant. And I hosted the first 10 or 12 CTOs and realized that people had a real need for that kind of interaction. And I then ended up hosting 30 different meetings in three different cities. And everywhere I went, there was the same expression that people wanted what I wanted. And then I tried to host a few more meaningful, smaller conversations and people...quite frankly, it was a disaster. I don't think it was the right container for people to respect each other and have empathy for each other's decisions. And instead, it just became a pissing contest for who made the right decision about what situation. And that's when I realized I'm not going to be able to create a meaningful, open the kimono style conversation without some rules. And those rules I put in place, i.e., you must attend the meetings. You need to have some skin in the game. And that's how 7CTOs was born. And to this day, it is a vetted peer group organization. We know we have some skin in the game. There's a hip fee. There's a time commitment. And there is a commitment to yourself to grow, to have empathy, to show up for your people, to be able to your people, to learn the stuff that you like to learn about and to learn the stuff that you don't want to learn about. And that is where we are today. So anybody who's listening to this who has a CTO who feels cold and lonely, come us. VICTORIA: I appreciate the hustle, that many meetups in that many cities. I would have gotten tired. [laughs] Like, that's too much. But it seems like there was a demand, and it created something that's really meaningful for people. ETIENNE: Yes. And I was surprised. So from San Diego, I went to Austin. And then, I also started investing in Portland. And I was really amazed how we were in different cities, but each tech scene had this group of people called CTOs who they knew how to talk about technology, and they knew how to geek out of trends and all that. But they were lacking solely in team composition, budget management, C-suite executive presence, handling disagreements with the CEO, maybe knowing when to leave, how to find new positions, to carefully consider the arc of their own careers, to just manage your LinkedIn page. I mean, it was really shocking in the early 2010s how much of that was going on. I will say I was reluctant to actually start something. You know, 7CTOs is very much a hip organization filled with people. Not the most intuitive move for me. I thought I would be building more and more and more tech companies, SaaS products. I do that as an interim or a fractional CTO now, but I don't have my own startup right now in the tech space. But I love 7CTOs. We have a new CEO. Her name is Beth Rehberg. We have our head of coaching. Her name is Brittany Cotton. And we have about 200-plus companies that have enrolled their CTOs in our organization. And the journey is remarkable, truly a remarkable journey to see how people are just blossoming into the full essence and the full impact that they can have in other companies. VICTORIA: That's wonderful. And I wonder, if you could go back in time and give yourself some advice back when you started it knowing what you know now, what advice would you tell yourself? ETIENNE: I grossly underestimated how many White guys I would be attracting. I think about three or four years into the organization; it took someone else to bring it to my attention that there were no women. There were no underrepresented minorities in this group. And so I think from day one, I would have made that a key focal point for myself to really invest in the diversity of the group. We've come a very long way. Our numbers are growing pretty quickly in of women ing us and people from various communities ing us. I think that's actually becoming a hallmark of 7CTOs. And I'm very proud of it today. But, boy, back in the day, I would have made that a key prime directive. VICTORIA: Well, that's a really honest take, and I appreciate you offering that to us. And I think that's an important thing to focus on always going forward. [laughs] But I like that, and now it's become a focus for you and creating that space that, you know, hindsight is 2020. [laughs] Well, great. Is there anything else that you'd like to leave as a takeaway for our listeners? ETIENNE: No. I think, of course, I would love some book purchases. Apparently, the first couple of weeks are vital for any new book. So please go over to Amazon and get "CTO Excellence." I also have a website: ctoexcellence.com. So really, anybody who has an inclination towards leadership in the tech space, I'm super ionate about those people. The opportunity to influence in a creative and confident way is just limitless. And I want to help unearth that for fledgling leaders, existing leaders, some leaders who might feel stuck. Please reach out to me. I'd love to get you connected, either through 7CTOs or even I do some coaching as well. So I consider it my life's mission to expand this ecosystem because so many people are impacted by the way we show up. And there's a great opportunity as CTOs to be transformational in our organizations. And this is what I exist to do. VICTORIA: Well, thank you so much for ing us today. And I really appreciate you sharing what you did, and I enjoyed our conversation. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at [email protected]. And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thank you for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Special Guest: Etienne de Bruin. Sponsored By: thoughtbot: As life moves online, bricks-and-mortar businesses are having to adapt to survive. With over 18 years of experience building reliable web products and services, thoughtbot is the technology partner you can trust. We provide the technical expertise to enable your business to adapt and thrive in a changing environment. We start by understanding what’s important to your customers to help you transition to intuitive digital services your customers will trust. We take the time to understand what makes your business great and work fast yet thoroughly to build, test, and validate ideas, helping you discover new customers. Take your business online with design‑driven digital acceleration. Find out more at: url tbot.io/acceleration or click the link in the show notes for this episode. Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Dominic Holt is CEO of harpoon, a drag-and-drop Kubernetes tool for deploying any software in seconds. Victoria talks to Dominic about commoditizing DevOps as a capability, coming up with the idea for drag and drop just thinking through how he could do these things in a visual and intuitive way, and using Kubernetes as a base for Harpoon. Harpoon Follow Harpoon on Facebook, or LinkedIn. Follow Dominic Holt on LinkedIn or Twitter. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. And with me today is Dominic Holt, CEO of harpoon, a drag-and-drop Kubernetes tool for deploying any software in seconds. Dominic, thank you for ing me. DOMINIC: Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me, Victoria. VICTORIA: Yes, I'm really excited to talk all about what Kubernetes is. And I have Joe Ferris, the CTO of thoughtbot, here with me as well to help me in that process. JOE: Hello. VICTORIA: Excellent. Okay, so, Dominic, why don't you just tell me how it all got started? What led you to start harpoon? DOMINIC: I got into the DevOps space fairly early. It was, I don't know, probably 2012 timeframe, which sounds like not that long ago. But, I mean, DevOps is also still a baby. So I have a software background. And I was starting to figure out how to do the continuous; I guess, automated way of standing up cloud infrastructure for Lockheed Martin at the time because people didn't know how to do that. There weren't a lot of tools available, and nobody knew what DevOps was. And if you said it to somebody, they would have slapped you. VICTORIA: Aggressive. [laughs] DOMINIC: [laughs] Maybe not, maybe not. Maybe they'd be nicer about it. But anyway, nobody knew what DevOps was because it wasn't coined yet. And I started realizing that this was not some system istration voodoo. It was just common sense from a software development standpoint. And I ended up leaving Lockheed shortly thereafter and going and working for a small business here in San Diego. And I said, I have no idea what any of this stuff is, but we're going to do it because, in a few years, everybody's going to be doing it because it's common sense. So we did. We grew quite a large practice in consulting and DevOps, among other things. And predominantly, I was working with the U.S. Navy at the time, and they needed a standardized way to deploy software to aircraft carriers and destroyers, the ships out there in the ocean. And so, I came up with a design for them that used Kubernetes. And we built a pipeline, a CI/CD pipeline, to automatically deploy software from the cloud to Navy ships out in the ocean on top of Kubernetes. And everything worked great. And it was there, and we tested it. But at the end of the day, handing over the maintenance, what we call day two ops, proved to be troubling. And it never quite made it onto the ships in the way that we wanted. So after that, I did a bunch of consulting with other groups in the Navy, and the Air Force, and Space Force, and all kinds of different groups across the government. And I also started consulting in commercial, fortune 500, startups, everything. And I just saw that this problem was really pervasive, handling the day two operations. You get everything up and running, but then maintaining it after that was just complicated for people because all of the DevOps implementations are snowflakes. So if you go from Company A to Company B, they look nothing alike. And they may have a lot to do with somebody named Jim or Frank or Bob and how they thought was the best way to do it. And so, running a DevOps consultancy myself, I just knew how hard it was to find the talent, and how expensive they were, and how hard it was to keep them because everyone else was trying to hire my talent all the time. And I just thought to myself, all of this is completely untenable. Somebody is going to commoditize DevOps as a capability. And what would that look like? VICTORIA: Right. I'm familiar with the demand for people who know how to build the infrastructure and systems for deploying and running software. [laughs] And I like how you first talked about DevOps, just it being common sense. And I feeling that way when I went to my first DevOps DC meetup. I was like, oh, this is how you're supposed to build teams and organizations in a way to run things efficiently and apply those principles from building software to managing your infrastructure. DOMINIC: Yeah. Well, I had lived the life of an enterprise software developer for quite a while before then. And I had gone through that whole process they talk about in all of DevOps bibles about why it is we're doing this, where the software development team would have their nice, fancy dev laptops. And the operations team with the pagers or whatever would be the ones managing the servers. And the software developers were never really sure exactly how it was going to work in production, but were like; I'm just going to throw it over the fence and see what the ops people do. And inevitably, the ops people would call us very angrily, and they would say, "Your software doesn't work." And then, of course, we would say that the ops people are all crazy because it works just fine here on my laptop, and they just don't know what they're doing. And, I mean, we would just fight back and forth about this for six months until somebody figured out that we were running the wrong version of some dependency in the software on the ops side, and that's why it didn't work. So that process is just crazy, and nobody in their right mind would want to go through it if they could avoid it. VICTORIA: Right. I'm sure Joe has had some stories from his time at thoughtbot. JOE: Yeah, certainly. I was interested by what you said about working with...I think it was Frank, and Ted, and Bob. I've definitely worked with all those people in their own snowflakes. And one of the things that drew me to Kubernetes is that it was an attempt to standardize at least some of the approaches or at least provide anchor points for things like how you might implement networking, and routing, and so on. I'm interested to hear, you know, for a drag-and-drop solution, even though Kubernetes was meant to standardize a lot of things, there are a lot of