Podcast appearances and mentions of chad pytel

Chad and Sami get creative as they discuss the product ideas they would potentially like to develop. Sami lays out his plan to rejuvenate the queuing system at theme parks, Chad has a bone to pick with his CRM tool, and the pair breakdown why success for a new business is not always as black and white as it might seem. — You can find Chad all over social media as @cpytel and Sami through his website (https://samibirnbaum.com). You can also connect with them both over on their LinkedIn pages - Chad (https://www.linkedin.com/in/cpytel/) - Sami (https://www.linkedin.com/in/samibirnbaum/). If you would like to support the show, head over to our GitHub page (https://github.com/sponsors/thoughtbot), or check out our website (https://podcast.thoughtbot.com). Got a question or comment about the show? Why not write to our hosts: hosts@giantrobots.fm This has been a thoughtbot (https://thoughtbot.com/) podcast. Stay up to date by following us on social media - LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/) - Mastodon (https://thoughtbot.social/@thoughtbot) - YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/thoughtbotvideo) - Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/thoughtbot.com) © 2025 thoughtbot, inc.

Chad and Luisa Herrmann, founder of AINovva (https://ainovva.com/), sit down and attempt to demystify the “magic” of AI. Luisa lays out the ramifications of working with AI on a daily basis, why it's a tool that shouldn't be utilised just because you can, the bias built into every AI system, as well as the ever expanding AI bubble and what the final outcome of its rapid growth could look like down the road. — If you're interested in using AI for your project but not sure if it's the right fit or where to start, consider getting in touch with Luisa to discuss your needs either through her website (https://www.luisaherrmann.com/home), connecting on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/luisahr/), or directly via email - luisa@ainovva.com Your host for this episode has been Chad Pytel. You can find Chad all over social media as @cpytel, or over on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/cpytel/). If you would like to support the show, head over to our GitHub page (https://github.com/sponsors/thoughtbot), or check out our website (https://podcast.thoughtbot.com). Got a question or comment about the show? Why not write to our hosts: hosts@giantrobots.fm This has been a thoughtbot (https://thoughtbot.com/) podcast. Stay up to date by following us on social media - LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/) - Mastodon (https://thoughtbot.social/@thoughtbot) - YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/thoughtbotvideo) - Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/thoughtbot.com) © 2025 thoughtbot, inc.

Chad catches up with John Nunemaker, self-employed programer on a plethora of products, about all things technical to gain insight into life as a self-employed developer. The pair share their experiences as rail devs and what keeps them using Ruby, John's journey to success, his recent acquisition of Fireside (the podcast platform that hosts this very podcast!) and the lessons he learnt along the way. — If you're interested in any of the projects John mentioned in this episode, you can head to them directly here - Fireside Podcast Hosting (https://fireside.fm) - BoxOut (https://boxoutsports.com) - Flipper (https://www.flippercloud.io) Alternatively you can keep up to date with the work that John does through his website (https://www.johnnunemaker.com), podcast (https://standinginthefire.fireside.fm), or by connecting directly with him through LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jnunemaker/). Your host for this episode has been Chad Pytel. You can find Chad all over social media as @cpytel, or over on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/cpytel/). If you would like to support the show, head over to our GitHub page (https://github.com/sponsors/thoughtbot), or check out our website (https://podcast.thoughtbot.com). Got a question or comment about the show? Why not write to our hosts: hosts@giantrobots.fm This has been a thoughtbot (https://thoughtbot.com/) podcast. Stay up to date by following us on social media - LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/) - Mastodon (https://thoughtbot.social/@thoughtbot) - YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/thoughtbotvideo) - Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/thoughtbot.com) © 2025 thoughtbot, inc.

The Giant Robots hosts are back together for more off the wall discussion about construction, movies and a special announcement! Find out what big purchase Sami made through the company during the last UK heatwave, why Chad has a listing on IMDB, and our three hosts turn film critics as they share thoughts on their favourite films. — If you haven't already, be sure to check out thoughtbot's YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@thoughtbot)! You can find Chad all over social media as @cpytel and Sami through his website (https://samibirnbaum.com). You can also connect with the trio via their LinkedIn pages - Chad (https://www.linkedin.com/in/cpytel/) - Will (https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-larry/) - Sami (https://www.linkedin.com/in/samibirnbaum/). If you would like to support the show, head over to our GitHub page (https://github.com/sponsors/thoughtbot), or check out our website (https://podcast.thoughtbot.com). Got a question or comment about the show? Why not write to our hosts: hosts@giantrobots.fm This has been a thoughtbot (https://thoughtbot.com/) podcast. Stay up to date by following us on social media - LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/) - Mastodon (https://thoughtbot.social/@thoughtbot) - Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/thoughtbot.com) © 2025 thoughtbot, inc.

Chad talks with Sarah Merlin of IndiMade (https://www.indimadebrands.com) about what goes into revitalising an e-commerce platform and how they're staying true to their customers. Discover the challenges involved with such a big migration and the efforts needed to bring it into the modern day, the importance of communication with your team at all times, as well as well as the core values they work to in order to deliver the best possible experience across their business. — If you would like to work with IndiMade (https://www.indimadebrands.com) and think your product might be be a good fit, reach out to Sarah via linkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahmerlin/) or thorough IndiMade's website (https://www.indimadebrands.com). Your host for this episode has been Chad Pytel. You can find Chad all over social media as @cpytel, or over on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/cpytel/). If you would like to support the show, head over to our GitHub page (https://github.com/sponsors/thoughtbot), or check out our website (https://podcast.thoughtbot.com). Got a question or comment about the show? Why not write to our hosts: hosts@giantrobots.fm This has been a thoughtbot (https://thoughtbot.com/) podcast. Stay up to date by following us on social media - LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/) - Mastodon (https://thoughtbot.social/@thoughtbot) - Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/thoughtbot.com) © 2025 thoughtbot, inc.

Chad, Will and Sami discuss life outside of thoughtbot and the hobbies that occupy them in their down time. Sami talks about taking the cold plunge, Will about his recent efforts with running, before Chad takes his co-hosts down the rabbit hole that is Dungeons and Dragons. — Watch the trailer for Chad's upcoming production Thresher (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQs51JGy0iQ), a collaboration between his production company 12 Sided Studios and Critical Role! Check Out Sami's Running Shoes (https://runrepeat.com/guides/best-carbon-plate-running-shoes) You can find Chad all over social media as @cpytel and Sami through his website. You can also connect with the trio via their LinkedIn pages - Chad (https://www.linkedin.com/in/cpytel/) - Will (https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-larry/) - Sami (https://www.linkedin.com/in/samibirnbaum/). If you would like to support the show, head over to our GitHub page (https://github.com/sponsors/thoughtbot), or check out our website (https://podcast.thoughtbot.com). Got a question or comment about the show? Why not write to our hosts: hosts@giantrobots.fm This has been a thoughtbot (https://thoughtbot.com/) podcast. Stay up to date by following us on social media - LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/) - Mastodon (https://thoughtbot.social/@thoughtbot) - BlueSky (https://bsky.app/profile/thoughtbot.com) © 2025 thoughtbot, inc.

Chad talks with Karen King, Found of Gold Star Pro (https://www.usegoldstar.com), and her drive to help small business owners reach their full potential. Karen talks about the all-inclusive space Gold Star Pro offers for solopreneurs, the automation behind it all, as well as balancing a life of world travel with running a successful business. — Want to take a step up in your small business and ditch plethora of different platforms you use? See what Gold Star Pro can offer you (https://www.usegoldstar.com). Still not sure, try out their 5 day challenge (https://fivedaystosimplify.com) to see how you could benefit! If you'd like to chat with Karen further about Gold Star Pro, you can connect with her on LinkedIn. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/karen-e-king/). Your host for this episode has been Chad Pytel. You can find Chad all over social media as @cpytel, or over on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/cpytel/). If you would like to support the show, head over to our GitHub page (https://github.com/sponsors/thoughtbot), or check out our website (https://podcast.thoughtbot.com). Got a question or comment about the show? Why not write to our hosts: hosts@giantrobots.fm This has been a thoughtbot (https://thoughtbot.com/) podcast. Stay up to date by following us on social media - LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/) - Mastodon (https://thoughtbot.social/@thoughtbot) - Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/thoughtbot.com) © 2025 thoughtbot, inc.

Chad talks with Andrei Oprisan, head of engineering at Agent.AI (https://Agent.AI), about his new approach to making AI tools and agents accessible to everyone. Hear how the community are helping to shape and build on Agent.AI in ways the team never thought of, the road blocks of developing such an accessible market place, and the desire to make every AI agent as easy to use for as many people as possible. — Explore Agent.AI's (https://Agent.AI) catalogue of tools to see if it can help enhance your workflow for free! If you find the resource useful, consider joining the AI builders community (https://community.agent.ai) and get even more involved with AI tools! You can email Andrei at andrei@mail.agent.ai, or connect with him via LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreioprisan/) If you would like to support the show, head over to our GitHub page (https://github.com/sponsors/thoughtbot), or check out our website (https://podcast.thoughtbot.com). Got a question or comment about the show? Why not write to our hosts: hosts@giantrobots.fm This has been a thoughtbot (https://thoughtbot.com/) podcast. Stay up to date by following us on social media - LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/) - Mastodon (https://thoughtbot.social/@thoughtbot) - Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/thoughtbot/) © 2025 thoughtbot, inc.

Chad talks with fellow thoughtboters Dawn Delatte and Elaina Natario about the evolution of design sprints within the company. Listen to how design sprints helped shape and streamline the discovery stage of work with clients, how it helps route out what should and shouldn't be done in a project, as well as the way thoughtbot has tweaked the formula over the years to build their own playbook. — Check out thoughtbot's Design Sprint Guide! (https://design.thoughtbot.com/sprint-guide/) Read through thoughtbot's AI ethics guide (https://thoughtbot.com/playbook/our-company/ai-ethics) and ask yourself thoughtbot's six key questions when working with AI. You can find both Dawn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/dawndelatte/) and Elaina (https://www.linkedin.com/in/elainanatario/) on LinkedIn, or through their respective thoughtbot blogs - Dawn's Blog (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/authors/dawn-delatte) - Elaina's Blog (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/authors/elaina-natario) Your host for this episode has been Chad Pytel. You can find Chad all over social media as @cpytel, or over on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/cpytel/). If you would like to support the show, head over to our GitHub page (https://github.com/sponsors/thoughtbot), or check out our website (https://podcast.thoughtbot.com). Got a question or comment about the show? Why not write to our hosts: hosts@giantrobots.fm This has been a thoughtbot (https://thoughtbot.com/) podcast. Stay up to date by following us on social media - LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/) - Mastodon (https://thoughtbot.social/@thoughtbot) - Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/thoughtbot/) © 2025 thoughtbot, inc.

thoughtbot hosts Chad, Will and Sami shoot the breeze in this laid back episode of Giant Robots as they discuss the ins and outs of being a parent and growing up with tech. The trio discuss how they manage screen-time with their kids as well as themselves, Sami's internal HTTP coding for his children's temper tantrums, and other challenges of bringing up their kids in the digital age. — Listen to the ‘Therapy Through Gaming' episode (https://podcast.thoughtbot.com/538) for a deeper dive into some of the topics mentioned in today's episode. Your hosts for this episode have been Chad Pytel, Will Larry and Sami Birnbaum. You can find Chad all over social media as @cpytel and Sami through his website. You can also connect with the trio via their LinkedIn pages - Chad (https://www.linkedin.com/in/cpytel/) - Will (https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-larry/) - Sami (https://www.linkedin.com/in/samibirnbaum/). If you would like to support the show, head over to our GitHub page (https://github.com/sponsors/thoughtbot), or check out our website (https://podcast.thoughtbot.com). Got a question or comment about the show? Why not write to our hosts: hosts@giantrobots.fm This has been a thoughtbot (https://thoughtbot.com/) podcast. Stay up to date by following us on social media - LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/) - Mastodon (https://thoughtbot.social/@thoughtbot) - Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/thoughtbot/) © 2025 thoughtbot, inc.

Chad is joined by Matt Gale, Chief Strategy Officer for Lawfully (https://www.lawfully.com/), as they talk about the immigration process in the US and how Lawfully is helping both individuals and businesses track applications on the road to becoming US citizens. Matt explains the challenges of having an app that sees users leave once their the immigration application is complete, how they've expanded to help more than just the individual, and why they chose to make Lawfully a benefit corporation. — If you have an active immigration case that you are tracking or are an attorney acting on behalf of other, consider checking out Lawfully and their app! (https://www.lawfully.com/) If you'd like to connect with Matt directly, you can find him over on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewrichardgale/). Your host for this episode has been Chad Pytel. You can find Chad all over social media as @cpytel, or over on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/cpytel/). If you would like to support the show, head over to our GitHub page (https://github.com/sponsors/thoughtbot), or check out our website (https://podcast.thoughtbot.com). Got a question or comment about the show? Why not write to our hosts: hosts@giantrobots.fm This has been a thoughtbot (https://thoughtbot.com/) podcast. Stay up to date by following us on social media - LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/) - Mastodon (https://thoughtbot.social/@thoughtbot) - Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/thoughtbot/) © 2025 thoughtbot, inc.

Chad talks with NYC local Vikram Oberoi about how he used AI to breakdown local city meetings into accessible bitesize chunks. Learn how Vikram tamed New York's public records with AI, the lengthy review process involved to make it all and why his model is so well suited to NYC council proceedings in particular. Vikram also discusses the project's path to sustainability and the difficulties of expanding his passion project further afield. — If you're a NY resident wanting to learn more about your local community, or just curious about the inner workings of one the largest cities in the US, you can find Vikram's work on citymeetings.nyc here (https://citymeetings.nyc/)! To learn more about Vikram and his work, check out his website! (https://vikramoberoi.com/) Or, if you're interested in helping expand citymeetings.nyc and support this project well into the future you can get in touch with Vikram via LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/voberoi/), or email him directly: vikram@citymeetings.nyc Your host for this episode has been Chad Pytel. You can find Chad all over social media as @cpytel, or over on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/cpytel/). If you would like to support the show, head over to our GitHub page (https://github.com/sponsors/thoughtbot), or check out our website (https://podcast.thoughtbot.com). Got a question or comment about the show? Why not write to our hosts: hosts@giantrobots.fm This has been a thoughtbot (https://thoughtbot.com/) podcast. Stay up to date by following us on social media - LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/) - Mastodon (https://thoughtbot.social/@thoughtbot) - Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/thoughtbot/) © 2025 thoughtbot, inc.

Chad talks with Eben Pingree and Mike Gerbush, Co-Founders of Kinsome (https://kinsome.com/), about the struggles of family connection in the modern world and how they're bringing generations together again. They discuss the importance of having a close family unit, the difficulties families often face with having relatives being spread out state to state, and how Kinsome works to facilitate daily connections between loved ones no matter how far apart they may be. Learn about they technology behind the idea, the lessons they learned from similar projects in the past and the challenges they face now with such a narrow target market. — Head to Kinsome's website (https://kinsome.com/) to find out how they can help you reconnect with your family today. If you're curious about what Kinsome has to offer but not an iOS user, consider registering your interest to be one of the first to use the app for Android! Alternatively if you'd liked to reach out and ask a question or put yourself forward to help with Kinsome's development, you can connect with Eben (https://www.linkedin.com/in/eben-pingree-1711647/) and Mike (https://www.linkedin.com/in/msgerbush/) over on LinkedIn, or email them directly - mike@kinsome.com Your host for this episode has been Chad Pytel. You can find Chad all over social media as @cpytel, or over on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/cpytel/). If you would like to support the show, head over to our GitHub page (https://github.com/sponsors/thoughtbot), or check out our website (https://podcast.thoughtbot.com). Got a question or comment about the show? Why not write to our hosts: hosts@giantrobots.fm This has been a thoughtbot (https://thoughtbot.com/) podcast. Stay up to date by following us on social media - LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/) - Mastodon (https://thoughtbot.social/@thoughtbot) - Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/thoughtbot/) © 2025 thoughtbot, inc.