different Kubernetes distributions. And I think there are still a lot of Kubernetes snowflakes. I'm curious how you manage to tackle that problem with a drag-and-drop solution to hit the different Kubernetes distributions out there. DOMINIC: Yeah, I mean, I think you nailed it, Joe. Standing up Kubernetes is a little bit complicated still these days. It's been made a lot easier by a lot of different companies, and products, and open-source software, and things like that. And so I see a lot of people getting up basic Kubernetes clusters these days. But then you look at companies like ARMO that are doing compliance scans and security scans on Kubernetes clusters, and they're making the claim that 100% of the Kubernetes clusters they scan are non-compliant [laughs] and have security issues. And so that just goes to show you all of the things that one has to know to be successful just to stand up a cluster in the first place. And even when I...like for a client or something, over the years, if I was standing up a Kubernetes cluster and a lot of it was automated, you know, we used Terraform and Ansible, and all the other best practices under the hood. A lot of the response I got back when we handed over a cluster to a client was, "Okay, now what?" There are still a lot of things you have to learn to maintain that cluster, keep it up to date, upgrade the underlying components of the cluster, deploy the software, configure the software, all those things. And can you learn these things? Absolutely. Like, they're not rocket science, but they're complicated. And it is a commitment that you have to make as an individual if you're going to become proficient in all of these things and managing your own cluster. And so we were just...we had done this so many times at different companies I had worked with, for different clients, and seeing how all of the different pieces work together and where clients were having problems and what really hung people up. And so I just started thinking to myself, how would you make that easier? How would you make that more available to the pizza guy or an 18-year-old with no formal training that's on a ship in the ocean? And that's why I came up with the idea for drag and drop, just thinking through how can I do these things in a visual way that is going to be intuitive for people? VICTORIA: Well, I have, obviously, a very thorough understanding of Kubernetes, [laughs] just kidding. But maybe explain a little bit more about to a founder why should they invest in this type of approach when they're building products? DOMINIC: So I think that's a great question. What I find these days is DevOps is almost a requirement to do business these days in some sort of nimble way. So you have to...whether you're a large enterprise or you're a garage startup, you need to be able to change your software to market forces, to stuff that's happening in the news, to your customers don't like something. So you want to change it to something else quickly or pivot because if something happens, you can get your day in the sun, or you can capitalize on something that's happening. And so the difficulty is I think a lot of people have an impression that DevOps scripts are sort of like a build once and forget type of thing, and it'll just work thereafter. But it's actually software, and I like to think of software as living organisms. You have to take care of them like they're people, almost because if you don't, they'll become brittle and unhealthy over time. If you have a child, you have to feed them probably multiple times a day, brush their teeth. You got to tuck them in at night. You have to be nice to them. You have to do all the things that you would do with a child. But with software as well, if you just take the quick route, and quick fix things, and hack, and take shortcuts, eventually, you're going to have a very unhealthy child on your hands, and they're going to have behavior problems. At the end of the day, you have all these DevOps scripts, and they can be quite complex together. And you have to take care of them like they're your own child. And the problem is you're also taking care of your software products like it's your child. And so now you're taking care of two children. And as somebody that has two children, I can tell you that things become much more complicated when two children are having behavioral problems than just one. And you're at the store, and it's very embarrassing. So I guess the point is that harpoon is a capability that can basically take care of your second child for you, which is your DevOps deployments. And then you can just focus on the one child that you, I mean, this is turning into a terrible analogy at this point. [laughter] But you should love all of your children equally. But, in this case, you're looking to take care of your products and get it out there, and harpoon is something that can take care of your DevOps software for you. VICTORIA: I agree. I think when your software or children are problematic, it's more than just embarrassing sometimes. It can create a lot of financial and legal liability as well. From your research, when you're building this product and, like, who's going to be interested in buying this thing, is that something that people are concerned about? DOMINIC: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the fact that we can stand up your cluster for you, stand up all of your cloud infrastructure for you, and then dynamically generate all of the configuration as code as well, and how to open those things securely up to the network and control everything such that you're not going to accidentally do something that's really bad, can definitely help out a lot of people. The interest has been really overwhelming from so many different groups and organizations. We have people that are interested in the Department of Defense in both the U.S. and other countries. We have fortune 500 companies that see this as a pathway to accelerate digital transformation for legacy applications or even to use it as a sandbox, so people aren't bugging Frank, and Joe, and Bob, who run the Kubernetes clusters in production. We have startups who see it just as a way to skip over the whole DevOps thing and work on getting a product-market fit so that they have a production environment that just works out of the box. So it's been really interesting seeing all the different use cases people are using harpoon for and how it's helped them in some way get to some and realize some goal that they have. JOE: I'm curious if it's been a challenge as somebody managing the underlying infrastructure as sort of a plug-and-play thing. One experience I've had working more on the operations side of DevOps is that everything becomes your problem. Like, if the server misbehaves, if there's a database crash, whatever, certainly, that's your problem. But also, if the application is murdering your database, that becomes your problem. And it's really an application problem. But it surfaces visibly in the infrastructure when the U spikes and it stops responding to requests. And so, how do you navigate that agreement with your s? How do you balance what's your responsibility versus theirs to not kill the cluster? DOMINIC: One thing that's great about Kubernetes and why it's a great base for our product is that Kubernetes is really good at keeping things running. Certainly, there are catastrophic things that can happen, like an entire region of EC2 and Amazon Web Services goes down. And that is, obviously, if you have your clusters only running in that particular region, you're going to have a bad day. So there are things beyond our control. I mean, those things are also covered by the service-level agreement, the SLA with AWS, since you're using your own AWS when you're utilizing harpoon. So it's like a hybrid SaaS where we deploy everything into your , and you own it. And you can adjust those infrastructure things on your own as you'd like. So from that standpoint, you're kind of covered with your agreement with AWS as an example of a cloud service provider. And certainly, Kubernetes also kind of knows what to do in some of those instances where you have a container that is murdering everything. In a lot of cases, it can be configured to, you know, just die or go into a CrashLoopBackOff or something if it's just taking up all your resources in the cluster versus destroying your entire cluster in a great fireworks display. So we put some of those protections into the platform as well. But yeah, to your point, being an ops person is a difficult job because we're usually the ones [laughs] that get blamed for everything when something bad happens, even though sometimes it's the software team's fault or sometimes it's even just the infrastructure you're built on. Occasionally, AWS services and Google Cloud and Azure services do go down, and things happen. We've had instances, even during harpoon development, where we're testing harpoon late at night on AWS, and sometimes AWS does wonky things at night that people don't realize. It's not completely perfect capability. And we're like, oh, why does it only happen at 11:58 on Tuesdays? Oh, because AWS updates their servers during that time, and it slows down everything. It's still good to understand all the underlying components and how they work, and that could certainly help you regardless of if you use harpoon or not. But ultimately, we're just trying to make it easier for people. They can spend less time focusing on those things. We can help them with a lot of those problems that might occur, and they can focus on their software. VICTORIA: Great. I think that's...it's interesting to me to always hear about all the different challenges in managing operations of software. So I like that you're working on this space. It's clearly a space that needs more innovation, you know, we're working on it here at thoughtbot as well. Has there been anything in your, like, any theory that you had going into your initial research that when you talked to customers surprised you and caused you to change your direction? DOMINIC: Yeah. I mean, we run the gamut there. So we did a lot of early customer discovery to try to figure out who might be interested in this product. And so, our first thought was that startups would be the most interested in this product because they're building something new. They just want to get it out there. They want to build their MVP, and they just want to throw it on the internet and get it rolling and not have to worry about whether the software is up and down while they're doing a bunch of sales calls. Because really, during the MVP phase, if you're doing lean startup-style company development, then you really just want to be selling. You want to always be selling. And so we thought it would just be a no-brainer for startups. And we talked to a lot of startups, and some startups for sure thought it was valuable. But a lot of them were like, "Yeah, that's cool, but we don't care about DevOps. [chuckles] We don't care about anything. Like, I'll run it on my laptop if I have to. The only thing I care about is finding product-market fit and getting that first sale." And so, at least as far as the very first customers that we were looking for, they weren't the best fit. And then we went and talked to a bunch of mid-market companies because we just decided to go up to the next logical level. And so mid-market companies were very interested because a lot of them were starting to eyeball Kubernetes and maybe sort of migrate some of their capabilities over there. Maybe they had a little bit of ability to be a bit nimble, in that sense, versus some of the enterprise customers. And so they were very interested in it. But a lot of them were very risk averse, like, go find a bunch of enterprise customers that will buy it, and then we'll buy it. And so then we went to talk to the enterprise customers. And that was sort of like an eye-opening time for us because the enterprise customers just got it. They were like, "Yeah, I'm trying to migrate legacy capabilities we built 10 or 15 years ago to the cloud. We're trying to containerize everything and refactor our existing software. I got to redesign the interface that was built ten years ago." And if somebody's got a DevOps easy button, then sign me up. I would like to participate because I can't spell Kubernetes yet, but I definitely know what it is, and I want to use it. So working with the enterprise customers was really great for us because it showed us what the appetite was in the market and who was going to immediately benefit from it. And then, ultimately, that rolls down to the mid-market companies. And maybe later-stage startups as well are starting to find a lot of value in the platform from, you know, have maybe started finding some product-market fit and care a little bit about whether people can access my software and it's maintainable and available. And so we can definitely help with that. VICTORIA: That's super interesting, and it aligns with my experience as well, coming from consulting companies and the federal government who are working on digital services, and DevOps, and agile, and all of those transformational activities. And so it's been five years, it looks like since you started harpoon. What advice would you give to yourself if you could travel back in time when you were first starting the project? DOMINIC: So I made lots of mistakes along the way. I'll inevitably make more. But when I first started building this thing, I wasn't even sure how it was going to work. Kubernetes can be a bit of a fickle beast, and it wasn't really built to have a drag-and-drop UI on top of it. And so there are lots of things that could go wrong, trust me, [laughs] I learned them. But building an initial prototype, like, the very base of can the capability work at all, came together pretty quickly. It was maybe three or four months of development during my nights and weekends. And building an enterprise scalable product took quite a bit longer. But once I had an initial capability, I was very excited because, again, I didn't even know if this was possible, certainly not five or six years ago. So I didn't even really want to raise a round or make money. I do know how venture capital works. So it wasn't even my expectation that people would want to give me money because all I had was an MVP and no product-market fit. And I had just thrown it together in three or four months. But I was just excited about it. I'm a software developer at heart, and technology excites me. And solving problems is kind of what gets me up in the morning. So I just called all the people I knew, a bunch of VCs, other people, and they're like, "Yeah, I would like to see that. Let's set up a time." And so I think maybe they interpreted that as, like, I want to do a pitch to you for money. [laughs] And I just proceeded to go to, like, this dog and pony show of showing a bunch of people this thing I built, and I thought they would just understand it and get what I was doing. And I just proceeded to get my ass handed to me over and over and over again. Like, "This isn't that great of a product. How much money are you making?" Blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, "No, no, you don't get it. I just started. It's just a prototype at this stage. It's not even a finished product." And they're like, "Well, you're definitely going to fail. [laughter] You're wasting your time. What are you even doing here?" And so that was...I like to think that I have thick skin, but that's hard to hear as an entrepreneur; just people don't get your vision. They don't understand what it is you're building and why it's going to be valuable to people. And it could be a long time before you get to a point where people can even understand what it is you're doing, and you just have to sort of stay the course and, I mean, I did. I went around on some rock somewhere and hung out in a tent on an island for a while. I just kept going. And you just got to pour all your heart and soul, and effort into building a product if you want to make it exist out there in the world. And a lot of people are not going to get it, but as long as you believe in it and you keep pushing, then maybe someday they will get it. For the first year after we had a working enterprise-grade product, we kind of did a soft launch. And we had a small set of customers. We had 8 to 10 people that were sort of testing it out and using it, things like that. We kind of went, you know, more gangbusters launch at the end of last year, and it was crazy. And then...what? I don't know, maybe 60 days since we did a more serious launch. And we have gone from our ten soft s to 2,000 s. VICTORIA: Wow. Well, that's great growth. And it sounds exciting that you have your team in place now. You're able to set yourself up for growth. Mid-Roll Ad: Are your engineers spending too much time on DevOps and maintenance issues when you need them on new features? We know maintaining your own servers can be costly and that it’s easy for spending creep to sneak in when your team isn’t looking. By delegating server management, maintenance, and security to thoughtbot and our network of service partners, you can get 24x7 from our team of experts, all for less than the cost of one in-house engineer. Save time and money with our DevOps and Maintenance service. Find out more at: url tbot.io/devops VICTORIA: So now that you're getting more established, you're getting more customers, you have a team ing you on the project; what parts of the DevOps culture do you feel like are really important to making a team that will continue to grow? DOMINIC: I've been an individual contributor for a long period of time. I was a first-level manager and managed people. At a very granular personal level, I've been a director, and a VP, and a CTO at a bunch of different places. And so all of those different roles and different companies that I've worked at have taught me a lot about people, and teams, and culture, and certainly about hiring. I think hiring is the absolute most important thing you can do in a company, and definitively in a software company. Because there are just certain people that are going to mesh well with your culture, and the people that do and that are driven and ionate about what they do, they're just going to drive your company forward. And so I just spend a lot of my time when we need to grow as a company, which happens here and there, really focusing on who is going to be the best next person to bring on to the company. And usually, I'm thinking about this far in advance because whenever we do need that person, I don't want to have to start thinking about it. I want to just know, like, it is Frank, it is Bob, it is Jamey, or Alex, or whoever else. Because it is...at a personal level, there has to be people who are very aligned with your visions, and your values, and your culture, and they care and are going to push the company forward. And if you're just hiring people with a quick coding interview and a 30-minute culture fit session, you're going to make a lot of hiring mistakes. You're going to find people who are just looking for a nine-to-five or things like that, and, I mean, there's nothing wrong with that. But in a startup especially, you really need people who buy into the vision and who are going to push the thing forward. And I'm looking for people who just care, like; they have an ownership mentality. Maybe in a different lifetime or a different part of their career, they'd be an entrepreneur at their own company. But you just give them stuff, and they're like, cool, this is mine. I'm going to take care of this. It's now my child. I will make sure that it grows up and it is healthy and goes to a good university. Those are the type of people that you want in your company, people that you would trust with your children. So those are the criteria for working at harpoon, I guess. VICTORIA: Yeah, that's good. So what does success look like in the next six months or even beyond the next five years? DOMINIC: I think it's still very early market for us. Certainly, we have an explosive growth of s using the platform, and that's really heartening to see. That's really awesome that people want to use the thing that you built. But again, there are so many companies out there and organizations that are still not even doing DevOps. They're just doing manual deployments, maintaining clusters manually, not using containers or Kubernetes. Not to say that you have to use these things and that they're a panacea, and they work in every sense because they don't. But obviously, there's been a major shift in the industry towards containers and container orchestration like Kubernetes. Even some of the serverless platforms that people like to use are actually backed by Kubernetes, so you see a major shift in that direction. But there are still so many different companies and organizations that, again, are still locked into legacy ways of doing things and manually doing things. There are companies that are trying to get their products off the ground, and they're looking for faster and easier, and cheaper ways to do that. And I think that's what's really exciting about harpoon is we can help these companies. We can help them be more successful. We can help them migrate to things that are more modern and agile. We can help them get their product off the ground faster or more reliably. And so that's kind of what excites me. But you know what? We do a lot of demos, you know, sales demos and things like that. And, really, we don't have PowerPoints. We're just like, cool, this is the app, and this is how you use it. And it is so simplistic to use, even though Kubernetes is quite complicated, that the demo goes pretty quick. We're talking five, six minutes if there are not a lot of questions. And we always get exactly the same response, whether somebody is not super familiar with Kubernetes or they are familiar with Kubernetes, and they've set up their own cluster. It's almost always, "Wow," and then a pause, and then "But how do I know it works?" [laughs] So there's going be a lot of work for us in educating people out there that there is an easier way to do DevOps now, that you can do drag and drop DevOps and dynamically generate all of your scripts and configuration, and open up networks, and deploy load balancers, and all the other things that you would need to do with Kubernetes, literally in a few minutes just dragging and dropping things. So there's going to be a lot of education that just goes into saying, "Hey, there's a new market, and this is what it is. And this is how it compares to the manual processes people are using out there. Here's how it compares to some of the other tools that are more incremental in nature." And trust, you know, over time, people are going to have to use the platform and see that it works and talk to other people and be like, yeah, I deployed my software on harpoon, and nothing terrible happened. Demons didn't come out of the walls, and my software kept running, and no meteors crashed in my house. So it's just going to take some time for us to really grow and build the education around that market to show that it's possible and that it exists, and it can be an option for you. VICTORIA: Right. I used to do a lot of intro to DevOps talks with Women Who Code and DevOps DC. And I would describe Kubernetes as a way to keep your kubes neat, and your kube is where your software lives. It's a little house that keeps the doors locked and things like that. Do you have another way to kind of explain what is Kubernetes? Like, how do you kind of even just get people started on what DevOps is? DOMINIC: I like to usually use the cattle story. [laughs] So, in DevOps, they have these concepts of immutable infrastructure or immutable architecture. And so when you have virtual machines, which is what people have been running on for quite a while, certainly some people still run on bare metal servers, but pretty much everybody's got on board with virtualization at this point, and so most software these days is at least running on virtual machines. And so the difficulty with virtual machines is, I mean, there's nothing wrong with them, but they're kind of like pets. They exist for long periods of time. They have what we call state drift, and that's just the changing of the data or the state of the virtual machine over time. And even if I were to kill off that virtual machine and start another one, it wouldn't be exactly the same one. It wouldn't be, you know, fluffy. It would be a clone of fluffy. And maybe it wouldn't have the same personality, and it wouldn't do exactly the same things. And sometimes that might be good; maybe fluffy was a terrible dog. But in other cases, you're like, oh crap, I needed that snowflake feature that Bob built three years ago. And Bob has been hit by a train, so people can't ask Bob anymore. And so what then really happens at these organizations is when the virtual machines start acting up, they don't kill them. They take them to the vet. They take care of them. They pet