Chad is joined for a special interview by Keira Czarnota, founder of Emagineer (https://emagineer.world/), as they talk all about their recent collaboration on a new AI powered LEGO® app. Listen to Keira's incredible journey, the challenges they faced with early AI models, why LEGO® was so keen to support their project and how thoughtbot (https://thoughtbot.com/) was brought in to help. This episode is a unique crossover event between AI in Focus and Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots. It originally live-streamed over on thoughtbot's YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/live/d3mukuhpGMU?feature=shared) and features some hands on demos with the new app not heard in the audio version. Find out more about Emagineer (https://emagineer.world/)'s upcoming app over on their website, and if you feel you're suited to helping Keira and the team with their work at Emagineer you can connect with him over on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/keira-czarnota/?originalSubdomain=au). — Want to try out Emagineer's new LEGO® app for yourself? Sign up for the beta program here! (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScUm65nFWDRfZZ4twy18Lnlg0Dcks4h4m8YdkO5gxc2tnl5JA/viewform) Your host for this episode has been Chad Pytel. You can find Chad all over social media as @cpytel, or over on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/cpytel/). If you would like to support the show, head over to our GitHub page (https://github.com/sponsors/thoughtbot), or check out our website (https://podcast.thoughtbot.com). Got a question or comment about the show? Why not write to our hosts: hosts@giantrobots.fm This has been a thoughtbot (https://thoughtbot.com/) podcast. Stay up to date by following us on social media - LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/) - Mastodon (https://thoughtbot.social/@thoughtbot) - Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/thoughtbot/)

Luká Yancopoulos, Co-Founder and CEO of Grapevine (https://www.go-grapevine.com/), reveals to Chad how he and his team are working to revolutionise the hospital supply chain system. Luká discusses the difficulties of building such a service and the pushback they've received by entering such a large and established sector that's so resistant to change. Learn how Luká's concern for his mom's health at work during the pandemic lead to the unexpected launch of Grapevine, the difficulties of trying to scale up such a service nationwide, and the extreme lengths companies will go to stop you from shopping around. Head over to Grapevine's website (https://www.go-grapevine.com/) to find out how you can make your healthcare more affordable. If you're interested in working with Luká, you can connect with him via LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/luká-yancopoulos-50051a1a8/). -- Your host for this episode has been Chad Pytel. You can find Chad all over social media as @cpytel, or over on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/cpytel/). If you would like to support the show, head over to our GitHub page (https://github.com/sponsors/thoughtbot), or check out our website (https://podcast.thoughtbot.com). Got a question or comment about the show? Why not write to our hosts: hosts@giantrobots.fm This has been a thoughtbot (https://thoughtbot.com/) podcast. Stay up to date by following us on social media - LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/) - Mastodon (https://thoughtbot.social/@thoughtbot) - Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/thoughtbot/) © 2024 thoughtbot, inc.

After 10 years and 550 episodes of Giant Robots, Chad and Sami are ready to discuss what's next for the podcast. The pair dive into some podcast role-play as they test out some ideas for iterating the show's formula. Peek behind the curtain as they discuss the inner workings of the show, the challenges of working on a mature codebase, how thoughtbot tackles impostor syndrome when onboarding new employees and the developing accessibility of AI. — Your hosts for this episode have been Chad Pytel and Sami Birnbaum. You can find Chad all over social media as @cpytel, or over on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/cpytel/). Sami can be found through his website (https://samibirnbaum.com) or via LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/samibirnbaum/). — If you would like to support the show, head over to our GitHub page (https://github.com/sponsors/thoughtbot), or check out our website (https://podcast.thoughtbot.com). Got a question or comment about the show? Why not write to our hosts: hosts@giantrobots.fm This has been a thoughtbot (https://thoughtbot.com/) podcast. Stay up to date by following us on social media - LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/) - Mastodon (https://thoughtbot.social/@thoughtbot) - Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/thoughtbot/) © 2024 thoughtbot, inc.

Chad talks with Aakash Shah, Founder and CEO of Wyndly (https://www.wyndly.com/), about how he built a new online telehealth experience to expand convenient access to allergy immunotherapy. The pair discuss the mechanics of building an online healthcare operation from scratch, the challenges that arise as you begin to scale your business, and how Aakash utilised his past experience as a software engineer to support his new venture. Discover why this area of medicine has been overlooked for so long, how COVID has shifted our view on healthcare as a whole, as well as the odd rules and quirks of the FDA when trying to market a new medical service. To find out more about Aakash's work with Wyndly you can connect with him on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mraakashshah/) or send him an email: aakash@wyndly.com If you're interested in receiving treatment for persistent allergies, you can book a consultation through Wyndly's website (https://www.wyndly.com/). — Your host for this episode has been Chad Pytel. You can find Chad over on Mastodon (https://thoughtbot.social/@cpytel), or connect with via LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/cpytel/). If you would like to support the show, head over to our GitHub page (https://github.com/sponsors/thoughtbot), or check out our website (https://podcast.thoughtbot.com). Got a question or comment about the show? Why not write to our hosts: hosts@giantrobots.fm This has been a thoughtbot (https://thoughtbot.com/) podcast. Stay up to date by following us on social media - LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/) - Mastodon (https://thoughtbot.social/@thoughtbot) - Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/thoughtbot/) © 2024 thoughtbot, inc.

If system design is a team sport, then you need to make sure that your team has the tools they need to work together. In this episode, entrepreneur, CTO, and co-founder Tom Johnson joins us to discuss Multiplayer, a collaborative tool streamlining system design and documentation for developers. Multiplayer is often likened to “Figma for developers,” as it allows teams to map, document, and debug distributed systems visually and collaboratively. Tom shares his experience building this tool, drawing on years of backend development challenges, from debugging to coordinating across teams. We also discuss the business side of startups before learning about the AI features that they have planned for Multiplayer and how it will benefit users, including eliminating time-consuming “grunt work”. Join us to learn how Multiplayer is revolutionizing system design and get a sneak peek into the exciting AI-powered features on the horizon! Key Points From This Episode: Introducing Tom Johnson, co-founder of Multiplayer. An overview of Multiplayer and how it helps developers work on distributed systems. The teams and developers that will get the most use out of Multiplayer. Details on Multiplayer's debugging and auto-documentation tools. A breakdown of what distributed systems are in modern software development. Why Tom sees contemporary systems design as a team sport. Multiplier's whiteboard-type space and how it allows teams to collaborate. Tom's back-end developer experience and how it helped him create Multiplayer. How Tom co-founded Multiplayer with his wife, Steph Johnson, and her role as CEO. Why solving a problem you've personally experienced is a good starting point for startups. What you need to have before fundraising: a minimum viable product (MVP). How they used the open-source software, YJS, for virtual, real-time collaboration. Insights into Multiplayer's upcoming AI-powered features. Links Mentioned in Today's Episode: 
Thomas Johnson on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomjohnson3/) Thomas Johnson on X (https://x.com/tomjohnson3) Thomas Johnson on Threads (https://www.threads.net/@tomjohnson3?hl=en)
 Steph Johnson on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/steph-johnson-14355b3/)
 Multiplayer (https://www.multiplayer.app/)
 YJS (https://github.com/yjs/yjs)
 Figma (https://www.figma.com/) Chad Pytel on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/cpytel/) Chad Pytel on X (https://x.com/cpytel) thoughtbot (https://thoughtbot.com) thoughtbot on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/) thoughtbot on X (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast (https://podcast.thoughtbot.com/) Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Email (hosts@giantrobots.fm) Support Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots (https://github.com/sponsors/thoughtbot)

What if booking a private chef was as easy as ordering an Uber? Iyabo Bello is a serial founder and entrepreneur, best known for iKooK, an app connecting private chefs to their target audience. Join us as she shares the unlikely story of how she came up with the idea to start iKooK after working in fashion design and food science. We get into the weeds with the premise of the app, how it differs from other home chef experiences, and how the cooks are vetted before being allowed to register on the app. Iyabo shares her experience of navigating a double-sided marketplace and discusses the process of building an app and driving traffic toward it instead of her website. We discuss bootstrapping and outsourcing to create a user-friendly, effective app, and handling health and safety as a food service. Join us as we discuss the challenges and benefits of building iKooK, and what you can learn from her journey. Thanks for tuning in. Key Points From This Episode: Welcoming Iyabo Bello, founder of iKooK, and the story of the inception of her business. Her background in fashion design and food science. The premise of iKooK and how it differs from other home chef experiences. How the process behind vetting chefs has evolved. Navigating a double-sided marketplace. The challenge of finding the right chef with an eye for detail. Taking down the website to encourage users to book on the app. Bootstrapping and outsourcing to build the app. Handling health and safety and building it into the program. The inclusive and flexible nature of Iyabo's product. Challenges she has faced while building the app. How Jared and Sami would go about assessing the app and user experience. Links Mentioned in Today's Episode: 
Iyabo Bello on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/iyabobello/)
 iKooK Email (info@ikook.co.uk)
 iKooK (https://ikook.info/) Sami Birnbaum on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/samibirnbaum/?originalSubdomain=uk)
 Jared Turner on X (https://x.com/jaredlt) 
 Jared Turner on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaredlt/) thoughtbot (https://thoughtbot.com) thoughtbot on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/) thoughtbot on X (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast (https://podcast.thoughtbot.com/) Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Email (hosts@giantrobots.fm) Support Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots (https://github.com/sponsors/thoughtbot)

How do you build a tool that redefines the real estate game for agents and brokers? Today on the show, host Chad Pytel sits down with Chris Fellows, founder and CEO of Bold Street, to explore how his AI-powered platform is reshaping residential investment for real estate professionals. Originally focused on data analytics for big investors, Bold Street pivoted after the Great Recession to meet the needs of agents and brokers. Chris shares how the platform, developed over 18 months, helps agents master investor math and market analysis, boosting efficiency. The conversation dives into current market dynamics, like the rising costs of leads from platforms such as Zillow, which make Bold Street's value proposition increasingly vital. Chris also expands on the company's latest round of fundraising before sharing key lessons on scaling a startup in real estate. For these insights and more, don't miss this fascinating conversation with Chris Fellows!

 Key Points From This Episode: A warm welcome to today's guest, Chris Fellows, founder and CEO of Bold Street. Founding Bold Street: their initial AI strategy and how it has shifted. How their software helps agents and brokers be more efficient. Key takeaways from bringing their first product to market. Reflections on what could have helped the development process go more quickly. Chris and his team's approach to sales and their general pricing model. A breakdown of their ideal customer and how they are reaching them. What they've done to address their ideal customers' biggest objections. Unpacking current market dynamics, from expensive leads to class action lawsuits. How Bold Street brings value to the current real estate market. The benefits and challenges of running a business in such a disrupted market. Reflections on their current fundraising efforts versus their previous round. Lessons on scaling a startup both locally and through internet marketing. Links Mentioned in Today's Episode: Chris Fellows on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/chriscfellows/)
 Chris Fellows' email (chris@boldstreet.ai) Bold Street (https://www.boldstreet.ai/) Chad Pytel on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/cpytel/) Chad Pytel on X (https://x.com/cpytel) thoughtbot (https://thoughtbot.com) thoughtbot on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/) thoughtbot on X (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast (https://podcast.thoughtbot.com/) Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Email (hosts@giantrobots.fm) Support Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots (https://github.com/sponsors/thoughtbot)

What if, instead of asking how to integrate AI into your product, the question was, should you? During this episode, Jared Turner and Will Larry interview Senior Product Manager at thoughtbot and Founderland Startup Mentor, Bethan Ashley, who shares her insights and advice on how and when to leverage AI tooling. Sharing her career journey leading up to this point, Bethan makes the key distinction between project management and product management, and why this is essential to understand. Next, you'll hear about her views on the importance of talking to customers about your products and the different ways to reach them effectively. We get into some of the classic reasons that products fail, the appropriate time to bring in a product manager, and a few of the techniques, prompts, and exercises that Bethan favors when mentoring others. Join us as we unpack how to avoid common pitfalls, discuss practical steps to overcome the fear of failure, and share advice for those seeking to put AI tooling into their product. Thanks for tuning in. Key Points From This Episode: From building bespoke apps for companies to product management, mentorship, and more: Bethan Ashley's career journey. Distinguishing between project management and product management. Why talking to your customers is fundamental to successful products. Some of the many different ways to reach customers. Classic reasons that products fail. How to identify the point at which a product manager has become a necessity. Bethan's path to mentorship through Founderland. The Speedy Eights exercise that she uses to prompt ideas. Advice to avoid common pitfalls: just get started. Exploring the obstacle created by the fear of failure. Strategies from the book The Mom Test. Insights on AI in the day-to-day product management space. Advice for those seeking to put AI tooling into their product. Spicy takes on product management. Links Mentioned in Today's Episode: Bethan Ashley on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/bethanashley/) Founderland (https://www.founderland.org/) Customer Discovery Playbook (https://thoughtbot.com/playbook/customer-discovery/preparation-and-setup) The Mom Test (https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone/dp/1492180742) Gamma (https://gamma.app/)
 Gemini (https://gemini.google.com/) Loom (https://www.loom.com/) Figma (https://www.figma.com/) Motion (https://www.usemotion.com/) WIP is waste (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/wip-is-waste#) Jared Turner on X (https://x.com/jaredlt) Jared Turner on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaredlt/) Will Larry on X (https://x.com/will23larry) Will Larry on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-larry/) thoughtbot (https://thoughtbot.com) thoughtbot on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/) thoughtbot on X (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast (https://podcast.thoughtbot.com/) Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Email (hosts@giantrobots.fm) Support Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots (https://github.com/sponsors/thoughtbot)

Could our inability to agree be holding us back from achieving meaningful social progress? What if AI could help us "fight better,” not by winning arguments but by resolving conflicts in ways that benefit our communities, businesses, and relationships? Flank's innovative technology offers just that: a smarter, more empathetic approach to conflict resolution that could transform how we engage with one another. Today, we're joined by Flank founder, CJ Tayeh, a human rights lawyer turned growth marketer turned social innovator. With a mission to address inequalities and power imbalances, especially around money, she explains how Flank's AI companion acts as a mediator to foster trust and communication. We explore the different user experiences Flank serves, the careful research and development that went into its creation, and how joining Flank's community can revolutionize conflict resolution. CJ also shares the challenges the startup faces, the role of interaction design in addressing them, and why high-quality data is crucial for effective AI-driven solutions. Don't miss this fascinating conversation with serial innovator, CJ Tayeh! Key Points From This Episode: An overview of CJ's journey into the emerging AI startup space. How growing up in a high-conflict family has informed her work as a social innovator. The problem Flank is focused on and how it aims to solve that problem with AI. Perspectives on conflict resolution and the impact of joining Flank's community. How Flank's AI companion acts as a mediator to foster communication and trust. Different kinds of user experiences that Flank aims to cater to. The amount of time, effort, and care that went into research and development. Challenges that Flank faces and how interaction design can address them. Why machine learning models are only as good as the data you train them with. Links Mentioned in Today's Episode: Flank (https://flankdigital.org/) CJ Tayeh on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/cj-tayeh/) CJ Tayeh on X (https://x.com/oheycj) Will Larry on X (https://x.com/will23larry) Will Larry on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-larry/) Victoria Guido on X (https://x.com/victori_ousg) Victoria Guido on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/victorialguido/) Victoria Guido Email (thoughtbot.social@vguido) thoughtbot (https://thoughtbot.com) thoughtbot on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/) thoughtbot on X (https://x.com/thoughtbot) Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast (https://podcast.thoughtbot.com/) Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Email (hosts@giantrobots.fm) Support Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots (https://github.com/sponsors/thoughtbot)