them. They tell them they're a good boy. And you have entire enterprises that are super dependent on these virtual machines staying alive. And so that's no way to run your business. And so that's one of the reasons why people started switching over to containers because the best practices in containers is to build software that's immutable. So if you destroy or kill one of your containers, you can start another one. And it should work exactly the same as before, and that's because when you build your containers, you can't change them unless you rebuild them. I mean, there are ways to do it, but people will wave their finger angrily at you if you try to do that because it's not a best practice. So, at the end of the day, virtual machines are pets, and the containers are cattle. And when containers start acting up, you kill them. And you take them to the meat factory, and you go get another one. And so this provides a ton of value from a software development and an ops perspective because anytime you have a problem, you just kill your containers, start new ones, and you're off to the races again. And it significantly reduces the troubleshooting time when you're having problems. Obviously, you probably want to log things and check into things; why did that happen? So that maybe you can go make a fix in your software. But at the end of the day, you want to keep your ops running. Containers are a great way to do that without having to be up at midnight figuring out why the virtual machine is acting up. And so the difficulty with cattle is they like to graze and wander and break through fences and things like that. And mostly, when you have an enterprise software application or even just a startup with an MVP, you probably have multiple containers that you need to run and build this application. And so you need somebody to orchestrate. You need somebody to wrangle your containers. And so Kubernetes, I like to say, is like cowboys. Like, they're the ones that wrangle your cattle and make sure they're all going in the right direction and doing the right things. And so it just makes natural sense. Like, if you have a bunch of cattle, you need somebody to take care of them, so that's what Kubernetes does. JOE: Yeah, just to add to that, one of the things I really like about Kubernetes is that it's declarative versus prescriptive. So if you look at a lot of the older DevOps tools like Chef, things like that, you're effectively telling the machine what you want it to do to end up with a particular deployment. With containers, you'd say, start this number of containers on this node. Start this number of containers on this node. Add a virtual machine with these. Whereas with Kubernetes, you state the way you would like the world to be, and then Kubernetes' job is to make the world like that. So from a developer's perspective, when they're deploying things, they don't actually usually want to think in of the steps involved between I push this code, and somebody can use it. What they want us to say is I want this code running in containers, and I would like it to have this configuration. I would like it to have these ports exposed. And I love that Kubernetes, to a pretty good extent, abstracts away all of those steps and just lets you say what you want. DOMINIC: Yeah, that's a lot of the power in Kubernetes. You just say, "This is what I want, and then make it so." And Kubernetes goes out and figures out where it's going to schedule your container on what node or server if it dies. Kubernetes is like; I'm pretty sure you wanted one of those running, so I'm going to run it again. It just handles a lot of those things for you that previously you would need somebody with a pager to call to fix. And Kubernetes is automating a lot of that deployment and maintenance for you. VICTORIA: Right. And it seems like there's the movement to really coalesce around Kubernetes. I wonder if either of you can speak to the healthiness of the ecosystem for Kubernetes, which is open source, and why you chose to build on it. DOMINIC: So there was sort of a bit of a container orchestration war for a while. There was a bunch of different options. And I'm not saying that a lot of them weren't good options. Like, Docker built a capability called Swarm, and it's fairly simple to use and pretty powerful. But there was just a lot of backing from the open-source community behind Kubernetes when Google made it an open-source project. There were other things sort of like Kubernetes but not really like Mesos. And they all had like this huge bloodbath to see who was going to be the winner. And I just feel like Kubernetes kind of pulled ahead. It was a really smart move from Google to make it open-source and get the open-source community's buy-in to use. And it just became a very powerful but complex tool for running your software in production. Google had been using some form of that called Google Borg for a number of years prior. And I'm guessing they're still quite a bit different. But that's how it kind of came about. Do you have anything to add, Joe? JOE: I'd say that I judge the winner or the health of an ecosystem by the health of the off-the-shelf and open-source software that can run on that system. So Kubernetes is a thing that you use yourself. You build things to run on it. But also, you can pick and choose many things from the community that people have already built. And there is a huge open-source community for components that run on Kubernetes, everything from CI/CD to managing databases to doing interesting deployment styles like canary deployments. That's really healthy. It just didn't happen with the other systems like Swarm or Nomad was another one. And most of the other companies that I saw doing container orchestration eventually just changed to doing their flavor of Kubernetes, like Rancher. I forget what their original platform was called. But their whole thing was based on that cattle metaphor. [chuckles] And they took a pretty similar approach to containers. And now, if you ask somebody what Rancher is, they'll tell you it's a managed Kubernetes platform. DOMINIC: Yeah, I think it's called Longhorn, so they very much have the cattle theme in there. I mean, they're literally called Rancher, so there you go. But yeah, at the end of the day, something is going to come after Kubernetes as well. And I like to think that it's not so much a matter of what's going to be next? Is there going to be something beyond containers or container orchestrators like Kubernetes? I just think there are going to be more and more layers of abstraction because, at the end of the day, look at the advent of things like ChatGPT and generative AI. People just want to get their jobs done more efficiently and faster. And in software, there's just a lot of time and money that goes into getting software running and keeping it running, and that's why Kubernetes makes sense. But then there's also a lot of time that goes into Kubernetes. And so we think that harpoon is just sort of the natural next layer of abstraction that's going to live on as the next thing. So if 15 years ago I told you I was going to build a web application and I was going to go run it in the cloud, maybe you would have said, "You're crazy, Dom. Like, how could you trust this guy, Jeff, with all your software? What if he is going to steal it? And what if he can't run a data center? What then?" And now, if I told you I was going to go build a data center because I want to build a web application, you would look at me like I was a pariah and that I was not fit to run a company and that I should just use the cloud. So I think it's the same process. We're going to go with containers and Kubernetes. And software deployment, in general, is going to be an abstraction layer that lives on top of all that because software developers and companies just want to push out good software to end s. And any sort of way to make that more efficient or more fun is going to be embraced eventually. JOE: Yeah, I agree with that. I hear people ask, "What are you going to do when Kubernetes is obsolete?" pretty often. And I think it's achieved enough momentum that it won't be. I think it'll be what else is built on top of Kubernetes? Like, people talk about servers like they're obsolete, but they're not; there are still servers. People are just running virtual machines on them. And virtual machines are not obsolete. We'll just run containers on them. So once we get beyond the layer of worrying about containers, you'll still need a container platform. And based on the momentum it's achieved, I think that platform is going to be Kubernetes. VICTORIA: Technology never dies. You just get more different types of technology. [laughs] Usually, that's my philosophy on that. DOMINIC: Yeah, I mean, there's never been a better time to be a software developer, especially if you're an entrepreneur at the same time, because that's what happens over time. Like, what we're achieving with web applications today and what you can push out to the internet and kind of judge if there's a market for would have been unimaginable 20 years ago because, again, you would have had to build a data center. [laughs] And who has a bunch of tens of millions of dollars sitting around to do that? So now you can just use existing software from other people and glue it together. And you can use the cloud and deploy your software and get it out to the masses and scale it. And it's an amazing time to be alive and to be building things for people. VICTORIA: Right. And you mentioned a few things like artificial intelligence before, and there are a lot of people innovating in that space, which requires a lot of data, and networking, and security, and other types of things that you want to think about if you're trying to invent that kind of product. Which brings me to a question I have around, you know when you're adding that abstraction layer to these Kubernetes clusters, how does that factor into security compliance frameworks? And does that even come up with the customers who want to use your product? DOMINIC: Yeah. I mean, definitely, people are concerned about security. When we do infrastructure as code for your virtual infrastructure that's running your Kubernetes cluster that we deploy for you, certainly, we're using best practices from a security standpoint. We do all the same things. If we're building out custom scripts for some clients somewhere, we'd want it to be secure. And we want to lock down different aspects of components that we're building and not just expose all the ports on maybe a load balancer and things like that. So by default, we try to build in as much security as we can. It's pragmatic. I think ultimately we'll probably go down to the path of SOC 2 compliance, and then anything that goes on top of a harpoon cluster or that is deployed with harpoon will be SOC 2 compliant to a large degree. And so yeah, I mean, security is definitely a part of it. We're currently building in a lot of other security features, too, like role-based access control and zero trust, which we'll have pretty soon here. So, yeah, if you want to build your software and get it deployed, you want it to be scalable, and you also want it to be secure. There are so many ilities that come into deploying software. But to your point, even on the artificial intelligence side, people are looking for easier ways to abstract away the complexity. Like, if I told you to go write me a blog post with either ChatGPT or go build your own generative AI model and use that, then you're probably going to be like, yeah, I'll just go to the OpenAI website. I'll be back in a minute. And that's why also you see things like SageMaker from AWS. People want abstraction layers. They want easier ways to do things. And it's not just in DevOps; it's in artificial intelligence and machine learning. That's why drag-and-drop editors are becoming more popular in building web applications mobile applications. I think all of this software development stuff is going to be really accessible to a much larger community in the near future. VICTORIA: Yeah, wonderful. That's great. And so, Dominic, any final takeaways for our listeners today? DOMINIC: Definitely, if you have interest in how either harpoon or Kubernetes, in general, might be applicable to you and your company, we're a bunch of friendly people over here. Even if you're not quite sure how to get started or you need advice on stuff, definitely go hit us up on our website or hit up at harpoon.io, and send us a message. We're very open to helping people because, again, what we're really trying to do is make this more accessible to more people and make more people successful with this technology. So if we have to get on a bunch of phone calls or come sit next to you or do whatever else, we're here to be a resource to the community, and harpoon is for you to get started. So don't feel like you need a bunch of money to get started deploying with Kubernetes and using the platform. VICTORIA: That's a great note to end on. So you can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at [email protected]. And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thank you for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Special Guest: Dominic Holt. Sponsored By: thoughtbot: Are your engineers spending too much time on DevOps and maintenance issues when you need them on new features? We know maintaining your own servers can be costly and that it’s easy for spending creep to sneak in when your team isn’t looking. By delegating server management, maintenance, and security to thoughtbot and our network of service partners, you can get 24x7 from our team of experts, all for less than the cost of one in-house engineer. Save time and money with our DevOps and Maintenance service. Find out more at: tbot.io/devops Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Jennifer Goldsack is CEO of Digital Medicine Society (DiMe), the professional home for digital medicine. It is a global nonprofit with a mission to advance the ethical, effective, equitable, and safe use of digital technology to redefine healthcare and improve lives. Victoria talks to Jennifer ing new products and solutions to solve some of the most pressing and persistent challenges in healthcare, measuring success by how well they are caring for people every day and not by how good their products or how many they use on any given day, and how DiME can improve the way that we identify, manage, cure, and people in a lifetime journey of health and disease. Digital Medicine Society (DiMe) Follow Digital Medicine Society (DiMe) on LinkedIn or Twitter. Follow Jennifer Goldsack on LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. And with me today is Jennifer Goldsack, CEO of Digital Medicine Society, the professional home for digital medicine. Jennifer, thank you for ing me. JENNIFER: Thank you so much for having me; excited for our conversation today. VICTORIA: Wonderful, me too. And we have our Program Manager for DEI Geronda with us today. Hello. GERONDA: Hey, how's it going? I'm super excited to be on here as well. VICTORIA: Yes, me too. It's going to be a great conversation. So, Jennifer, why don't you just tell me a little bit more about the Digital Medicine Society? JENNIFER: Happy to, one of my favorite topics, Victoria. So the Digital Medicine Society, or as we affectionately refer to it as DiMe, is a global nonprofit, and our mission is to advance the ethical, effective, equitable, and safe use of digital technology to redefine healthcare and improve lives. And I think one point I'd like to make right off the bat is while we are tech and digital enthusiasts here at DiMe, we are not tech determinists. What we think about is how can we harness the promise of these new digital tools in the toolbox, these new products, these new solutions, and how can we use them to solve some of the most pressing and persistent challenges in healthcare, an industry that exists to care for people? That's what we think about all day. That's our measure of success: how well are we caring for people every day, not how good are our products or how many products can we use on any given day. VICTORIA: Right. So what did you see in the digital health space that led you to believe that something like DiMe needed to exist in the world? JENNIFER: So it's interesting. When we take a step back and think about all the experts that need to be at the table to ensure that we build a field of digital health that is worthy of our trust, in our opinion here at DiMe, we think this is the most interdisciplinary field you can imagine, and that's a bold claim. But let me play it out for you. And maybe we can think about some other interdisciplinary fields during the course of our discussion. For digital medicine to work, we need citizen scientists and cyber security experts. We need physicists, engineers, product folks, data scientists, clinical scientists, clinical care providers, healthcare executives, regulators, payors, investors, funders all to sit at the table together, all to speak a common unifying language, all to have a shared idea of what our North Star is. What are we trying to do here as we digitize healthcare, and what does good look like and for whom as we do it? And so that's the gap that the Digital Medicine Society was introduced to fill. That water cooler, if you like, where the leaders in our field can share their expertise and where we can very intentionally build a much better future for healthcare using the new digital tools in our toolbox. VICTORIA: Interesting. And I like how you pointed out for whom. [laughs] And I see digital equity is a big topic that you're focused on with the organization. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? JENNIFER: I'm happy to, and in our opinion here at DiMe, equity has to be front and center of everything we do. I think too many times we look across and considerations around diversity, equity, and inclusion; they're part of a rubric. They're a vertical. That's not what we think here at DiMe. We have to think about diversity, equity, and inclusion in everything that we do as we work to digitize healthcare. We know that there are pressing, persistent, and absolutely inexcusable inequities that exist across the burden of disease, across access to care, across the quality of care you're able to access, the care that you can afford. We know that all of those things introduce a long-standing history of inequities in health and healthcare. As we digitize the healthcare industry, it's unacceptable for us just to be thinking about, hey, as long as we don't make things worse, that's not acceptable to us. We are thinking at every turn about how can we improve the way that we identify disease, the way that we manage disease, the way we cure disease, the way that we people in a lifetime journey of health and disease? And how can we make sure that we do that for everyone in a way we've never been able to before? So while I could talk about some of the projects that we've done that exclusively focus on advancing health equity through the use of digital tools, it's actually something we keep front and center in everything we do, in everything we talk about here at DiMe and something that we try and compel every single person in the field to think about to make sure that we seize this opportunity. GERONDA: I think that's fantastic. And something that you hit on that it's really important for us at thoughtbot is continuous improvement. And that intentionality is incredibly important when it comes to DEI efforts. And so one thing that we do have at thoughtbot is we have trainings, and we try to work toward a shared language. But we do understand that everyone is at a different point in a different journey towards DEI to be able to build and design the best products and provide businesses to our clientele. So I'd love to hear more about how your organization does consider that continuous improvement for all employees across the organization in of ensuring that you're enforcing shared language across the organization to be able to continue to have really great care for your people. JENNIFER: Geronda, I love this. And I think that you've touched on something that's really important, which is while we can be collectively frustrated, perhaps even angry, about the health inequity that we see on a daily basis and that we frankly have not addressed as an industry for decades and decades...and quite frankly, I think we should be frustrated; we should be angry. Not taking the time to meet people where they are as they make a commitment to deg, developing, and thinking about the business incentives that they need in order to do this work well and to be intentional is actually incredibly counterproductive. So we always start with that shared language. When we talk about inclusion in digital health, we need to not just think about all of the different vectors of inclusion and domains of diversity that we've developed as a healthcare industry, but we need to think about those vectors and domains at the intersection between healthcare and digital. And if we do nothing else beyond educate the field on what those domains and vectors are so they can be intentional, is they think about, gosh, what's the healthcare problem I want to solve for, for whom? How do I need to consider the needs of our intended s as I do that? That in and of itself is going to take us so much further than we are today. But I'd also love to learn from you guys. I love the three-part way you describe your work, that you think about deg, and then developing, and then getting the business of great product development right. How do you guys think about it? I'd love to be able to learn from you too. VICTORIA: One thing I know, speaking specifically to the intentionality that you mentioned, so if you're building an AI product and you're not intentionally thinking about DEI, you can actually build bias and problems into the code itself. So for us, and, Geronda, I want to hear your perspective here too, consulting with experts in the field, especially in DEI early and making a culture where we do have a program manager of DEI. So I've really pinged Geronda several times already this year about, like, I have this question about this. And I think having access to an expert and having access to knowledge that you should go back and check yourself is part of it. But do you have anything you want to add there, Geronda? GERONDA: I definitely agree with everything that you had said, Victoria. And also what I'll add too is that it is really thinking about in everything that we do, how do we bring DEI at the forefront? And recognizing, as I mentioned before, that everyone's in a different place. So it's not to say that if you mess up or if you didn't consider something that, you can't continuously improve. And we have this culture where I'm not going to come in as the DEI police to say, "How come you didn't consider that?" Or "Why didn't you think of that earlier?" It's more to say, "Oh, okay, well, here's how we can approach this differently." And everyone's pretty open to the and the learning. And so one example that I'll give is that our website, thoughtbot.com, we're right now working towards accessibility for our website so that we can offer it more to those with disabilities, or those that are visually impaired, or hard of hearing, and offer it to be more accessible for anyone who goes to our website. And it's a learning curve for quite a few of our folks. But the learning library that's offered in there to say, okay, I may not know everything about how things impact those that may be visually impaired, but let me educate and help to develop this website in a way that's going to them. So to Victoria's point, it's infusing DEI in every way that we can. And what I love as well is that we do have a DEI Council, and we do have a shared platform to bring about issues or have those discussions and ask the questions so that you can continuously improve yourself to make sure that you're developing and infusing DEI across the work that you do. So great question and I really feel like it's, of course, a work in progress. But we're in a really good place where we can continue to have that continuous improvement through education, and learning, and to correct ourselves. VICTORIA: Yeah, I love that. I think that having the culture at least puts you in a good starting place. [laughs] I'd love to hear more about what projects you've worked on in that space, specifically, Jennifer. JENNIFER: So, first of all, I love how you talk about this idea of you need to have a culture in place that allows us to assess opportunities, that allows us to identify the kind of work we need to do based on where we are today. And then once we've assessed those opportunities, once we've identified potential pathways, we actually then have the and the right environment to be able to implement these best practices. And there are two things that I'd love to highlight. The first is actually education resources and specifically education resources on applied digital health