What happens when competition goes from being a driver of success to a source of division and exclusion? In today's episode, Chad is joined by Dr. Justin Key, Founder of Black Theorem Consulting, to unpack societal divisions driven by social and economic status. Dr. Key is an accomplished consultant, speaker, and thought leader with expertise in helping organizations achieve growth and innovation through data-driven strategies. He is the founder of Black Theorem Consulting, a firm specializing in harnessing the power of diversity and technology to solve complex business challenges. In our conversation, we unpack today's topic through the lens of the products and services developers bring to market. We discuss the hyper-competitive nature of society, the impacts of toxic competition, real-world examples of rigid and fluid drivers of division, and why we should not be afraid to discuss race. Explore how digital products and services can drive change on a global scale, how designers and developers can be a part of that change, and why developers need to check their biases when building digital technology. He shares his motivation for starting Black Theorem Consulting, what the company focuses on, and how it is helping drive change. He also shares how he stays motivated, the types of industries Black Theorem Consulting serves, and how you can contribute to a better world. Join us as we untangle systemic societal problems and how to reflect the world you serve in your product or service with Dr. Justin Key! Key Points From This Episode: Learn how social and economic status divides society and creates division. Discover how the impacts of exclusion compound into larger societal problems. Find out the difference between healthy and unhealthy competition. Uncover the common misconceptions about power and wealth in society. Hear how societal divisions have played a role in the decline of mental health. Explore how the societal structure of America compares to other countries. Find out why race cannot be ignored when discussing social divisions. Understand the significance of considering race in discussions about social division. Positive ways digital products and services can bridge the gap and drive change. Ways technology creates obstacles between different socio-economic groups. Steps developers can take to ensure that technology is inclusive and accessible. Background about Black Theorem Consulting and the services it provides. How inclusion and equity apply to developers and the development process. Final takeaways and how to find out more about Black Theorem and Dr. Key. Links Mentioned in Today's Episode: Dr. Justin Key (https://www.justindkey.com/) Dr. Justin Key on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/justindkey/) Dr. Justin Key on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/@JustinKey) Black Theorem Consulting (https://www.blacktheorem.com/) Gracie's Corner (www.youtube.com/@graciescorner) Chad Pytel on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/cpytel/) Chad Pytel on Mastodon (https://thoughtbot.social/@cpytel) Will Larry on X (https://x.com/will23larry) Will Larry on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-larry/) Victoria Guido on X (https://x.com/victori_ousg) Victoria Guido on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/victorialguido/) Victoria Guido Email (thoughtbot.social@vguido) thoughtbot (https://thoughtbot.com) thoughtbot on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/) thoughtbot on X (https://x.com/thoughtbot) Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast (https://podcast.thoughtbot.com/) Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Email (hosts@giantrobots.fm) Support Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots (https://github.com/sponsors/thoughtbot)

Since its inception in 2017, Sema has been improving outcomes for users, companies, and developers by providing automated tools to assess code. During this episode, we are joined by Sema Founder and CEO, Matt Van Itallie. Matt discusses five reasons why you should know how much generative AI is used in your code, from the capacity to increase the quantity, quality, and maintainability to intellectual property risk. These also include exit risks. Next, we explore how this is detected, how it can be solved, and the advantages of looking at code. Next, we explore the origins of Sema and how Matt sourced his co-founders, consider his thoughts on open source, and why it matters to know how much generative AI is used in your code. Hear advice on where to begin, how much to prioritize precision, and why it is imperative to make generative AI your own. Tune in today to hear all this and more. Key Points From This Episode: Introducing Sema CEO and Founder Matt Van Itallie. How the work is distributed among different target customers: companies, financial and strategic buyers. Why Sema is language agnostic and what it does instead. Matt's belief that the fundamental health of a software product depends on the team. Understanding key person risk and the concept of golden handcuffs. How Matt's background set him up to easily understand the world of coding. Why the combination of manual implementation and automation via Sema is most effective. The process behind turning the idea into a product with the University of Michigan and a Founder from AngelList. Why he does not recommend using his approach. The single biggest focus: code inspection and due diligence. Using open source code and the risks involved. Five sets of reasons why it matters to know how much generative AI is used in your code. How this is detected and how it can be solved. Advice on where to begin, how precise to be, and more. Leveraging the expertise of Co-Founder Brendan Cody-Kenny to build Sema. Why it is imperative to make generative AI your own. Free advisory AI counsels that Matt and Sema have set up. 
 Links Mentioned in Today's Episode: Matt Van Itallie on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mvi/) Matt Van Itallie on X (https://x.com/vanitallie_matt) Matt Van Itallie Email (mvi@sema.com) Sema (https://semasoftware.com/ai-code-monitor) University of Michigan (https://umich.edu/) AngelList (https://www.angellist.com/) CoPilot (https://copilot.microsoft.com/) Chad Pytel on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/cpytel/) Will Larry on X (https://x.com/will23larry) Will Larry on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-larry/) Victoria Guido on X (https://x.com/victori_ousg) Victoria Guido on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/victorialguido/) Victoria Guido Email (thoughtbot.social@vguido) thoughtbot (https://thoughtbot.com) thoughtbot on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/) thoughtbot on X (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast (https://podcast.thoughtbot.com/) Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Email (hosts@giantrobots.fm) Support Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots (https://github.com/sponsors/thoughtbot)

What if diagnosing complex joint disorders could be as precise and personalized as a fingerprint? Today, Will sits down with Nazgol Tavabi and Mohammadreza Movahhedi to discuss their journey of transforming cutting-edge research into a revolutionary AI-powered platform for diagnosing joint disorders. Nazgol and Mohammadreza are the co-founders of BonePixel, a healthcare startup focused on using AI and big data for the diagnosis and treatment planning of joint disorders. In our conversation, we unpack the origins of BonePixel, the challenges of building a healthcare startup, and how they are leveraging AI to make patient-specific treatment planning more accurate and efficient. Explore how its data-driven process facilitates decision-making for surgeons, how they were able to commercialize the software, and the positive impact it is making on patients' lives. They share details about BonePixel's current state of development, the regulatory hurdles, and their surgeon-centric approach to software development. We discuss the complexities of securing funding and their approach to fostering a healthy company culture. Gain insights into how they make their software inclusive, the ethical aspects of BonePixels development, why human involvement is crucial, and more. Join us to learn how BonePixel is transforming orthopedic care and pushing the boundaries of what's possible with AI with Nazgol Tavabi and Mohammadreza Movahhedi! Key Points From This Episode: Background about the development of BonePixel's innovative software. Learn about BonePixel and how it leverages data to improve decision-making. Hear about BonePixel's research origins at Harvard Medical School. How Harvard Medical School is facilitating the commercialization of BonePixel. Uncover the role that machine learning and AI play in BonePixel's software. Find out how their collaborators have acted as data sources for their models. They share details about upcoming features and software additions. Discover the core values of BonePixel that are driving its development. What got them interested in applying their research skills in healthcare. Explore the ethical considerations that need to be taken into account. Why human involvement during BonePixels implementation is vital. Hear their opinion on regulating the development of AI-based technologies. Lessons from their careers, final takeaways, and how to get in contact with them. Links Mentioned in Today's Episode: BonePixel (https://www.bonepixel.com/) Nazgol Tavabi on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nazgoltavabi/) Mohammadreza Movahhedi on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mohammadreza-movahhedi-phd-5aa652145/) Harvard Medical School (https://hms.harvard.edu/) Boston Children's Hospital (https://www.childrenshospital.org/) VirtualHip (https://virtualhip.childrenshospital.org/) Will Larry on X (https://x.com/will23larry) Will Larry on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-larry/) thoughtbot (https://thoughtbot.com) thoughtbot on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/) thoughtbot on X (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast (https://podcast.thoughtbot.com/) Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Email (mailto:hosts@giantrobots.fm) Support Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots (https://github.com/sponsors/thoughtbot)

Is it time to rethink how we approach hiring? The traditional recruitment process often fails to capture the true potential of candidates, relying heavily on outdated methods like résumés and generic job descriptions. In this episode, Will sits down with Brian Glover, Co-founder and CEO of Previewed, to unpack the revolutionary interplay between technology and the recruitment sector. Previewed aims to revolutionize how job seekers connect with potential employers by allowing them to showcase their skills and experiences in a more personalized and impactful way. It leverages cutting-edge technology to create a platform that helps candidates stand out in a competitive job market, ensuring that everyone has a fair shot at landing their dream job. In our conversation, we discuss how the Previewed platform creates an immersive, streamlined, and intelligent solution for recruiters and candidates. Learn about the innovative technology behind Previewed's platform and how it is revolutionizing the traditional recruitment landscape. Discover the inspiration behind Previewed, its approach to career life-cycle, and how it empowers the candidate. We unpack the company's skill-based assessment method, the ‘gamification' of recruitment tools, how Previewed's platform helps with retention, identifying gaps in a candidate's skills, and much more. Join us as we explore where AI meets talent acquisition and how it turns purpose into a career with Brian Glover. Tune in now! Key Points From This Episode: How he uses prayer and meditation to keep him grounded as an entrepreneur. Overcoming the mental hurdles of being a founder and business owner. Previewed's platform and how it leverages AI to enhance the recruitment process. Issues in the traditional job search and hiring process that Previewed solves. Discover why aligning a candidate's job description with their purpose is so vital. Reasons for Previewed's skill-based method and how it assesses candidates. The benefits of Previewed's skill-based approach for candidates and recruiters. Brian shares how his hustler background growing up led him to become an entrepreneur. Hear about Previewed's roots and the many challenges he overcame starting it. Recommendations for budding entrepreneurs and what Brian is currently focusing on. Links Mentioned in Today's Episode: Brian Glover on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-glover-startupfounder/) Previewed (https://www.previewed.careers) Will Larry on X (https://x.com/will23larry) Will Larry on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-larry/) Victoria Guido on X (https://x.com/victori_ousg) Victoria Guido on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/victorialguido/) thoughtbot (https://thoughtbot.com) thoughtbot on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/) thoughtbot on X (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast (https://podcast.thoughtbot.com/) Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Email (hosts@giantrobots.fm) Support Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots (https://github.com/sponsors/thoughtbot)

Company culture plays a fundamental role in the success of your organization. Unfortunately, it's not always clear what methods will lead to optimal outcomes. Top research shows an alarming gap between a company's stated culture and what employees report about their experience working there. But what if one could harness the power of AI to close this gap? Today on the show, we're joined by Elie Rashbass, CEO & Co-founder at ScultureAI, a startup developing innovative solutions that shape organizational culture from the ground up. He tells us about the groundbreaking work being done by ScultureAI and how they are leveraging AI to coach everyday interactions between internal staff members and external stakeholders. We discuss the endless interactions that shape company culture, why it matters, and how Elie and his team are helping companies use AI to embed their culture into actualized, organization-wide behavior. To learn more about how AI is used to transform company culture, tune in today!
 Key Points From This Episode: How Elie's corporate background instilled an appreciation for good company culture. Co-founding ScultureAI with his father and what led them into the AI startup space. His father's experience fostering strong company cultures and his extensive AI research. The significant gap between what companies say their culture is and what it actually is. Why company culture matters, from employee well-being to organizational success. What to consider when selecting and defining your company values. Common challenges organizations face when implementing company culture. How ScultureAI is helping companies embed company culture from the ground up. Their groundbreaking AI-powered behavioral coach and examples of its workflow integration. Key challenges they've encountered working with LLMs and how they've addressed these. What you can expect from the ScultureAI demo and how to get in touch. An overview of hiring as a potential use case for their behavioral AI coach. How ScultureAI prioritizes and safeguards user data and privacy. Overcoming challenges as innovators in the space and advice to other leaders. Links Mentioned in Today's Episode: Elie Rashbass on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/elie-rashbass-cfa-b78631132/) ScultureAI (https://sculture.ai/) Donald Sull (https://mitsloan.mit.edu/faculty/directory/donald-sull) Sami Birnbaum (https://samibirnbaum.com) Sami Birnbaum on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/samibirnbaum/) Svenja Schäfer (svenjaschaefer.com) Svenja Schäfer on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/svenjaschaefer/) Will Larry on X (https://x.com/will23larry) Will Larry on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-larry/) Victoria Guido on X (https://x.com/victori_ousg) Victoria Guido on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/victorialguido/) thoughtbot (https://thoughtbot.com) thoughtbot on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/) thoughtbot on X (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast (https://podcast.thoughtbot.com/) Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Email (hosts@giantrobots.fm) Support Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots (https://github.com/sponsors/thoughtbot)

In this episode of Giant Robots Smashing into Other Giant Robots (On Tour!), hosts Sami Birnbaum and Svenja Schäfer are joined by Karishma Gupta, the Founder and CEO of Eslando Circular Fashion. Eslando is a fashion company dedicated to changing the clothing industry through circular economy principles and textile recycling. Its mission is to simplify recycling and ensure compliance with EU regulations by connecting brands, consumers, and recyclers, fostering transparency and efficiency in the fashion industry. In today's conversation, Karishma delves into her company's innovative Digital Product Passport and how it's revolutionizing the fashion and textile industries. We discuss how her company helps the right material get to the right recycler using data and leveraging AI to map the process. Tune in to explore how the circular economy applies to the fashion industry, the current recycling gaps, what motivates fashion brands to be more sustainable, and how Eslando is reducing the carbon footprint of the textile supply chain! Key Points From This Episode: Background on Karishma and what led her to start a tech company. How recycling in fashion differs from other industries that recycle. An outline of the biggest recycling hurdles facing the fashion industry. The complex range of materials in clothes and the problems they create. Karishma's transition from the fashion industry to founding a tech-based company. Some of the materials in clothes that are endlessly recyclable. Details about the Digital Product Passport and what it offers the supply chain. Benefits and costs of sustainable regulations and solutions for fashion brands. Ways that Eslando is monetizing its various solutions. The value proposition the Digital Product Passport offers consumers. How long it took to create and build a workable prototype. What Karishma has planned for the future of Eslando Circular Fashion. Links Mentioned in Today's Episode: Karishma Gupta on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/karishma248/) Karishma Gupta on X (https://x.com/_karishmagupta) Eslando Circular Fashion (https://www.eslando.com) Innovate UK (https://www.ukri.org/councils/innovate-uk/) Carbon13 (https://carbonthirteen.com) Sami Birnbaum (https://samibirnbaum.com) Sami Birnbaum on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/samibirnbaum/) Svenja Schäfer (svenjaschaefer.com) Svenja Schäfer on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/svenjaschaefer/) Will Larry on X (https://x.com/will23larry) Will Larry on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-larry/) Victoria Guido on X (https://x.com/victori_ousg) Victoria Guido on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/victorialguido/) thoughtbot (https://thoughtbot.com) thoughtbot on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/) thoughtbot on X (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast (https://podcast.thoughtbot.com/) Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Email (hosts@giantrobots.fm) Support Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots (https://github.com/sponsors/thoughtbot)