ethics. I think creating this culture of ethics which is absolutely inextricable from a culture of equity, is critically important. You need to have those folks on staff just like you guys do. You need to be able to go to potential end s and communities and have line items in your budget to reimburse them for their time and their expertise. You need to be able to have goals and performance metrics that actually reflect the success you're having or where you're struggling when we think about building a more inclusive environment. So that's a lot of what we try and fuel through our applied digital health ethics education. That's something that's a direct-to-learner option for folks; we're very proud of. We've had fantastic reviews and testimonials. We had tremendous faculty help us with that curriculum, and it's been really well received. And we are confident in the change that that education resource is driving in the field. The second is actually a suite of resources that we launched more recently, and this is where I can start to get really tangible. So as an organization, we convened a broad and diverse group of experts to really tackle the issue of diversity, equity, and inclusion in digitized clinical trials. And I use action-oriented words like tackle very intentionally. Unfortunately, what we see an awful lot of the time is people iring the problem, for want of a better expression, that we'll see endless s at conferences and op-eds, and these sorts of things being written about the current state. But what we were determined to do is own the fact that there is nothing technically prohibiting us today from deploying these digital tools and resources in the service of advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion while simultaneously addressing some of the long-standing clinical issues, while simultaneously addressing some of the regulatory science issues, while promoting access, while making sure we generate better data for better clinical decision making. This is not an either-or. This is not a trade-off. We are not limited by the technology; we are powered by the technology. It requires our intent and our commitment to actually doing this work. So I'm going to pause there to see if Geronda or Victoria you have questions on any of that. And then I can certainly go into more detail about those tools if that's interesting. GERONDA: It's super interesting. And I do have a question. But I'll kind of recap and understand that by having those different broadened expertise, you're having multiple people come together with this expertise so that you can ensure you're providing the best data to help you make those equitable decisions. Does that sound about right? JENNIFER: That's exactly right. I think that as fantastic and expert as our team are, we are merely representative of a broader community that is doing this excellent work out every single day, trying to improve the way we care for people, representing different communities, building tools. And unless we bring not only those innovators from different backgrounds to the table but also representatives of the communities we're actually working hard to serve to the table, our efforts will be inadequate. And that's why we're so committed to this multidisciplinary, pre-competitive, and collaborative work as we build our tools and resources here at DiMe. GERONDA: Yeah, and that's amazing. The question that I have for you, the follow-up question to that, is we try to look across...our company is global. We do have employees in many different countries across the globe. So trying to ensure that we have an understanding of the needs on a global scale can sometimes be challenging. Can you speak more to this multidisciplinary broadened expertise and how they might bring in perspective that can help shape your technologies or even clinical trial project in a way that s different ethnicities across the globe and how they identify and even intersectionality of folks as well, so not just race but also LGBTQ or other races as well like socioeconomic status? JENNIFER: It's such a good question, and it's so important. And I think one of the things that I have frankly learned an enormous amount and really taken to heart are these many different domains and these many different vectors of inclusion. Now, first of all, if we start saying, look, we have to consider these 50 (I'm being facetious, intentionally so.) different considerations, then we're going to become so overwhelmed so quickly that we become absolutely ineffectual as we try and think about serving all of these different individuals. But, Geronda, you gave fantastic examples around the hard work that you've been doing even in your own website environment to make sure people who are differently abled...they might have certain vision or hearing impairments or whatever that might look like, and they can access your resources. They can interact with your team just as easily as anyone else. So I'll give you an example of something that had never occurred to me until we actually started working with a member of a community who represented this particular part of the workforce. We were talking about actually how we can use a variety of different tools to monitor respiratory illnesses and diseases. You can think about things like asthma. You can think about things like cough was an important symptom of COVID, for example. How can we use the microphones that you might find in your smartwatch or your smartphone? How might we use these to be able to monitor, predict and track disease? We'd gone through how does different socioeconomic status, how does place, how does race, or ethnicity perhaps play into your access to these different tools, your tech literacy, your trust in these different tools and products? What had not occurred to me at all...and I'm so embarrassed to say this, but you think about you can have a tool where you do all of the work around inclusive design. You can think about all of the different needs to earn the trust of the communities that you're asking to use these tools. But we hadn't contemplated how you might use these tools if someone, for example, worked in a work environment where it was incredibly loud. If you're on a building site, if you're in a warehouse, if you're working on a checkout, it doesn't matter how good the sensor is in your smartwatch that you may have been provided with because that work environment is going to absolutely drown out any signal from that stream of data. And so we need to think about all of the different ways that someone's life, and career, and their background, and social determinants affect our ability to develop and deploy tools that really can help them manage their health, improve their health, have better health outcomes. GERONDA: That's amazing. VICTORIA: That's amazing. And I wonder if you've encountered too an issue with if you're deg these applications...like I know when I was living in Washington, D.C., there were 3,000 people who don't have internet at home, don't have a computer, don't have a phone. So how would your team approach that kind of problem? JENNIFER: [laughs] I think this is the theme of our conversation. VICTORIA: [laughs] JENNIFER: With intentionality, which is, is the goal here simply to provision tools and technologies, or is our goal here to be more thoughtful about the tools that exist, that we can use? Is our goal here to think about digital infrastructure and how we should be thinking about that not just to power healthcare but also perhaps access to education, access to safe and secure bank s, all of these different sorts of things? We cannot assume that every single person has top-of-the-range technology, unlimited data plans; we are foolish to do so. But the first thing we need to do is actually ask and understand what access to technology looks like and not just assume it's an affordability issue. Maybe it's a trust issue. You have to understand the root cause before you can work to solve something. I'd also offer up some other data that I always find compelling and important as we have these conversations. While we know there are large portions of the population who don't have access to what some of us, unfortunately, when we're moving quickly, just assume that everyone has, there are also horribly underrepresented populations, represented populations that do have access to these technologies. Some recent data actually showed that one-third of homeless individuals in California do have a smartphone. Let's actually just pause and think about that for a moment. You can't get access to benefits or brick-and-mortar healthcare because you have to go and fill in all of your information if you don't have a home. But if you have a smartphone, which presumably many of these folks have realized that even at some of the hardest times in their life, they actually need that to stay connected in today's digital economy, that this is actually a way and a vector for us to reach them, for us to capture information and data about what it is they need, not just to improve their healthcare but to get ed into a more safe and sustainable environment with more security where we can actually their health in a much more holistic way. It also can connect them with care, whether that's mental healthcare or whatever their needs are in any given moment, that if we were relying on the traditional brick and mortar system, we'd be unable to capture. So this goes back to two things. First of all, don't assume. Don't assume that people do or don't have technology, and if they don't, don't assume you understand what the root cause actually is. The second point is don't think about these digital tools as limiting factors; think about the ways that we can use them to overcome so many of the challenges that we've faced in the way we care for people for decades and decades. VICTORIA: I love that you bring that point up. I volunteered for many years with an application called HopeOneSource, which is a mobile app for people who are experiencing homelessness to get access to services that they need. And I know it might have changed over time, but it was like 80% of people who are experiencing homelessness do have a cell phone. And partly in the United States, there is a subsidy. If you're under a certain income level, you can get a free cell phone. But it's very easy to have your cell phone stolen or to get lost. And the impermanency of the device is also an issue. So I think it's actually, like you said, you don't want to make assumptions about what people have and what they don't. And you do want to bring the intention and understand what it's really like because that will change how you build in things like security and two-factor authentication and things like that. So... JENNIFER: That's exactly right. And also, what are some of the infrastructure things we can do? You mentioned the subsidies for folks who are low-income. But then we want people to start transmitting confidential and private information about their health in order to access the highest quality care possible. Are we creating environments where there is access to secure connection environment? So they're not using public Wi-Fi where they actually might be more susceptible to harm due to sort of misuse of that data if it falls into the hands of the wrong folks. These are all of the different things we need to be thinking about. That's not to slow us down or to dampen our enthusiasm for the opportunities that digitization provides to improve the way we care for people. But again, it comes back to...I think what's emerging is almost a theme of our discussion, which is the need to be intentional. GERONDA: I love what you said about not making assumptions because I'm a DEI practitioner, but I always tell people I'm not perfect. [laughs] And so my bias comes in sometimes. I sometimes will assume that I might know the answer to something or what somebody may be experiencing because I may be incredibly ionate about the LGBTQ+ community, which I'm a part of. And it's reminding myself that I can't assume or let my own biases or own feelings towards certain things to steer my decision-making. I really have to be super open and objective to what the facts are telling and get those other experiences from other people. So I continuously check my bias, and I continuously try not to make those assumptions which can be hard at times. And while I know everyone at thoughtbot thinks I'm perfect, I'm the best, [laughter] it's just not true. VICTORIA: I think it is true. [laughter] GERONDA: There you go. JENNIFER: Geronda, I so appreciate you sharing that, and I think it probably is giving everyone listening the same experience that I am having right now, which is you owning that and being willing to share that. Immediately cascading through my mind...and now all of the assumptions that I come to the table with, and all of the ways that I think about things and those hot topics that are unique to me and my lived experience, and what I've been exposed to. And on the one hand, we should never dismiss that. On the other hand, the definition of being inclusive is to go out to folks with those different viewpoints. And one of the things I see increasingly featuring in these sorts of domains of diversity is political views. And you think, gosh, how has this even become a thing in the way that we consider caring for people? But it's so divisive. And I come to the table with all of my thoughts about these kinds of things. But what's serving us about our lived experience and about the ions that drive us all to try and create better products and a better and more inclusive future, and what's not? And how can we humbly acknowledge that and really listen and hear what others are telling us? GERONDA: Right. Exactly, exactly. Mid-Roll Ad: When starting a new project, we understand that you want to make the right choices in technology, features, and investment but that you don’t have all year to do extended research. In just a few weeks, thoughtbot’s Discovery Sprints deliver a -centered product journey, a clickable prototype or Proof of Concept, and key market insights from focused research. We’ll help you to identify the primary flow, decide which framework should be used to bring it to life, and set a firm estimate on future development efforts. Maximize impact and minimize risk with a validated roap for your new product. Get started at: tbot.io/sprint. VICTORIA: If I'm a clinical researcher and I'm about to design an experiment, let's say, how can I use the resources at DiMe to help inform my opinion and help bring in that inclusivity, which I want? JENNIFER: So, Victoria, great question. [laughter] I'm teed up to answer this one. So I think the first thing is, and, Geronda, this is something that you mentioned earlier, which is you don't do a 45-minute brainstorm before you get going, check a box, and say you did it. It's a continual process, and it's a process of continual improvement. So when we describe this, we would discuss the entire clinical trials lifecycle. So, first of all, there are DEI considerations, even in the kind of question you want to answer. If you are doing clinical research because you want to develop a new molecule, a new pill, or something, for example, what community will you be serving? What's the problem we're trying to solve for? Are we trying to add a me-too drug to a population that's already well-served? Or are we actually thinking about, gosh, there's this underrepresented population? There's a disease state where we've struggled to break through. We believe that we can deploy these digital tools in order to really effect change here. So it starts as early as what is the problem you're trying to solve for? What is your research question? Then each stage as you think about, gosh, what are the tools that I might want to use in order to answer this question? Who are the people that we could possibly serve through the development of this new drug, for example? Great, then we take seriously our responsibility of making sure that every single individual who participates in our trial reflects and represents that broader population, that we are going to take inclusivity seriously so that when we have an answer to our research question, we know that what we know about the safety of a new drug and what we know about the effectiveness of a new drug applies equally well to every member of the population. At that point, we're asking ourselves questions about as we think about parts of the clinical protocol, so the different steps that we work through in order to safely ister a new therapy that's part of the trial, as we think about capturing the information we need in order to determine whether it's safe and effective, are we setting that up to be as safe as effective for everyone? Are we able to design the trial in such a way that the burden of participation isn't a barrier for certain of the community? If we're picking digital tools to do things like remote patient monitoring...so imagine for anyone who has a smartwatch the green light on the back of your watch that's measuring your heart rate. Unfortunately, some of those products work differently across different skin tones. Have you done the work to make sure that you're selecting a tool that is going to give you equally trustworthy information for every single person? These are all of the things step by step that you should think about as you are developing a clinical trial. We have tool after resource after checklist to help you do this in a really accessible way. We organize them so you can find them really easily based on either what stage am I at and what can I do today to be more diverse, and more equitable, and more inclusive in the way that I'm developing new medicines? We also allow you to find these tools and resources based on a particular digital product. So if, for example, you think that you might be able to use, and we haven't said the words yet, so it's probably time, AI or machine learning to better identify a more diverse patient population that you could enroll into your trial, how are you thinking about catching potential bias that might take your good intentions and actually render them almost useless because you didn't identify bias in the algorithm, for example? So all of those tools and resources, and there are over 60 of them available, are open access. They're free to , use them, interactive checklists, considerations documents, tools, and resources that help you act today as soon as you make a decision about doing clinical research that benefits all people. GERONDA: And it almost sounds like, in a way, that this resource could be helpful for many other industries as well because although it's tied to clinical trials, the considerations and process that you're taking to start to think through those DEI elements that checklist can be helpful across many different disciplines. Would you say that's correct? JENNIFER: I would. Now, Geronda, our superpower, is getting the digitization of healthcare right. And that's a big enough task that while there are other pressing areas, we will not stray into those. But I think you've hit the nail on the head. When we think about getting access to education, for example, or access to safe housing, or any other kinds of benefits, and we can think about how some of these digital tools can overcome many of the different barriers to access that different communities face. Absolutely, all of these different principles can apply. And in fact, we actually think that's really important. We talk a lot about harmonization in the work that we do. There are folks who have product portfolios that span different industries. When we think about really trying to hammer home the need to be intentional, to make sure that as we digitize the healthcare industry, we are bringing everyone with us, we should avoid, wherever possible, having unique or special considerations. Ultimately, these are all the same humans that we serve in other industries. We are trying more than ever to meet people where they are than insisting they come to us or come to the clinic, for example. All of these principles apply equally well. And if we do that harmonization well...and this comes back to the idea of culture that we were talking about. This just gets embedded into the culture of developing products for every single person, regardless of whether that's an educational product, or a healthcare product, or a financial product. We should be thinking about these things regardless of how we're striving to help and people. GERONDA: I love that. VICTORIA: I love that. And I wonder, when you were developing these products for clinicians or for healthcare providers, was there anything surprising in your initial research and discovery when building these things? JENNIFER: Yes. And I would say that technology is no longer the barrier. There is nothing that we need a product to do, whether that's the way we for, right? You're not always going to eliminate it. But the way that we for, for example, bias in the way that we capture and process data, if you acknowledge it, you can do the necessary statistical interpretation. And then you can actually be well-informed in your decision-making. There's nothing either about the data, about the form factors, about battery life, about the performance of these tools that is stopping us from building and deploying solutions that work for everyone starting today, starting immediately. So then, what is the barrier? The barrier is a knowledge gap, a skills gap, an incentives gap. And that's really what we've been hammering to address. And if you do look at our DEI resources, especially for digitized clinical trials, we try and think about all of those gaps and people, whether it's through, here, let us educate you on actually where some of the risks are, some of the new vectors of inclusion or domains of diversity, especially at the intersection of digital and health. Let us you with tools and resources, and guides for how to do this. And then let us give you data and let us give you things like a market opportunity calculator, which is something else that we've created that will actually give you the business case to be more inclusive in the way that you develop digital products for use in clinical trials and the way you deploy them to better research. That's really what we're focused on. And so the surprise almost is that the tech isn't limiting us in any way. The flip side of that being we are not going to tech our way out of this. It comes down to humans and our decisions and how we develop and deploy these tools in the service of better health. VICTORIA: That makes sense to me, and it makes me think about there's like a moral obligation or value that you can apply to DEI, but there's also a financial aspect. [laughs] And if you put a lot of effort into building an app, for example, and don't think about inclusivity, and you get to the end and think, oh, now I have to go back and make it accessible, that can be a lot of rework. It can be a lot of cost, if not even a legal liability and financial liability, I would imagine, in the healthtech sector. JENNIFER: That's exactly right. I couldn't have said any better, Victoria. [laughs] VICTORIA: [laughs] It's like, you are morally and legally obligated in many cases to include people. And it's better to just start from the beginning and start from the beginning and knowing what we're trying to do. JENNIFER: 100%. And I was trying not to pile on because I think the statement just stands alone. We are morally obligated. In some cases, we are legally obligated. There are emerging regulations certainly in the clinical trials environment about having more representative samples in order for you to get regulatory approval, for example. One of those regulations is moving slowly, which is always frustrating and disappointing. But given the moral imperative, given the emerging regulations, given that finally, this is more at the forefront of conversations, you've got to think about the gymnastics that are happening to continue to avoid doing this. And that's a little bit of the pressure that we want to apply. And so when we talk about the fact that there's no technological reason for not doing this, and when we have tried to provide the tools and resources to actually put these tools into practice, the only remaining question is, are you going to do it? And that's a big question. And as a field, we've not been terribly good at leaning into that previously. We'll talk about it all day. We'll ire the problem of inequity all day. We haven't been good enough at acting. And I'm hoping we're at a tipping point. VICTORIA: Great. And it sounds like now with DiMe, there's no excuse. All the information is there for you. [laughter] JENNIFER: That was exactly what we tried to do. That was the challenge that we gave ourselves and this extraordinary team. And the different individuals and organizations that came to the table to do this they set the standard high. And I'm so proud of their sort of possession, of their courage, and their tenacity in saying, "We are