By addressing the way that families hire, manage, and pay in-home care professionals, Clara Home Care is reimagining the way that home care is delivered in America, and Jon Levinson is at the helm. He joins us today to share his personal experiences with in-home care that led him to research the industry, identify the challenges, and co-found Clara. Hear how Jon was able to draw on his background in product management for TripAdvisor and Uber to pioneer his company, what it was like to develop early iterations of the product, and how all this resulted in creating the first-ever caregiver-specific payroll platform. We touch on finding the appropriate market, creating foundational code, and the importance of setting best practices to support scaling and changing. Jon also describes the critical role of thoughtbot in setting Clara Home Care up for scaling success. To finish, Jon shares some of the exciting opportunities that exist in the realm of care management, and how Clara is already taking advantage of them. Thanks for listening! Key Points From This Episode: Introducing Jon Levinson, Co-Founder and CEO at Clara Home Care. The role of thoughtbot in bringing Clara to life. A personal experience that led Jon to pioneer Clara Home Care. Results of researching the specific problems faced in the broader industry. His background in product management at TripAdvisor, Uber, and more. The engineer who became his technical co-founder. Fundraising choices and investment during his early journey. Three consumer problems that care agencies do not adequately address. Why using an agency is still beneficial in comparison to hiring independently. Developing the first version of the product. Identifying the opportunity to pioneer the first caregiver-specific payroll platform. The challenge of finding people seeking a caregiving product. Setting foundational code structured to scale and the role of Thoughtbot in this process. Reaching a critical mass by building a strong grounding through relationships. Balancing building the marketplace, solving discovery, and investing in caregiving technology. Flexible metrics for success in a given marketplace. Why caregivers still favor agencies over independent work. Understanding how emotionally taxing the caregiver coordination role can be. Features that support the relationship with long-term care insurance providers and care management. Links Mentioned in Today's Episode: Jon Levinson on X (https://x.com/levinsonjon) Jon Levinson on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonlevinson1/) Jon Levinson Email (jon@clarahomecare.com) Clara Home Care (https://www.clarahomecare.com/) Clara Home Care on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/HomeCareNearMe/) Clara Home Care on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/clarahomecare/) Thoughtbot (https://thoughtbot.com/) Will Larry on X (https://x.com/will23larry) Will Larry on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-larry/) Victoria Guido on X (https://x.com/victori_ousg) Victoria Guido on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/victorialguido/) thoughtbot (https://thoughtbot.com) thoughtbot on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/) thoughtbot on X (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast (https://podcast.thoughtbot.com/) Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Email (hosts@giantrobots.fm) Support Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots (https://github.com/sponsors/thoughtbot)

Hosts Will Larry and Chad Pytel interview Brock Dubbels, Principal UX and AI Researcher at CareTrainer.ai. Brock discusses how CareTrainer.ai leverages AI to address the current care crisis in elderly populations. He highlights the growing demographic of individuals over 70 and the significant shortage of caregivers, exacerbated by COVID-19. CareTrainer.ai aims to alleviate this by automating routine tasks, allowing caregivers to focus on building meaningful relationships and providing personalized, compassionate care. The platform utilizes AI to manage tasks such as documentation, communication, and monitoring, which helps caregivers spend more time engaging with patients, ultimately enhancing the quality of care and reducing caregiver burnout. Brock elaborates on the specific tasks that CareTrainer.ai automates, using an example from his own experience. He explains how AI can transform transactional interactions into conversational ones, fostering trust and authenticity between caregivers and patients. By automating repetitive tasks, caregivers are freed to engage more deeply with patients, encouraging them to participate in their own care. This not only improves patient outcomes but also increases job satisfaction and retention among caregivers. Brock mentions the alarming attrition rates in caregiving jobs and how CareTrainer.ai's approach can help mitigate this by creating more rewarding and relational caregiving roles. Additionally, Brock discusses the apprenticeship model CareTrainer.ai employs to train caregivers. This model allows new caregivers to learn on the job with AI assistance, accelerating their training and integrating them more quickly into the workforce. He emphasizes the importance of designing AI tools that are user-friendly and enhance the caregiving experience rather than replace human interaction, and by focusing on customer obsession and continuously iterating based on feedback, CareTrainer.ai aims to create AI solutions that are not only effective but also enrich the entire caregiving profession. CareTrainer.ai (https://www.caretrainer.ai/) Follow CareTrainer.ai on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/caretraining-ai/). Follow Brock Dubbels on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/brockdubbels/). Visit his website: brockdubbels.com (https://brockdubbels.com/). Follow thoughtbot on X (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). 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. CHAD: And I'm your other host, Chad Pytel. And with us today is Brock Dubbels, Principal UX and AI Researcher at CareTrainer.ai, which is transforming health care and caregiving with a human-first approach to artificial intelligence. Brock, thank you for joining us. BROCK: Hey, thanks for having me, guys. I'm excited to talk about this. CHAD: Brock, let's get started with just diving into what CareTrainer.ai actually does. You know, so many businesses today are getting started with or incorporating artificial intelligence into their product offerings. And I know that it's been something that you've been working on for a long time. So, what is CareTrainer? BROCK: Well, CareTrainer is an opportunity in the midst of a crisis. So, right now, we have what's called a care crisis for the elderly populations. If you were to look at the age of the North American population and look at it over the next 10 years, about 65% of our population will be over the age of 70. And right now, we are understaffed in caregiving by almost 20%. Caregivers, especially after COVID, are leaving at about a 40% clip. And enrollment in these care programs is down 9%, but yet that older population is growing. And in the midst of this, we've just recently had an executive order called the Older Americans Act, which states that we actually have to reduce the ratio of caregivers to patients, and we need to give more humane interaction to the patients in these facilities, in homes and help them to retain their dignity. Many of them lose their identity to diagnosis, and they're often referred to as the tasks associated with them. And what CareTrainer attempts to do is take many of the tasks out of the hands of the caregivers so that they can focus on what they're good at, which is building relationships, learning and understanding, acting with curiosity and compassion, and demonstrating expert knowledge in the service to caring for patients, either in homes, facilities or even post-acute care. WILL: You mentioned your hope is to take some of the tasks away from the caregivers. Can you go a little bit deeper into that? What tasks are you referring to? BROCK: Let's think about an example. My mom was a public health nurse, and she worked in child maternal health. And these were oftentimes reluctant counseling sessions between she and a young mother or a potential mother. And if she were sitting there with a clipboard or behind a computer screen and looking at the screen, or the clipboard, and doing the interview with questions, she would probably not get a very good interview because she's not making a relationship. It's not conversational; it's transactional. And when we have these transactional relationships, oftentimes, we're not building trust. We're not expressing authenticity. We're not building relationships. It's not conversational. And we don't get to know the person, and they don't trust us. So, when we have these transactional relationships, we don't actually build the loyalty or the motivation. And when we can free people of the tasks associated with the people that they care for by automating those tasks, we can free them up to build relationships, to build trust, and, in many cases, become more playful, expose their own vulnerability, their own past, their own history, and, hopefully, help these patients feel a little bit more of their worth. Many of these people worked meaningful lives as school teachers, working at the fire department, working at the hardware store. And they had a lot of friends, and they did a lot for their community. And now they're in a place where maybe there's somebody taking care of them that doesn't know anything about them, and they just become a person in a chair that, you know, needs to be fed at noon. And I think that's very sad. So, what we help to do is generate the conversations people like to have, learn the stories. But more importantly, we do what's called restorative care, which is, when we have a patient who becomes much more invested in their own self-care, the caregiver can actually be more autonomous. So, let's say it's an elderly person, and, in the past, they wouldn't dress themselves. But because they've been able to build trust in a relationship, they're actually putting on their own blouse and slacks now. For example, a certified nursing assistant or a home health aide can actually make the bed while they're up dressing because the home health aide or certified nursing assistant is not dressing them or is not putting the toothpaste on the toothbrush. So, what we're doing is we're saying, "Let's get you involved in helping with restorative care." And this also increases retention amongst the caregivers. One of the things that I learned in doing an ethnography of a five-state regional healthcare system was that these caregivers there was an attrition rate of about 45% of these workers within the first 30 days of work. So, it's a huge expense for the facility, that attrition rate. One of the reasons why they said they were leaving is because they felt like they weren't building any relationships with the people that they were caring for, and it was more like a task than it was a care or a relationship. And, in fact, in many cases, they described it as maid service with bedpans for grumpy people [chuckles]. And many of them said, "I know there's somebody nice down there, but I think that they've just become a little bit hesitant to engage because of the huge number of people that come through this job, and the lack of continuity, the lack of relationship, the lack of understanding that comes from building a relationship and getting to know each other." And when we're talking about taking the tasks away, we're helping with communication. We're actually helping with diagnosis and charting. We're helping with keeping the care plan updated and having more data for the care plan so that nurse practitioners and MDs can have a much more robust set of data to make decisions upon when they meet with this patient. And this actually reduces the cost for the care facilities because there's less catastrophic care in the form of emergency rooms, prescriptions, assisted care, as well as they actually retain their help. The caregivers stay there because it's a good quality of life. And when those other costs go down, some of the institutions that I work for actually put that money back into more patient care, hiring more people to have more meaningful, humane interactions. And that's what I mean about taking the tasks off of the caregiver so that they can have the conversations and the relational interactions, rather than the transactional interactions. CHAD: One thing I've heard from past guests and clients that we've had in this space, too, is, to speak more to the problem, the lack of staff and the decline in the quality of care and feeling like it's very impersonal causes families to take on that burden or family members to take on that burden, but they're not necessarily equipped to do it. And it sort of causes this downward spiral of stress and quality of care that impacts much bigger than just the individual person who needs the care. It often impacts entire families. BROCK: Oh yeah. Currently, they're estimating that family, friends, and communities are providing between $90 and $260,000 worth of care per person per year. And this is leading to, you know, major financial investments that many of these people don't have. It leads to negative health outcomes. So, in a lot of ways, what I just described is providing caregiver respite, and that is providing time for a caregiver to actually engage with a person that they're caring for, teaching them communication skills. And one of the big things here is many of these institutions and families are having a hard time finding caregivers. Part of that is because we're using old systems of education in new days that require new approaches to the problem. And the key thing that CareTrainer does is it provides a guided apprenticeship, which means that you can earn while you learn. And what I mean by that is, rather than sitting in a chair in front of a screen doing computer-based training off of a modified PowerPoint with multiple-choice tests, you can actually be in the context of care and earning while you learn rather than learning to earn. CHAD: Well, at thoughtbot, we're a big believer in apprenticeships as a really solid way of learning quickly from an experienced mentor in a structured way. I was excited to hear about the apprenticeship model that you have. BROCK: Well, it's really exciting, isn't it? I mean, when you begin looking at what AI can do as...let's call it a copilot. I thought some of the numbers that Ethan Mollick at Wharton Business School shared on his blog and his study with Boston Consulting Group, which is that an AI copilot can actually raise the quality of work, raise the floor to 82%, what he calls mediocrity. 82% was a pretty good grade for a lot of kids in my classes back when I was a Montessori teacher. But, in this case, what it does is it raises the floor to care by guiding through apprenticeship, and it allows people to learn through observation and trial and error. And people who are already at that 82nd percentile, according to Mollick's numbers, increase their productivity by 40%. The thing that we're not clear on is if certain people have a greater natural proficiency or proclivity for using these care pilots or if it's a learned behavior. CHAD: So, the impact that CareTrainer can have is huge. The surface area of the problem and the size of the industry is huge. But often, from a product perspective, what we're trying to do is get to market, figure out the smallest addressable, minimum viable product. Was that a challenge for you to figure out, okay, what's the first thing that we do, and how do we bring that to market and without getting overwhelmed with all the potential possibilities that you have? BROCK: Yeah, of course. I start out with what I call a GRITS model. I start out with, what are my goals? Then R, let's review the market. How is this problem being addressed now? I, what are my ideas for addressing these goals, and what's currently being done? And T, what tasks need to be completed in order to test these ideas? And what steps will I take to test them and iterate as far as a roadmap? And what that allowed me to do is to begin saying, okay, let's take the ideas that I can bring together first that are going to have the first initial impact because we're bootstrapping. And what we need to be able to do is get into a room with somebody who realizes that training caregivers and nursing is something that needs a review, maybe some fresh ideas. And getting that in front of them, understanding that that's our MVP 1 was really important. And what was really interesting is our MVP 2 through 5, we've begun to see that the technology is just exponential, the growth and progress. Our MVP 2 we thought we're going to be doing a heck of a lot of stuff with multimedia reinforcement learning. But now we're finding that some of the AI giants have actually done the work for us. So, I have just been very happy that we started out simple. And we looked at what is our core problem, which is, you know, what's the best way to train people? And how do we do that with the least amount of effort and the most amount of impact? And the key to it is customer obsession. And this is something I learned at Amazon as their first principle. And many of the experiences that I brought from places like Amazon and other big tech is, how do I understand the needs of the customer? What problems do they have, and what would make this a more playful experience? And, in this case, I wanted to design for curiosity. And the thing that I like to say about that is AI chose its symbol of the spark really smartly. And I think the spark is what people want in life. And the spark is exploring, and it's finding something. And you see this kind of spark of life, this learning, and you discover it. You create more from it. You share it. It's enlightening. It's inspirational. It makes people excited. It's something that they want to share. It's inventing. It's creation. I think that's what we wanted to have people experience in our learning, rather than my own experience in computer-based training, which was sitting in front of a flashified PowerPoint with multiple choice questions and having the text read to me. And, you know, spending 40 hours doing that was kind of soul-killing. And what I really wanted to do was be engaged and start learning through experience. And that's what came down to our MVP 1 is, how do we begin to change the way that training occurs? How can we change the student experience and still provide for the institutional needs to get people on the floor and caring for people? And that was our first priority. And that's how we began to make hard decisions about how we were going to develop from MVP 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 because we had all the big ideas immediately. And part of that is because I had created a package like this back in 2004 for a five-state regional care provider in the Midwest. Back then, I was designing what could only be called a finite game. I'm designing in Flash for web. I'm doing decision trees with dialogue, and it's much like a video game, but a serious game. It's getting the assessment correct in the interactions and embedding the learning in the interaction and then being able to judge that and provide useful feedback for the player. And what this did was it made it possible for them to have interactive learning through doing in the form of a video game, which was a little bit more fun than studying a textbook or taking a computer-based test. It also allowed the health system a little bit more focus on the patients because what was happening is that they would be taking their best people off the floor and taking a partial schedule to train these new people. But 45% of those that they were training were leaving within the first 30 days. So, the game was actually an approach to providing that interaction as a guided apprenticeship without taking their best people off the floor into part-time schedules and the idea that they might not even be there in 30 days. So, that's kind of a lot to describe, but I would say that the focus on the MVP 1 was, this is the problem that we're going to help you with. We're going to get people out of the seats and onto the floor, off the screen, caring for people. And we're going to guide them through this guided apprenticeship, which allows for contextual computing and interaction, as we've worked with comparing across, like, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, Grok, trying these different approaches to AI, figuring out which models work best within this context. And, hopefully, when we walk in and we're sitting with an exec, we get a "Wow," [laughs]. And that's the big thing with our initial technology. We really want a wow. I shared this with a former instructor at the University of Minnesota, Joe Gaugler, and I said...I showed him, and he's like, "Wow, why isn't anybody doing this with nursing and such?" And I said, "Well, we are," you know, that's what I was hoping he would say. And that's the thing that we want to see when we walk into somebody's office, and we show them, and they say, "Wow, this is cool." "Wow, we think it's cool. And we hope you're going to want to go on this journey with us." And that's what MVP 1 should do for us is solve what seems like a little problem, which is a finite game-type technology, but turn it into an infinite game technology, which is what's possible with AI and machine learning. WILL: I love, you know, you're talking about your background, being a teacher, and in gaming, and I can see that in your product, which is awesome. Because training can be boring, especially if it's just reading or any of those things. But when you make it real life, when you put someone, I guess that's where the quote comes from, you put them in the game, it's so much better. So, for you, with your teacher background and your gaming background, was there a personal experience that you had that brought out your passion for caregiving? BROCK: You know, my mom is a nurse. She has always been into personal development. By the time I was in sixth grade, I was going to CPR classes with her while she was [inaudible 19:22] her nursing thing [laughs]. So, I was invited to propose a solution for the first version of CareTrainer, which had a different name back in 2004, which we sold. That led to an invitation to work and support the virtual clinic for the University of Minnesota Medical School, which is no longer a thing. The virtual clinic that is the medical school is still one of the best in the country, a virtual stethoscope writing grants as an academic for elder care. And I would have to say my personal story is that at the end of their lives, I took care of both my maternal grandmother in her home while I was going to college. And then, I took care of my paternal grandfather while I was going to college. And, you know, those experiences were profound for me because I was able to sit down and have coffee with them, tell jokes, learn about their lives. I saw the stories that went with the pictures. And I think one of the greatest fears that I saw in many of the potential customers that I've spoken to is at the end of a loved one's life that they didn't learn some of the things that they had hoped from them. And they didn't have the stories that went with all the pictures in the box, and that's just an opportunity missed. So, I think those are some of the things that drive me. It's just that connection to people. And I think that's what makes us humane is that compassion, that wanting to understand, and, also, I think a desire to have compassion and to be understood. And I think that's where gaming and play are really important because making mistakes is part of play. And you can make lots of mistakes and have lots of ways to solve a problem in a game. Whereas in computer-based training and standardized tests, which I used to address as a teacher, there's typically one right answer, and, in life, there is rarely a right answer [laughs]. CHAD: Well, and not really an opportunity to learn from mistakes either. Like, you don't necessarily get an opportunity on a standardized test to review the answers you got wrong in any meaningful way and try to learn from that experience. BROCK: Have you ever taken one of those tests and you're like, well, that's kind of right, but I think my answer is better, but it's not here [laughter]? I think what we really want from schools is creativity and innovation. And when we're showing kids that there's just a right answer, we kind of take the steam out of their engine, which is, you know, well, what if I just explore this and make mistakes? And I remember, in high school, I had an art teacher who said, "Explore your mistakes." Maybe you'll find out that their best is intentional. Maybe it's a feature, not a bug [laughs]. I think when I say inculcate play or inspire play, there's a feeling of psychological safety that we can be vulnerable, that we can explore, we can discover; we can create, and we can share. And when people say, "Oh, well, that's stupid," and you can say, "Well, I was just playing. I'm just exploring. I discovered this. I kind of messed around with a little bit, and I wanted to show you." And, hopefully, the person backs off a little bit from their strong statement and says, "Oh, I can see this and that." And, hopefully, that's the start of a conversation and maybe a startup, right [laughs]? CHAD: Well, there are so many opportunities in so many different industries to have an impact by introducing play. Because, in some ways, I feel like that may have been lost a little bit in so many sort of like addressing problems at scale or when scaling up to particular challenges. I think we trend towards standardization and lose a little bit of that. BROCK: I agree. I think humans do like continuity and predictability. But what we find in product is that when we can pleasantly surprise, we're going to build a customer base, you know, that doesn't come from, you know, doing the same thing all the time that everybody else does. That's kind of the table stakes, right? It works. But somebody is going to come along that does it in a more interesting way. And people are going to say, "Oh." It's like the arts and crafts effect in industrialization, right? Everybody needs a spoon to eat soup, a lot of soup [laughs]. And somebody can make a lot of spoons. And somebody else says, "Well, I can make spoons, too." "And how do I differentiate?" "Well, I've put a nice scrollwork design on my spoon. And it's beautiful, versus this other very plain spoon. I'll sell it to you for a penny more." And most people will take the designed thing, the well-designed thing that provides some beauty and some pleasure in their life. And I think that's part of what I described as the spark is that realization that we live in beauty, that we live in this kind of amazing place that inspires wonder when we're open to it. 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 user-centered product journey, a clickable prototype or Proof of Concept, and key market insights from focused user research. We'll help you to identify the primary user 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 roadmap for your new product. Get started at: tbot.io/sprint. WILL: You mentioned gamifying the training and how users are more involved. It's interesting because I'm actually going through this with my five-year-old. We're trying to put him in kindergarten, and he loves to play. And so, if you put him around a game, he'll learn it. He loves it. But most of the schools are like, workbooks, sit down; focus, all of those things. And it probably speaks to your background as being a Montessori teacher, but how did you come up with gamifying it for the trainee, I guess you could say? Like, how did you come up with that plan? Because I feel like in the school systems, a lot of that is missing because it's like, like you said, worksheets equal that boring PowerPoint that we have to sit down and read and stuff like that. So, how did you come up with the gamifying it when society is saying, "Worksheets, PowerPoints. Do it this way." BROCK: I think that is something I call the adult convenience model. Who's it better for: the person who has to do the grading and the curriculum design, or the kid doing the learning? And I think that, in those cases, the kid doing the learning misses out. And the way that we validate that behavior is by saying, "Well, you've got to learn how to conform. You've got to learn how to put your own interests and drives aside and just learn how to focus on this because I'm telling you to do it." And I think that's important, to be able to do what you're asked to do in a way that you're asked to do it. But I think that the instructional model that I'm talking about takes much more up-front thought. And where I came from with it is studying the way that I like to learn. I struggled in school. I really did. I was a high school dropout. I went to junior college in Cupertino, and I was very surprised to find out that I could actually go to college, even though I hadn't finished high school. And I began to understand that it's very different when you get to college, so much more of it is about giving you an unstructured problem that you have to address. And this is the criteria under which you're going to solve the problem and how I'm going to grade you. And these are the qualities of the criteria, and what this is, is basically a rubric. We actually see these rubrics and such in products. So, for example, when I was at American Family, we had this matrix of different insurance policies and all the different things in the column based upon rows that you would get underneath either economy, standard, or performance. And I think it was said by somebody at Netflix years ago; there's only two ways to sell bundled and unbundled. The idea is that there were these qualities that changed as a gradient or a ratio as you moved across this matrix. And the price went up a little bit for each one of those qualities that you added into the next row or column, and that's basically a rubric. And when we begin to create a rubric for learning, what we're really doing is moving into a moment where we say, "This is the criteria under which I'm going to assess you. These are the qualities that inform the numbers that you're going to be graded with or the letter A, B, or C, or 4, 3, 2, 1. What does it mean to have a 4? Well, let me give you some qualities." And one of the things that I do in training companies and training teams is Clapping Academy. You want to do that together? WILL: Yeah, I would love to. BROCK: Would you like to try it here? Okay. Which one of you would like to be the judge? WILL: I'll do it. BROCK: Okay. As the judge, you're going to tell me thumbs up or thumbs down. I'm going to clap for you. Ready? [Claps] Thumbs up or thumbs down? CHAD: [laughs] WILL: I say thumbs up. It was a clap [laughs]. BROCK: Okay. Is it what you were expecting? WILL: No, it wasn't. BROCK: Ah. What are some of the qualities of clapping that we could probably tease out of what you were expecting? Like, could volume or dynamics be one? WILL: Yeah, definitely. And then, like, I guess, rhythm of it like music, like a music rhythm of it. BROCK: Okay. In some cases, you know, like at jazz and some churches, people actually snap. They don't clap. So, hands or fingers or style. So, if we were to take these three categories and we were to break them 4, 3, 2, 1 for each one, would a 4 be high volume, or would it be middle volume for you? WILL: Oh, wow. For that, high volume. BROCK: Okay. How about rhythm? Would it be 4 would be really fast; 1 would be really slow? I think slow would be...we have this cultural term called slow clapping, right [laughter]? So, maybe that would be bad, right [laughter]? A 1 [laughter]? And then, style maybe this could be a non-numerical category, where it could just be a 1 or a 2, and maybe hands or slapping a thigh or snapping knuckles. What do you think? WILL: I'm going off of what I know. I guess a clap is technically described as with hands. So, I'll go with that. BROCK: Okay, so a 4 would be a clap. A 3 might be a thigh slap [laughter]. A 2 might be a snap, and a 1 would be air clap [laughter]. WILL: Yep. BROCK: Okay. So, you can't see this right now. But let's see, if I were to ask you what constitutes a 12 out of 12 possible, we would have loud, fast, hand-to-hand clap. I think we could all do it together, right [Clapping]? And that is how it works. What I've just done is I've created criteria. I've created gradients or qualities. And then, we've talked about what those qualities mean, and then you have an idea of what it might look like into the future. You have previewed it. And there's a difference here in video games. A simulation is where I copy you step by step, and I demonstrate, in performance, what's been shown to me to be accurate to what's been shown to me. Most humans don't learn like that. Most of us learn through emulation, which is we see that there's an outcome that we want to achieve, and we see how it starts. But we have to improvise between the start and the end. In a book by Michael Tomasello on being human...he's an anthropologist, and he studies humans, and he studied other primates like great apes. And he talks about emulation as like the mother using a blade of grass, licking it, and putting it down a hole to collect ants so that she can eat the ants. And oftentimes, the mother may have their back to her babies. And the babies will see the grass, and they'll see that she's putting it in her mouth, but they won't see the whole act. So, they've just [inaudible 33:29] through trial and error, see if they can do it. And this is the way an earlier paper that I wrote in studying kids playing video games was. We start with trial and error. We find a tactic that works for us. And then, in a real situation, there might be multiple tactics that we can use, and that becomes a strategy. And then, we might choose different strategies for different economic benefits. So, for example, do I want to pay for something with pennies or a dollar, or do I want a hundred pennies to carry around? Or would I rather have a dollar in a game, right? We have to make this decision of, what is the value of it, and what is the encumbrance of it? Or if it's a shooting game, am I going to take out a road sign with a bazooka when I might need that bazooka later on? And that becomes economic decision-making. And then, eventually, we might have what's called top site, which is, I understand that the game has these different rules, opportunities, roles, and experiences. How do I want to play? For example, Fallout 4 was a game that I really enjoyed. And I was blown away when I found out that a player had actually gone through the Final Boss and never injured another non-player character in the game. They had just done the whole thing in stealth. And I thought that is an artistic way to play. It's an expression. It's creative. It's an intentional way of moving through the game. And I think that when we provide that type of independent, individual expression of learning, we're allowing people to have a unique identity, to express it creatively, and to connect in ways that are interesting to other people so that we can learn from each other. And I think that's what games can do. And one of the hurdles that I faced back in 2004 was I was creating a finite game, where what I had coded in decision trees, in dialogue, in video interactions, once that was there, that was done. Where we're at now is, I can create an infinite game because I've learned how to leverage machine learning in order to generate lots of different contexts using the type of criteria and qualities that I described to you in Clapping Academy, that allow me to evaluate many different variations of a situation, but with the same level of expectation for professionalism, knowledge and expertise, communication, compassion, curiosity. You know, these are part of the eight elements of what is valued in the nursing profession. And when we have those rubrics, when we have that matrix, we begin to move into a new paradigm in teaching and learning because there's a much greater latitude and variety of how we get up the mountain. And that's one of the things that I learned as a teacher is that every kid comes in differently, but they're just as good. And every kid has a set of gifts that we can have them, you know, celebrate in service to warming up cold spots. And I think that sometimes kids are put into situations, and so are adults, where they're told to overcome this cold spot without actually leveraging the things that they're good at. And the problem with that is, in learning sciences, it's a transfer problem, which is if I learn it to pass the test, am I ever going to apply it in life, or is it just going to be something that I forget right away? And my follow-ups on doing classroom and learning research is that it is usually that. They learned it for the test. They forgot it, and they don't even remember ever having learned it. And the greatest gift that I got, having been a teacher, was when my wife and I would, I don't know, we'd be somewhere like the grocery store or walking out of a Target, and a couple of young people would come up and say, "Yo, Mr. Dubbs," And I'd be like, "Hey [laughs]!" And they're like, "Hey, man, you remember when we did that video game class and all that?" And I was like, "Yeah, you were so good at that." Or "Remember when we made those boats, and we raced them across the pool?" "Yeah, yeah, that was a lot of fun, wasn't it?" And I think part of it was that I was having as much fun doing the classes and the lessons as they were doing it. And it's kind of like a stealth learning, where they are getting the experience to populate these abstract concepts, which are usually tested on these standardized choice tests. And it's the same problem that we have with scaling a technology. Oftentimes, the way that we scale is based on conformity and limited variation when we're really scaling the wrong things. And I think it's good to be able to scale a lot of the tasks but provide great variety in the way that we can be human-supported around them. So, sure, let's scale sales and operations, but let's also make sure that we can scope out variation in how we do sales, and how we do customer service, and how we do present our product experience. So, how do we begin to personalize in scope and still be able to scale? And I think that's what I'm getting at as far as how I'm approaching CareTrainer, and how I'm approaching a lot of the knowledge translation that we're doing for startups, and consulting with larger and medium-sized businesses on how they can use AI. CHAD: That's awesome. Bringing it back to CareTrainer, what are some of the hurdles or cold spots that are in front of you and the business? What are the next steps and challenges in front of you? BROCK: I think the big thing is that I spend a good two to three [laughs] hours a day reading about the advances in the tech, you know, staying ahead of the knowledge translation and the possible applications. I mean, it's hard to actually find time to do the work because the technology is moving so fast. And, like I said, we were starting to build MVP 2, and we realized, you know what, this is going to be done for us in a little while. You know, it'd be cool if we can do this bespoke. But why not buy the thing that's already there rather than creating it from scratch, unless we're going to do something really different? I think that the biggest hurdle is helping people to think differently. And with the elder care crisis and the care crisis, I think that we really have to help people think differently about the things that we've done. I think regulation is really important, especially when it comes to health care, treatment, prescription safety. I think, though, that there are a lot of ways that we can help people to understand those regulations rather than put them in a seat in front of a monitor. CHAD: I think people respond to, you know, when there's a crisis, different people respond in different ways. And it's a natural tendency to not want to rock the boat, not introduce new things because that's scary. And adding more, you know, something that is scary to a difficult situation already is hard for some people. Whereas other people react to a crisis realizing that we got into the crisis for a reason. And the old ways of doing things might not necessarily be the thing to get us out of it. BROCK: Yeah, I totally agree. When I run into that, the first thought that comes to my head is, when did you stop learning [laughs]? When did you stop seeking learning? Because, for me, if I were to ever stop learning, I'd realize that I'd started dying. And that's what I mean by the spark, is, no matter what your age, as long as you're engaged in seeking out learning opportunities, life is exciting. It's an adventure. You're discovering new frontiers, and, you know, that's the spark. I think when people become complacent, and they say, "Well, this is the way we've always done it," okay, has that always served us well? And there are a lot of cultural issues that go with this. So, for example, there are cultural expectations about the way kids learn in class. Like, kids who come from blue-collar families might say, "Hey, you know what? My kid is going to be doing drywall, or he's going to be working fixing cars, or he's going to be in construction, or why does he need to do this? Or why does she need to do that? And, as a parent, I don't even understand the homework." And then, there are the middle-class folks who say, "You know what? I'm given these things. They need to be correct, accurate, and easy to read. And that's my job. And I don't see this in my kids' curriculum." And then, there are the creatives who say, "Hey, you know, this has nothing to do with where my kid is going. My kids are creative. They're going to have ambiguous problems that they have to come up with creative solutions for." Then you get to the executive class where, like, these elite private schools, where they say, "My kid is going to be a leader in the industry, and what they should be doing is leading groups of people through an activity in order to accomplish a goal." And those are four different pedagogical approaches to learning. So, I'm wondering, what is it that we expect from our caregivers? And I've got kind of a crazy story from that, where this young woman, [SP] Gemma, who was a middle school student, I gave her the option, along with my other kids, to either take a standardized test on Greek myths, or they could write their own myth. And she wrote this myth about a mortal who fell in love with a young goddess. Whenever they would wrap and embrace and kiss, a flame would occur. One day the mother found out and says, "Oh, you've fallen in love with a mortal. Well, here you shall stay. This shall be your penance." And she wrapped her in this thread, this rope, and dipped them in wax so they would be there forever. But then the flame jumped to the top, and that is how candles were created. And I read that, and I was...and this is, like, you know, 30 years ago, and I still have this at the top of my head. And I was like, "Gemma, that was amazing. Are you going to go to college?" And she says, "No." "No? Really? What are you going to do?" "I want to be a hairstylist." And, in my mind, my teacher mind is like, oh no, no, no, no. You [laughs] need to go to college. But then I thought about it. I thought, why wouldn't I want a smart, skilled, creative person cutting my hair? And, you know, people who cut hair make really good money [laughter]. And the whole idea is, are we actually, you know, empowering people to become their best selves and be able to explore those things? Or are we, you know, scaring them out of their futures with, you know, fear? Those are the big hurdles, which is, I'm afraid of the future. And the promise is, well, it's going to be different. But I can't assure you that it's not going to come without problems that we're going to have to figure out how to solve. And there are some who don't want the problems. They just want how it's always been. And I think that's the biggest hurdle we face is innovation and convincing people that trying something new it may not be perfect, but it's a step in the right direction. And I think Hans Rosling in Factfulness said it very well. He said, "Things are better than they were before, but they're not great." Can we go from good to great? Sure. And what do we need to do? But we always are getting better, as long as we're continuing to adapt and create and be playful and look at different ways of doing things because now people are different, but just as good. CHAD: Brock, I really appreciate you stopping by and bringing your creativity, and energy, and playfulness to this difficult problem of caregiving. I'm excited for what the future holds for not only CareTrainer but the impact that you're going to have on the world. I really appreciate it. BROCK: Well, thank you for having me and letting me tell these stories, and, also, thanks for participating in Clapping Academy [laughter]. WILL: It was great. CHAD: If folks want to get in touch with you or follow along with you, or if they work in a healthcare organization where they think CareTrainer might be right for them, where are all the places that they can do that? BROCK: You can reach me at brock@caretrainer.ai. They can express interest on our website at caretrainer.ai. They can reach me at my personal website, brockdubbels.com, or connect with me on LinkedIn, because, you know, life is too short not to have friends. So, let's be friends [laughs]. CHAD: You can subscribe to the show and find notes for this entire episode along with a complete transcript at giantrobots.fm. WILL: If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. CHAD: You can find me on Mastodon at cpytel@thoughtbot.social. WILL: And you can find me on Twitter @will23larry. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. CHAD: Thank you again, Brock. And thank you all for listening. See you next time. AD: Did you know thoughtbot has a referral program? If you introduce us to someone looking for a design or development partner, we will compensate you if they decide to work with us. More info on our website at: tbot.io/referral. Or you can email us at: referrals@thoughtbot.com with any questions.

Host Chad Pytel interviews Monik Pamecha, the Co-Founder and CEO of Toma, a company specializing in AI for the automotive industry. Monik discusses how Toma automates phone calls for car dealerships, enhancing customer service and streamlining interactions. Despite advancements in digital communication, phone calls remain crucial in the automotive sector, and Toma leverages AI to improve these experiences significantly. Monik shares his journey in the tech industry, detailing Toma's evolution from experimenting with different AI applications to focusing on voice AI. He explains the challenges and successes faced along the way, highlighting how AI technology has matured since his early work with chatbots in 2016. The conversation reveals how Toma's voice AI quickly gained user traction, validating their focus on this innovative technology. The episode also delves into the practical implementation of Toma's AI solutions in the automotive industry. Monik emphasizes the importance of integrating AI with existing dealership software and the gradual rollout process to ensure effectiveness. He discusses the need for clear communication about AI's role in customer interactions, reflecting diverse responses across different demographics. Monik's insights provide a compelling look at the future of AI in automotive customer service. Toma (https://www.toma.so/) Follw Toma on X (https://twitter.com/toma_voice), LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/tomavoice/), or Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/tomavoiceai/). Follow Monik Pamecha on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/monikp/). Follow thoughtbot on X (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). 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 I'm joined today by Monik Pamecha, Co-Founder and CEO of Toma, which provides AI for the automotive industry. Monik, thanks for joining me. MONIK: Hey, Chad, thanks for having me. CHAD: Obviously, in fact, as evidenced by the guest list that we've had over the last few months, a lot of companies are either integrating AI into their products or starting new companies. And you've been around doing AI for quite a while now. Tell us about Toma. MONIK: Yeah. So, Toma automates phone calls for the automotive industry right now, and we build a lot of different AI products as well. It's an interesting market, but one of the leading users of phone calls for doing business. So, a lot of the business, which is buying cars, you know, the first touch happens over the phone, you know, people bringing in their cars for service, getting updates, and all that, like, mostly happens over the phone, even though you have had websites and apps and all of these around. And to give you, like, an idea of scale, like, there are 290 million cars in the U.S. alone, which is, like, about 90% of the population has at least one car. So, scale is massive, and Toma is making that experience of getting service and just dealing with anything related to automotive, like, 100 times better. CHAD: So, I would encourage people to go to the website and check it out, because, I have to admit, I was a little skeptical, at first, about how good the phone call could actually be. And I was impressed by how natural it was, how it was able to respond in the video demos that I saw. So, how did you know that this was going to be possible? MONIK: I think a lot of it comes from our own experiences, I mean, not with automotive, but with technology. So, I've been in tech for a long time. I mean, I started writing code when I was, I think, 11 or 12, a similar story for my co-founders as well. But I've been doing machine learning research as well in the past. In fact, this was in 2016 when I wrote a paper on this as well, and we built a chatbot that was based on generative models. And, at the time, in 2016, it was really funky. Like, Google had come up with something called Sequence to Sequence, and we were using that to train it on a little bit of data that we had, and we had something that kind of worked. And, at the time, I was thinking that, I mean, when you were working with that, you'd see it, like, go off the rails and, like, do something really stupid. It couldn't even get grammar right. And, at the time, I saw all the holes that I was like, if somebody plugged these, like, you know, this would be phenomenal. Like, this is what it takes for it to work, you know, these are the places, more from a practical experience, right? Like, if you had to take it to production, like, what would you need to fix? And then, six years later, I see that things actually started picking up, right, like, they actually fixed all those holes. And it came back to me, and I was like, all right, this is the time. You know, those were the issues. They're all fixed. Now you can go ahead and build. So, I think a lot of it came from experience as to like, all right, this is what we should build, or this is why we should build, like, in terms of the technology. But we didn't really arrive at this idea, so to speak, you know, at least as a founding team. It was a lot of pivots. CHAD: What was the original sort of idea that you said, okay, we're going to start a company to do this? MONIK: Well, that was very different from this very, very different. So, my co-founder and I, like, most founders, like, the first thing they do is they try to look for problems that they themselves have. And we're like, huh, looks like...what do we have in common? We have some chronic conditions, and we've used diet to, you know, manage them. So, maybe let's build a tool to help, you know, patients manage conditions with, you know, diet recommendations. And we spent six months on that, and it went absolutely nowhere. Also, I think consumer products are just different. They require a different kind of thinking. But, you know, we were just trying to throw something on the wall and pray it sticks. And, you know, it was honestly pretty miserable because we got banned on a bunch of communities on Reddit and Facebook trying to promote it. And, like, all the people who tried our product they just never came back again, and, you know, things like that when you have something that people don't want, right? So, we see that side. I mean, and after that, we go ahead and we try to do...I think it was during it, I don't know, like, when you get a sense of, like, something's not going to work, where, like, then we realized maybe we should stick to what we know best, which is, you know, we're both technical. So, maybe we should do something that's, you know, more relying on those skills than something entirely different, which I think Y Combinator calls it founder-market fit. I think that's also very true. Of course, you can, like, build something for a business you know nothing about, but there must be some compatibility. So, yeah, we started with that, kept on experimenting. And then, I think, at some point, we were so annoyed that we made, you know, a list on Google Sheets. And we're like, all right, let's just, you know, vomit out 10 ideas that we have had, and let's write them all, and let's go after them one by one. Let's spend two weeks until we hit something that, you know, maybe we think has legs. And the third idea or the fourth idea on that was building something with voice AI. And, at the time, even that was, like, just a horizontal platform. That was it. All right, so we go ahead and commit to that. So, if we go through the list, try the first two or three ideas, I think the first thing was...then we went on the other extreme where we're like, all right, let's do something we do all day long, which is, as engineers, we are on call. So, you know, even at, I don't know, 2:00 a.m. in the night if your system is down, you get a pager on your phone saying, "Get on the computer and fix it." And we're like, how could we make that better? That was the first thing on that list. We spent some time trying to do it and, again, we kind of get that feeling. I think the more you fail, I guess, the better you get at detecting failure. I don't know about success but failure for sure it works like that. I think the third or the fourth idea was voice AI, and then we go ahead. We hack a prototype over a weekend and then put it out on...again, the communities that we know how to market were, like, Facebook groups and Reddit. And it picks up. Like, within, like, 3 days, we had 200 demo calls set up. And that just blew our minds because having been on the other side, we're like, oh, this is what it feels like when people kind of want something, what you have. I mean, it's still not clear, right? But -- CHAD: And you put it out there as automated voice assistant for businesses? MONIK: No, actually what we did [laughs], I mean, nobody will want to click that if you put it like that [laughter]. You know, just out of curiosity, I was like, "Hey, you know, I've built this thing. It does this, you know, what do you think? Do you think this has any use for you?" And that's it. Like, people are, you know, messaging me nonstop, like, DMing me that, "Can you please share it with me? You know, I run this business. This might be helpful." It was, like, more genuine. Like, I was just exploring, but, you know, that was a question that I posed. And that had, like, so many people show up, and they're like, "How about you just give us that and we can make money off of this?" And then, we started, you know, digging deeper, and we're like, oh, okay, it looks like you have so many manual processes and across industries. So, we had, like, some people from healthcare, some people from, like, you know, MLMs, multi-level marketing, so many different industries, optometrists, some in construction. Anyway, so we're, like, thinking at that point, huh, okay. Maybe there is something here. Again, no mention of automotive, no mention of dealerships, nothing. We had a single dealership then. And I would say this was, like, about six months. I don't even know how many months ago, but, like, a couple of months ago. I think, at the time, is when we applied to Y Combinator as well. CHAD: So, you applied to Y Combinator with the voice idea. MONIK: Right. And we put something out there. I forget if it was the healthcare idea or the voice idea, but it's probably one of the two. I mean, that's also the other thing about Y Combinator. I think they don't really focus on ideas as much as they just focus on teams, which I think is probably the best practice. You know, we pivoted again [laughs]. But yeah, so we did voice AI, and then spent some time just trying to do everything, right? Trying to build a horizontal layer for voice, where building assistance for all kinds of businesses. And, you know, one of the businesses, at the time, was a dealership. I always like to think of this as an arranged marriage, where, you know, we have the customer. We kind of work through it -- CHAD: So, you had an actual dealership that you were partnered with as sort of a expert in the industry? MONIK: Our first customer, right. And they were very progressive dealers, so they're always trying new things. And, at the time, we were working with a bank. We were working with some healthcare locations as well. We had some construction industry... whatnot. And we were going crazy trying to build something because everybody had these different requirements. And then, in practice, like, if you push AI out in the wild, to make it work, you need a lot of things, like deep domain expertise being one of them. So, that realization is happening, you know, where we're coming to terms with that. And, at the same time, it works really well for the dealership, and they bring another customer. And they're like, "Oh, they also want to use it," and we're like, "Okay, sure. We'll turn it on." Then we do it. And then, it works again. And then, they bring more customers. And then, we're like, wait a minute, you know, like, we're not doing any outreach. We're not pushing out anything, and it seems like customers want it. And then, there are these other places where we're struggling so much. Like, even with healthcare, you know, the regulations in banking and healthcare they slow down, you know, any sort of, like, AI implementations. So, even that world was very different with the automotive space. And you kind of do more of it and then you're like, oh, okay, looks like there is something here, and then we just decide to double down on that space. And then, we go further deep in and you realize, oh -- CHAD: Did Y Combinator...that can be a difficult decision for founders to make. So, did being in Y Combinator help you sort of give you the push to make that kind of bold decision? MONIK: At least from our experience, it's always been that they're, like, get to the truth very quickly, whatever it is, and then make a decision. Do not delay it. I think we were, in fact, slow to do that. I think they were probably pushing people to do it more because we saw companies pivot in our batch, like, two times, three times right before demo day, which is the end of the program. Like, two weeks before, they just completely changed the company, and that's completely okay. CHAD: So, how does an implementation actually happen? How does it roll out to a new customer? MONIK: I mean, this is also very new, right? I think as you come across new customers, you have to adapt the process. But the essence of it is that you first have some data to start, which is, for example, for us, we work with a bunch of call recordings because a lot of our customers are already recording a lot of their calls. So, that gives you, like, some data as to what the experience is like today. Then the next thing is you get an idea of what you know your customers want the experience to be like. And then, you're basically now figuring out the delta between the two. And then, you're configuring the AI agents, making sure, testing it. And then, you have, like, a period of, like, a week or so where you get through all of that. Then you work through integrations with existing softwares. That also, by the way, is another, like, I would say automotive is a sleeping giant. Like, an auto dealership, on average, like, per month will be spending $50, 000 on software. CHAD: Wow. MONIK: Because the whole business runs on software—everything starting from sales, inventory, parts, service, everything, repair orders—all of it comes through that. CHAD: Now, is there a single common platform that a lot of dealers are using? MONIK: Unfortunately, no. There are some major players; CDK Global is one of them, which actually was hacked recently. And it's in, like, over 15, 000 dealerships, and all of them shut down. CHAD: Wow. MONIK: Like, they just couldn't do any business, and they had to come up with creative workarounds. So, it was pretty painful, kind of, like, a COVID, you know, COVID moment for them. And then, yeah, we've been trying to help our dealers, whoever used that software, to, you know, again, come out with workarounds, where the AI is actually capturing all the information. And, you know, instead of dumping it into that system, it's, you know, finding workarounds on how to get it to our dealers. But yeah, so you integrate with them. That is, like, another major step. And they're, you know, they're not the most tech-forward companies so, you know, that can be a little challenging. CHAD: Right. So, they use a lot of software, but they're not necessarily tech for...they probably don't have big IT departments and that kind of thing. And then, the users are probably non-technical. MONIK: Correct. Yeah. The thing about dealers, I think, is that they're so plugged into the business, like, they know everything that is happening in the business. Everybody knows what the bottom line looks, what really will move the needle, what is a good customer experience. They may not be technical, but I don't think it even matters. That's the thing. But yeah, we were talking about, like, the process, so it takes a couple of weeks So, you do, you know, you get all the information from them as to what needs to be done. You integrate into the systems. And then, the next thing that you do is you start slowly, where, for example, when we start taking phone calls for them, we initially start with off hours and overflow. So, when nobody's able to pick up a phone call, we get the phone calls. And that's how you get, like, some training data at the beginning in a safe manner. And then, as the volume increases, you know, you get more confident, and you roll it out to a larger audience. But I think the key thing here is it has to be a gradual process because, even for the customer, it's something so new, like, to have a full-fledged conversation. Like, you can have a phone tree where it's, like, press one; press two. You're used to that kind of stuff, and that's been around for 15 years, and it still is, you know. And it is not the most natural thing, but it continues to exist. So, this is the next, you know, natural evolution of that interface where it's more free-flowing and, you know, less annoying. CHAD: Do all of your customers...when the AI agent answers, does it say it's an AI agent? MONIK: I mean, our recommendation is to always say that. I mean, it's up to the customer, eventually, if they want to say that or not. And, in fact, it is pretty interesting. Demographics make a huge difference. Like, we're live in, you know, all the states, not all but I would say, like, all the major states. And the way people behave with AI agents is so different, you know, Florida, and Michigan, and California, like, we see the call quality. We see the metrics. We see how annoyed people are or how happy they are and things like that. The way they talk is so different. And one of the parameters in that is actually, you know, letting them know that it is an AI or not as well. So, we tweak that based on, you know, where we are. But for the most part, we always say that because we want to set the expectations, right? Because, initially, when we didn't, the most popular question on the call was like, "Are you a human?" CHAD: [laughs] MONIK: And the fact that people are asking it was also pretty insane, right? CHAD: Right. They could sort of tell that something was different. MONIK: Yeah, if you have, like, a long enough conversation because, obviously, it's not human, right? And then, you go, like, five turns into the conversation, and then you realize, okay, it sounds like a human, like, you know, it's speaking pretty quickly. It's giving me the kind of answers I want. But, like, this thing is strange because, you know, humans have a personality now. Like, with AI, like, a lot of the systems, I mean, you can build personality into it, but it still doesn't have a personality, like, the truth is still that. And it does show up, you know, in interesting ways. And, of course, there can be, you know, some sort of mechanistic issues, you know, like, whatever, right, like, what the customer is really used to and then what you actually say. I think the best practice is to almost always declare, like, it's an AI. And that has improved call quality significantly. 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. CHAD: Did you train your own models? MONIK: Yeah, we collected enough data to be able to do that, and we have trained a lot of different components and different models. So, when you think of it, there's not, like, one model that does the whole thing. You have, like, a lot of these small, medium, and large models that do different parts. So, the voice and speech are, let's say, two components. I think the brain of the agent is really the thing that needs the most amount of training because, you know, text to speech and voice, I mean, they have, like, you know, some limits and then, some, you know, business return. Like, after some point, like, there's not really much value to be gained there because if you can transcribe everything, you know, to a certain level of accuracy, all the regions change, you know, accents change. You can always improve. Then it's just expanding scope. But really, with the brain of the agent, you have multiple different models that actually interact with each other, and they're not just LLMs or generative models. You have a lot of different types of things that are going. You know, you're looking up information. You are, you know, validating something. You're making sure if, you know, this is compliant with what, you know, your company's tone is, all of these happening at the same time. And then, these are the different things that you actually really need to train because that's so specific to, you know, the type of business that is happening. CHAD: So, are you also doing your own hosting of the models, or are you using a cloud provider for that? MONIK: Yeah, we use cloud providers. I think having a small team it's insane. I mean, you can host custom models on a lot of these providers now. And then, a lot of them even offer services for you to, like, train and, you know, they take care of the infrastructure as well. I think it's a good thing to rely on it if you're lean and small. There's only so much a few people [chuckles] can do and focus on. CHAD: What are you most focused on right now, either from a business or a product perspective, or, you know, where's your area of biggest risk? MONIK: Of course, there is always, you know, risk of competition. And I guess the real question is, like, where...a lot of popular AI companies get asked this as well, right? Like, what is your moat, right? And then, I mean, I think that is the most obvious risk, right? Where, like, what is stopping anybody else from doing what you're doing, right? And there are certain parts of it, which, you know, you can de-risk. Like, having data and having proprietary data is, like, one of the biggest factors in this, right, of de-risking this. I mean, there's also like, you know, the risk of, let's say, especially in our industry, is, like, taking technology to an industry where, you know, consumers are not pro-technology. You know, they don't want to jump at the best thing that there is, right, especially customer service generally suffers from that, right? Like, people anytime they hear a bot or something and they're like, "Ah, representative agent." So, there's, like, some underlying risk in, you know, human tendencies as to what they want. But, again, to think about it, like, you know, IVRs, which are these interactive voice response systems, they've been around for so long. Nothing about it is natural. It is completely alien to how we interact, but they've been around for so long. So, a lot of times, like, this innovation is actually pushed down from the business to the consumer and not the other way around. It may not be the best experience. It's getting there. So, it's that battle between the two, which I think can delay implementations. You know, some people, like, one of our customers, at one point, we went through the entire deal. And I think the owner of the dealership group just said, "I don't believe in AI." Now, you know, like, it's pretty hard, right? Like, you have the metrics. You have the numbers. You're generating value, but the belief is strongly held. And then, at that point, you know, there's nothing you can do. CHAD: Do you know why they were saying that? Was it like, I don't believe it as in I don't think it can do it, or I don't believe in it as in, like, it's against my ethics, or something like that? MONIK: I feel like it's probably because they've been burned by past experiences of AI. Like, I think chatbots have been around for so long, and a lot of people in the automotive industry have used them. Now, they used to suck. And as I remember in 2016 as well, you know, over the few years that came, like, it was still pretty terrible. So, I think it's some muscle memory from that. And then, also, I think AI has been hyped a lot, and I feel like people just generally discount anything that is hyped. And the opinion is that let's just wait for the dust to settle, and then we'll just pick the winners. So, it's also possible, right? On the adoption curve, like, there's you just hit some people who are probably not on the early or even the mid, right? Maybe on the tail end, which I guess is completely fine and true for any tech adoption cycle. CHAD: And it's true for any product that you're...this is not just an AI company problem. I think it's a startup thing, you know, to find the early adopters and then to move on from there. But you need those early adopters, those champions who are willing to do something new before other people. MONIK: Exactly. And, I mean, yeah, it's just surprising to me how many early adopters, even in...like, there are almost early adopters in every industry. Every business has people who just want to see something, you know, they're just excited about it, like, they're willing to take the risk. And sometimes I'm not even sure why. But, you know, there's just that element of thrill, and then also, you know, beating the market to it and things like that. And once you feel it, you understand the adoption curve initially. Because when you see customers, you see, ah, I see every dealership. Everybody should use us. I mean, as a naive founder, I think that that's what I used to think initially. And then, you know, over time, you get a sense of like, all right, you know, these are the types of customers that you should go after. These are the people who you should talk to first. And you build that kind of muscle as a founder and, yeah, new learnings. CHAD: So, you started with the voice assistant. But are you moving into providing other AI-driven solutions for the automotive industry? MONIK: Right. So, as we work with more dealers, we found out, you know, more areas that can be improved and, you know, gaps in, for example, communication. I think a lot of, like, quality of service really comes from how you can, you know, communicate with your customer. And it's not just about...you could do a good job and, you know, you could just completely destroy your, you know, quality scores because you didn't communicate well enough. And you could do a bad service and still have a great, you know, service, you know, experience by communicating well. So, I think a lot of it is key to communication, and that's our focus: using AI to make it better. Voice is one channel. There are other channels as well. And there are a lot of, you know, communication gaps within, you know, our customers, you know, business set up as well. So, we try to bridge that gap. CHAD: So, since you're focused on communication then, you're probably still leveraging generative AI solutions. MONIK: Oh, a lot of it is, you know, improved by that technology. Like, so I always think, like, great products usually bring in two things, right? One is a necessary evil. Let's say, you know, something that has to be done like a phone system, for example, like, you need people to call in. You need to set up all the numbers, phone trees, whatever, routing. And then, there is AI, which makes that whole process easier. So, I think good products usually have these two things combined, where it lets you do one nasty thing, which, you know, obviously, everybody else can do in a different way. And then, there's this one exceptional thing that you can do. And then, [inaudible 27:04] together, and it makes, like, a great offering for the business. I think that's what we're working towards. CHAD: What do you think about the way things are right now, in general? I do think that there are some companies that are saying, "Well, that great thing is the AI," but they're not necessarily solving a problem that needs to be solved in that way. MONIK: Yeah. I mean, I think to that part, right, the hype is real. Even in my mind, I just discount, like, 40% of the things that people say about AI now. Like, I mean, I would say it's more true than not, like, 60%, sure, but, like, a rough number in my mind is just 40%, and people, like, exaggerate. But, I mean, that's not because, I guess, they're lying. It's because they're, you know, hopeful, right? Because nobody knows, like, in practice. Like, I mean, now that we've done, you know, hundreds and thousands of minutes of AI phone calls, like, that has, like, you know, added to my judgment. And I kind of know, like, you know, what is possible and what is not with even the most cutting-edge stuff there is. I think a lot is possible. But it's unfair to say that, oh yeah, it's as good as a human, for example, right? Like, in certain use cases, that just is not true. It's a different paradigm. It's just a different design interaction that has never existed before. There's nothing human about it. You can try to force it to be as human as you want but then it is forced human. Like, it is still not natural because it just isn't. CHAD: So, I'm getting the sense then that that might not be your north star. That might not be what you're shooting for. MONIK: Yeah, not at all, no. At the end of the day, a tool should drive business outcomes, right? And then, to drive business outcomes, you got to understand what your customer and their users want, for example. You know, I can imagine a world where people will say, you know, when a human picks up the phone, and they're like, "No, I don't want to talk to you. Can you transfer me to a, you know, the virtual agent?" Like, it will happen, right? And it won't be natural. Like, I do not think it will be natural, and it will be different. Because imagine, like, a human having access to all the information at the same time. Like, how would they behave, right? Like, humans behave in a serial manner, and then there is, like, some simplicity to some interactions and some complexity to others. That's not the case with, you know, all the information you have. Like, I already know, for example, if you call me, right, and I'm an AI agent for your business, I know so much about you already, right? Like, I'm not going to act the way, you know, an agent would act who's, like, now pulling up something on the screen, and they're like, "Give me a moment," and then they're reading through your stuff. Like, I already know all the issues you've had, all the conversations you had in the past. So, now I know what's exactly wrong, and, in fact, I'll give you the answer straight up, right? Because I can kind of get ahead and figure out what you really want. CHAD: There's an example in one of the example videos I watched or, actually, I was trying to think, would I ever want to not talk to a person, right? There's an example in one of your videos where you can see the person does exactly what I do on a call. They say their email address is their first name dot last name at gmail.com. And that's not exactly what mine is, but it's like that. And I say that, and most of the people that I talk to on the phone when I say that they...and I think it might be because they're not on a screen that has my first name and my last name on it anymore. Oftentimes, they don't remember my name, or can't see it, or can't understand what I'm saying. But the AI has all the information, and it understood what you were saying, and it just gets it instantly. MONIK: Exactly. Another example of that, right? Let's say, like, you called six times, right? I mean, usually what happens in call centers often is that, like, you get thrown around, different agents pick up, and then maybe the data comes there. I've heard that, like, on existing recordings of, like, humans, where it's like, "I'm calling for the sixth time. Like, do you need me to repeat the same thing again?" And then, they go through the same flow again because that is the policy, for example. And then, they're just so annoyed. Like, with AI, there's no such thing. It's just, you know, one model that's consistent, that's listening to everything. And it's like, even before you say...like, "I see you've called for the sixth time. You know, I'm really sorry that this is happening," and, you know, whatever. Just simple things like that. CHAD: I'm just thinking about those experiences that I've had with customer service that have been that. And, yeah, that's why I think that this is really, you know, has a lot of potential. So, how do you sort of, you know, critics of AI will often point to, like, putting people out of work, right? How do you think about that? MONIK: Yeah. I always, like, to pin it down to, like, evidence, and, I think, at this point, I have enough to talk about this. I think what we've seen with our technology is that a lot of it leads to repurposing of existing talent. So, for example, there are, you know, business development companies that dealerships rely on for inbound and outbound calling. Now, when we free their time up from inbound, like, that's what we focus on right now, and take off all the mundane tasks, like, the agents that they have are now free to do a lot more outbound, which actually drives more sales or, you know, gives a better experience because, you know, people are checking up on them and saying, "Okay, how was your service a week later," right? And the person feels really good. And if there's any problem, they address it, whatever, right? So, I think there is more stuff to do than humans will ever be able to do, and our desires have no end. We will continue to pursue that. So, as you free up something...it's like a race which has no finish line. You get a little bit of lead, but that doesn't mean anything because now you still got to keep going and keep going, and that's what we've seen. So, you know, with service advisors, for example, who would get phone calls in the service department of the dealership all the time, now they don't get calls anymore, right? But they're able to spend more time with people in the store. So, they're actually able to upsell more. So, this kind of efficiencies that you drive, like, they take off the stuff that, you know, you don't want to do all the time and is repeatable to some extent, and then you free them to do things that they couldn't have done before. So, it really is, you know, realizing that there is this endless amount of work that always needs to be done. And here, I took this off your plate, but you still have all this work to do. So, it's just repurposing of, like, talent that's been happening again and again. And, I mean, there is, of course, that's not to say that there is not going to be a loss of job opportunities, things like that, because, you know, it's just part of creative destruction as it is called, right? Where anything new will create some sort of disruption and then, you know, destroy certain things, but then it creates more, you know, on a net basis. That's happening, yeah. I mean, if you think about it, like, I mean, I remember I grew up in India. This was, like, 15 years ago, I don't know, maybe 10 years ago, too. There was somebody who would sit in the elevator, and their only job was to press a button. If you think about it, right? Like, I mean, is that job like, you know, what value is it driving? Of course, like, to some extent, right? And then, they came up with these elevators where you could punch in the numbers, you know, exact floors right at the beginning, and you just walk into the right elevator, and that's done. So, I mean, that job obviously does not exist anymore or does not need to exist anymore, right? But, I mean, I don't know if anybody else in the world has an opinion on that job existing, for example. Like, it's just, over time, when we look back, it just seems, like, obvious that, you know, why were we doing that? We should be doing this other thing. So, I think it's just movement. CHAD: Right. Yeah. I think it is uncomfortable in the moment but, you know, there is a certain trend to the world, aside from AI, aside even from technology, specifically of progress. And, you know, over time, positive comes from that, but that doesn't mean that there's not pain in the meantime. MONIK: There is, yeah. Definitely, there is pain. And I think the real reason why people feel this a lot is sometimes, like, even I make that mistake myself of viewing yourself as, like, stationary in terms of, like, skills and learning. It's like, you are everything you've learned up till now. And, okay, if what I knew up until now is not going to be relevant tomorrow, then what am I going to do? But the thing is that everybody has the capability to learn and improve, and, in fact, even that gets easier and easier with time because technology makes that easier. And then, people are able to do more things than they could do before, learn faster, for example. And it's important to not forget that we have that ability. You know, we can always change and improve, and, in fact, knowing so much makes us even better at knowing more. And that's why we've been able to adapt to every change in history so far; we always have. You know, so that fear is natural. But I think, over time, when we all look back and we're like, oh my God, why were we doing that? You know, like, and we will all be doing different kinds of things. Like, that is guaranteed. That is going to happen. But that fear still exists, and I think that is what causes the pain. It's the anxiety of it. Like, really? Of course, you have to change, you know, tracks. That is very real, but it's not as painful as fear makes it. CHAD: Well, speaking of growing, and changing, and improving, you mentioned that, you know, you and your co-founder are both technical. How have your roles changed as the company has progressed, and what have you learned [chuckles], and have you settled into any sort of roles? MONIK: Yeah. So, I'm the CEO. My co-founder is a CTO. We both used to write code at the beginning. Now only one of us writes code. CHAD: And I'm guessing it's not you [laughs]. MONIK: Yeah, it's not me. Although I do miss it sometimes, but, actually, to be honest, I don't. CHAD: [laughs] MONIK: I feel so happy to have found that, I mean, to have realized that. But yeah, I think, basically, I think now that I understand at least B2B business to some extent, I think you always need to have a clear split of, like, build and sell. And then, of course, there's all this additional stuff that you need to do, but I think these two distinctions need to be absolutely crystal clear because both are full-time jobs. And more than that, you need, like, owners of those spaces, and it's very hard to jump between the two. I mean, if they are solo founders, I mean, it's incredible how they do it if they're able to do both, or they rely on AI, or they rely on, you know, consultants, or contractors, or whatever. But I think those are the two roles. And it came, I mean, I think it was just a natural progression. It's, like, when there's more work than people, I mean, that's usually a good place to be, I think, and that's how you know something is going well. You automatically assume natural roles. Because it's in that moment of, oh no, my list is, like, growing, like, quicker than you know, something, and then I need to jump in, and then you pick up the most natural and important things to you. And then, even if you're not good at, like, you don't have an option. You have to get better at it. For example, selling, like, I never did any sales, ever. Like, I was doing machine learning and distributed systems and whatnot. But I've come to now realize that, okay, that is something that I enjoy that I think I can learn and get better at. And everything I did before, actually, even the engineering mindset helps with sales because it's just a process. So, we kind of assumed our roles when we just had too much on our plate, and we're like, "All right, you'll do this. I'll do this. Okay, fine." And then, we just talk about it, and then, all right, we keep doing it, and then now it just becomes a routine. CHAD: Yeah, how has your team grown? MONIK: Well, we've been two of us now, and we're hiring for a software engineer right now. So, we've been very lean. And I think...and this is also to something that Sam Altman said. I think it was him or I don't know who said that but, you know, you'll probably see the first one-person billion-dollar company. CHAD: Yeah, I think it was, yeah. MONIK: And I think there is some truth to it. Like, I don't know about billion, but, like, maybe a couple of million, a couple of hundred million, like, that might happen sooner. Because we've always tried to stay very, very lean, and I think we've relied on using technology wherever possible. But yeah, that's not to say...we still need people to build. And we are looking for a software engineer because, at some point, there's only so much we can do. CHAD: Yeah. So, what would make someone a good fit for your team in that software engineering position? What are they coming to the table with? MONIK: Everything, I wish. No, I mean, there are some exceptional people. And I think that's exactly what we're looking for is engineers with a founder's mindset because a founder's mindset is always like, you know, give us all the information. We'll make the decisions and figure out like, you know, what needs to be done. And someone who's, of course, exceptionally skilled at technology, at writing code, at building software, but also at understanding like, you know, what to build. I think that is, like, a killer combination and that is what differentiates, like, a great extraordinary engineer from anybody else. CHAD: Well, especially since it's going to be the second developer [chuckles], you're going to have high needs and expectations for that. MONIK: And with startups, right? It's always a little bit of chaos, and it's people who thrive in that chaos. And that's the thing, right? I've worked in, like, a bunch of startups that actually went on to become unicorns. I worked at Turing.com, which I think is...$4 billion, something like that now. But when I joined, there were, like, you know, just 10 people. And every company has problems, you know. And there's always this chaos that ensues, you know, at every stage. But there are some type of people who, like, thrive in that. They just love it. And there are some people who complain about it. I think the ones who complain about it lose that opportunity to grow, and they don't have the mindset to see opportunity in it. And I think those are the people who are absolute amazing, you know, future founders, you know, or even, like, great founding engineers are employees like that because they like that challenge, you know. It's like, this is wrong. Let me go fix it. CHAD: Right. And the reverse is also true. There's a point in a company's life cycle where they need a different kind of person that is more, like, stable [laughs]. MONIK: Well, I don't know. I think I disagree with that. I think, I mean, that's when the company, you know, plateaus. Like, if you bring in more people like that, you...really, like, what is a company? It's just a collection of really smart people. The fact that OpenAI is able to do what Google cannot over the span of six years is because they just do not hire people, you know, of certain caliber, certain mindset. They just keep them out. Again, that's their policy, or even some larger companies. I think the idea is to keep that mindset going and going. It is tiring, right? But it is what drives innovation. Like, that's just the nature of it. CHAD: Well, if what you're describing sounds like someone who's listening, or if someone's in the automotive industry and wants to learn more, where can they do that? MONIK: Yeah, they can reach out to me, you know, my email is monik@toma.com. So, they could get to us. CHAD: 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, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on Mastodon at cpytel@thoughtbot.social. Monik, thank you so much for joining me and sharing the story with me. MONIK: Thanks, Chad. This was great. CHAD: 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. AD: Did you know thoughtbot has a referral program? If you introduce us to someone looking for a design or development partner, we will compensate you if they decide to work with us. More info on our website at: tbot.io/referral. Or you can email us at: referrals@thoughtbot.com with any questions.

Founder Amy-Willard Cross discusses the mission and operations of Gender Fair, the first consumer rating system for gender equality. Gender Fair aims to measure and promote gender equality within consumer-facing companies by utilizing data and the UN Women Empowerment Principles. Amy highlights the importance of transparency and data-driven insights to create social change, emphasizing that gender equality in corporate practices benefits not just women but overall fairness in the workplace. Gender Fair evaluates companies across five categories: women in leadership, employee policies, diversity reporting, supplier diversity, and philanthropy for women. Amy also shares how Gender Fair has incorporated technology to increase its impact, including an app and browser extension that allow consumers to easily access company ratings on gender equality. These tools enable users to make informed purchasing decisions based on a company's gender equality practices. The app features functionalities like barcode scanning and logo recognition to provide real-time information about products. Amy emphasizes the significance of making gender equality data accessible and actionable for consumers, believing that collective consumer power can drive corporate accountability and fairness. Throughout the conversation, Amy discusses the challenges and successes of building Gender Fair, the importance of leveraging economic power for social change, and the role of technology in facilitating gender fairness. She also touches on the broader impact of Gender Fair's work in promoting fair business practices and the potential for future expansions, such as a B2B database for procurement. Gender Fair (https://www.genderfair.com/) Follow Gender Fair on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/begenderfair/), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/GenderFair/), or Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/genderfair). Follow Amy-Willard Cross on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/amy-willard-cross-genderfair/). Follow thoughtbot on X (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). 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 Amy-Willard Cross, the Founder of Gender Fair, the first consumer rating system for gender equality. Amy, thank you so much for joining me. AMY-WILLARD: Well, I'm very happy to be talking to robots, giant and small. CHAD: [laughs] We'll try not to smash into each other too much on this show. I think we probably have a lot to learn from each other rather than conflicting. AMY-WILLARD: I think so. CHAD: Let's just get started by digging in a little bit to what Gender Fair actually is in terms of what we mean when we say a consumer rating system for gender equality. AMY-WILLARD: It's about data. So, I was originally a journalist. I've written for a living my whole life: books, magazines, articles [laughs], you know, radio shows. I wanted to do something to promote equality in the world. And I realized that data is one way that you can want to have commercial value. Data has value that isn't, like, just blah, blah, blogging, and also, data can create social change. So, I decided to do something like, you know, we know fair trade has created great change as has, you know, marine stewards certified. And also, I was inspired by something that the Human Rights Campaign, the LGBTQ organization, does, which is called the Guide to Corporate Equality. So, our goal is to measure how companies do on gender and then share that with the public. And I didn't just make this up. We use a set of principles called the UN Women Empowerment Principles, which look at eight different sort of areas of an organization. And so, we created metrics that are based on these UN Women Empowerment Principles and also based on what is findable in the public record. We rate consumer-facing public companies, you know, like Unilever, Procter & Gamble, the shampoos that you use, the cars that you buy, the airplanes you ride on. And we look at five major categories, such as, like, women in leadership. We look at employee policies like parental leave, and flex time, part-time, summer Fridays. I'll be curious to know what you do at Giant Robot. I bet you have good ones. And then, we also look at diversity reporting. Our company is upfront with their attempt to bring more diversity into the workforce and also supplier diversity. I don't know, are you familiar with supplier diversity, Chad? CHAD: I am because we often are a supplier, so... AMY-WILLARD: You are. So, when they ask you if you're diverse...but one way companies, especially the big companies that we rate on this public database, they can make a big impact by trying to buy from women and minority-owned businesses, right? When procurement spending is huge. That's a metric that people may not know as well, but it's one that I would encourage every business to undertake because it's not that expensive. And you could just intentionally try to move capital into communities that are not typically the most rewarded. The last category that we measure is philanthropy for women, and that's important. People say, "Well, why do you measure philanthropy?" One, because the amount of philanthropy that goes to women and girls is 1.5% of all donations, and it used to be 1.8. So, pets get more money than women. I don't know how that makes you feel, Chad, but it doesn't make me feel very happy. I mean, I suppose if you're Monster Beverage and you don't have any women clientele, one, it's okay if you don't score well on your gender metrics; just meet the basic fairness. But maybe Monster Beverage doesn't have to donate to the community of women. But if you're making billions of dollars a year selling a shampoo, I would sort of think it's fair to ask that there's some capital that goes back the other way towards the community of women. So, that's the measurement. So, we could do it...and we do it for small companies like yours, too. I imagine your company would do well from the little bit I've talked to people on your staff. It sounds like you have a lot of women in leadership. And I don't know your policies yet, but I'm sure you...I bet in Massachusetts I know you have parental leave anyway in the state, but you're a more progressive state. But I think this is something that all of your listeners can benefit from is putting a gender lens on their operations because a gender lens is a fairness lens. And it includes usually, you know, this includes people who are not just all the same men, White men. So, it helps all businesses sort of operate in a more fair way to put a gender lens on their operations. And it's not hard to do. CHAD: So, one of the things that jumped out at me, in addition to just the Gender Fair mission, as I was learning about Gender Fair, is that you have an app and a browser extension. And so, that's part of why you're on the show, not only do we care about the impact you're having. AMY-WILLARD: That's right. Yeah [laughs]. CHAD: But you're a tech company. Did you always know as you got started that you were going to be making an app and a browser extension? AMY-WILLARD: Well, yes, that was the beginning because you have data. You have to make it used. You have to make it available, right? Personally, I like to see it on packages. But yes, we've had two iterations of the app, and I'm sure it could always get better and better. The current one has a barcode scanner and, also, it can look at a logo and tell you, "Oh, this soda pop is not gender fair. Try this soda pop, which is gender fair." And it can make you a shopping list and stuff like that. But, you know, tech is only good if people use it, so I hope they do. I mean, the idea is making it more accessible to people, right? I would like to have it as a filter, some easy tech. We've talked to big retailers before about having a filter put on online shopping sites, right? So, if I can choose fair-trade coffee, why can't I choose gender-fair shampoo? I like it when people can use technology to create more fairness, right? If this is a great benefit to us if technology can take this journalism we do and make it accessible and available and in your hand for someone, you can do it in the store, for Pete's sake. You could just go on the store shelf, and that's pretty liberating, isn't it? When you think of it. It should be easy to know how the companies from which you buy are doing on values that you care about. So, I never really thought of it as a tech. I wish it was better tech, but, you know, I'd need millions and millions of dollars to do that. CHAD: [laughs] Had you ever built in any of your prior companies, or had been directly responsible for the creation of an app? AMY-WILLARD: No, but I did actually once when I worked at the major women's magazine in Canada, I did hire the person who created the first online sort of magazine in Canada, and she made money, so I felt good about that. I plucked her from...she was working as sort of tech support at the major...what do you call those? Internet providers in Canada. But no, I had not, and so I relied on experts. I had a friend who was on the board of Southby, and he helped me find a tech team. I went through a few of them and, you know, it's hard to find. Like, where do you go and find people who will build something for you when you're a novice, right? As a journalist, I don't really know anything about building technology, and I certainly wasn't about to start at my age. It was definitely a voyage of discovery and learning, and I don't think I really learned much coding myself. CHAD: That's okay. AMY-WILLARD: That's okay [laughs]. CHAD: But was there something that sort of surprised you that you didn't anticipate in the process of creating a digital app? AMY-WILLARD: Oh gosh. Well, you know, of course, it's difficult, and there's lots of iterations, and there's lots of bugs. And in every business, mistakes are part of what people...in the construction industry, they'll tell you, "Mistakes are just going to happen every day. You just have to figure out how to fix each one." But, no, it's a difficult road. So yeah, I wish I could have coded it myself. I wish I could have done it myself, but I could not. But yeah, it's good learning. And, of course, you know, I think anyone who's going to start building a company with technology...if it were me now 10 years ago, I would have actually done some coding classes so I could just even communicate better to people who were building for me. But I did learn something, but not really enough. But it's a very interesting partnership, that's for sure. CHAD: And there is a lot of online classes now... AMY-WILLARD: Right [laughs]. CHAD: If someone is out there thinking, oh, you know, maybe that's good advice. And there's a lot of opportunities for sort of an on-ramp, and you don't need to become an expert. AMY-WILLARD: No. CHAD: But, like you said, even just knowing the vocabulary can be helpful. AMY-WILLARD: I think that would have been useful. Yeah, definitely useful. But I definitely, like, you learn a little bit as a text-based person. You learn the rigor of just sort of, like, you have to think in ones and zeros. It either is or isn't. That helps. I learned that a little bit in working with tech devs. The last version we did actually white labeled off of someone who had created a technology to do with...it was to do with building communities online. And their project failed, but it had enough backbone that we were able to efficiently build what we needed to on top of what they built. CHAD: Oh, that's really...was it someone you knew already, or how did you get connected? AMY-WILLARD: Yes, they knew one of our partners in New York. We tried it first as a community project. It didn't really work. And then, we realized it could actually hold our data at the same time. So, my first iteration of the app was different. But yeah, anyway, we've built it a couple of times, and I could build it even more times... CHAD: [laughs] AMY-WILLARD: And make it even better and better. CHAD: So, on the sort of company side of you've worked with companies like Procter & Gamble, MasterCard, Microsoft, do you find it difficult to convince companies to participate? AMY-WILLARD: What we do is data journalism. We don't contact the companies. We have researchers. We have journalists go and look through the SEC data and CSR reports and collect the data points on which we measure them. So, no one has to cooperate with us to get the data. It's journalism. It's not opt-in surveys, which is