going to serve up absolutely everything that's needed. We're going to present it in a way that it's almost impossible not to find what you need for every person who's coming with this question." We set the standard high, and I'm incredibly proud of how well we delivered on that. VICTORIA: What does success look like for DiMe in the next six months or in the next five years? JENNIFER: What is it? Is it a Bill Gates quote? Is it...you sort of overestimate what you can do in 6 months and underestimate what you'll do in 10 years, something along those lines. And the intention is there, though. Anyone who knows me well will probably say I've never underestimated anything in my life. I'm always pushing for the next thing. Let's come back to this notion that the tech is not the limiting factor. And we're facing a really interesting moment in healthcare where the current environment is simply not sustainable. There are not enough clinicians to provide care or conduct research. We've had an expensive healthcare system for a long time. But the prices are not sustainable when you think about how much health insurance is going up relative to inflation, when you think about the out-of-pocket costs that people are facing when you think about the fact that there's not a single healthcare executive who's sleeping well at night because they can't staff their units, and their supply chain costs are incredibly high. And they're worried about the sustainability of their hospital, especially in rural and underserved areas. Business, as usual, is not an option. So in the next six months, I think we're going to keep pushing along. But in that five-year window, I think we are going to see a fundamentally different way that we care for people in the healthcare environment and that we conduct clinical trials. No longer is healthcare going to be built around the clinic. That's not to say they're going to go away. There are, of course, going to be times where you need to see a clinician in person, where you need to have a procedure, where you need to have some lab work or imaging done. But so much of this can be translated into the home, can use tools to extend the knowledge and expertise of clinicians so that we can better care for people, all people, by meeting them where they are. I think we're going to see a fundamentally different kind of healthcare, different kinds of clinical research built around the patient, not the clinic. And part of that is going to be redefining what good healthcare even is. Currently, good healthcare is once you turn up at the clinic already sick, sometimes really sick, facing a catastrophic and likely very expensive outcome, we do our best. That's good healthcare. I really think we're going to drive towards a future where these new flows of data and these new technologies are going to actually allow us to try and mitigate disease earlier, to intervene earlier, to catch all people who are at risk earlier in their health journey. And the great thing about that is it offers the opportunity to define healthcare differently. All of a sudden, good healthcare isn't; how good are we at intervening when you're sick? But how good are we at keeping you well and keeping you out of the healthcare system? I also feel strongly that it is no longer going to be enough to just raise the top end of healthcare and provide the best care to the people who are able to afford it, that we are going to start to embed metrics around equity into our evaluation of good healthcare. And the sooner we do that, the better because every time we look at those numbers now, they are astonishingly bad. VICTORIA: Yeah. And it's making me think about, you know, in five years, if we continue with the trend of global warming, they're also predicting more pandemics, more disease. And it seems like we are going to have to reimagine how we do healthcare because the current path isn't sustainable. JENNIFER: Exactly right. Exactly right. And the sad thing about all of this is that the burden of things like climate change, the burden of pandemics falls on those communities and those individuals who have been underrepresented and underserved in healthcare for the longest. It increases the burden of disease and health stress on folks who have consistently carried the highest burden of disease, been part of the highest risk categories. Not only do we have to get better at delivering care to all people reducing the burden of disease, we have to do it where actually those challenges through all of those external pressures, Victoria, are going to be becoming worse. VICTORIA: And it reminds me of another term I've heard for underrepresented, which is historically excluded, which I think really applies here. So that's fascinating. JENNIFER: Because it is what it is. VICTORIA: Yeah, right? Like, that's what it is. So I think it's wonderful that's what you're working on. And let's see if you could go back in time to when you first started DiMe Society; what advice would you give yourself now that it's been three years and you've come a long way? JENNIFER: [laughs] Sleep more. [laughter] I don't know, when I look in the mirror these days, there's an old lady that I'm sure wasn't there at the beginning of all this. But I think that's not the spirit of the question you were asking, Victoria. I wish we'd been bolder sooner. And we've never shied away from tackling the hardest problems. We started with this bold mission and vision. People would ask us when we launched DiMe, you know, "Gosh, are you really focused across individual health promotion, across healthcare delivery, across public health, and across clinical research?" And we said, "Absolutely," because if we don't tackle it all together, we're simply going to create new silos in the digital era. And we're never going to move towards this reimagined healthcare system, a new healthcare system, one that cares for everyone and where access to research is even harder than access to care. With these new flows of data in the digital era, we want to do it together. So it's not that we weren't bold, but the way now we make strong statements that we've always believed and that we've always been proud of around the imperative to be inclusive around the demand for high-quality evidence to drive trust around the fact that none of this is a tech issue. It's a human issue. I wish we had gone there sooner. I think it is serving us well. I think that the professionals that we work with across industry respond to it. They want to be part of this journey. They want to build a better healthcare system. And so, while we've always been, I think, bold and courageous in the vision that we've held and the work we've done, giving voice to it in a way that really reflects our vision and our ion has been so well received by our community. And they have stepped up to do this work incredibly well. I just wish we'd gone there sooner. That's the only thing I would have done differently. VICTORIA: I think that's great advice, especially for founders who are starting out in a space like this, to really stand by their convictions and be bold about it. [chuckles] Like, this is what you believe in, and other people will connect to it if it's right, so I love that. And we're getting towards the end of our time here too. So I want to make sure I can it to Geronda if you have any other final questions for our guest here today. GERONDA: More a comment in that I think that learning more about your organization and perusing some of the tools that you offer and the checklist that you offer...and it's such great work. And in some ways...and I'm trying to get the best way to say this. But in some ways, it's so clear of, like, this is what you can consider. This is what you should do. Although the work is not easy to do, it's really a helpful guideline for how you can start to think differently. I really appreciate the thoughtfulness that was put into a lot of these resources that you're giving out and just where you are in your trajectory as well because DEI work is not easy work. And you sometimes...it can impact you emotionally. It can impact you mentally sometimes. But when you're continuing to go after what you know is needed and the intentionality of things, it really is super helpful. So although I said I didn't have a question, and I just had a comment, I lied. I do have a question. [laughter] My question to you is, in doing a lot of this work, ensuring that DEI is infused in healthtech, all the work that you do and that your team does, how do you just navigate and manage your well-being, your mental health, your emotional health as you continue to do all this work? JENNIFER: It's such a great question. And when you said, Geronda, that this can sometimes be really emotional, I heard a statistic actually from a colleague of mine, Ricki Fairley, who's the CEO of Touch, Breast Cancer, and she was telling me that cancer affecting women under 35, Black women under 35 are diagnosed with cancer at a rate twice that of White women and die at a rate three times higher than White women. And, I mean, you hear that statistic, and it just takes the wind out of you. And it would be really easy to hide from that because it's hard to hear, sometimes too hard. The way that we handle sort of all of this as a team is we square up to these data, and then we celebrate one another. We celebrate our community when we are able to make positive change, even if it's incremental change. Even if sometimes you have those moments where you really move the needle, you have those other days or those other initiatives where you feel like you're crawling on your hands and knees to gain inches. But to celebrate that every moment and to remind ourselves the work is returning value to those people that we all get up every morning to try and serve, that it might be hard, but we're making progress. And that is, I think, the way that, as a team, we stay positive, we stay productive, and that we're able to balance, frankly, the exposure to the reality of some of these issues. GERONDA: I think that's great, having a community even within the workplace. It's so crucial because you spend most of your time at work, as we all know. [laughs] And there's a lot that just goes on across the world all the time, and being able to just talk it out. We have employee resource groups for people to come together with common identities and just talk through things that are impacting them. And so I really think that's great that you're able to just be honest with how you're feeling but also celebrating those important positive moments because sometimes we can focus a lot on the negative. So I really love that you bring the positive aspects of that as well. VICTORIA: Yes, thank you for sharing, and it comes back to the intention. Like, we're all on the same page. We all have this intention of solving this problem. So we're in it together in a way. So, Jennifer, are there any final thoughts or takeaways you want to leave our listeners with today? JENNIFER: No, this was a fantastic conversation. I think we've drawn out this theme of intentionality that will serve all of us very well. Geronda, I love the final question about how do we keep our own sort of emotional state and mental health solid as we do this hard work? It's the perfect note to end on. So Victoria, Geronda, thank you so much for having me on. This has been just a wonderful conversation. I've really enjoyed it. VICTORIA: Wonderful. Thank you so much for ing and spending time with us today. JENNIFER: Yes, I very much appreciate it. This was an awesome conversation. VICTORIA: All right. And you can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, you can email us at [email protected]. And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thank you for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Special Guest: Jennifer Goldsack. Sponsored By: thoughtbot: When starting a new project, we understand that you want to make the right choices in technology, features, and investment, but that you don’t have all year to do extended research. In just a few weeks, thoughtbot’s Discovery Sprints deliver a -centered product journey, a clickable prototype or Proof of Concept, and key market insights from focused research. We’ll help you to identify the primary flow, decide which framework should be used to bring it to life, and set a firm estimate on future development efforts. Maximize impact and minimize risk with a validated roap for your new product. Get started at: tbot.io/sprint Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots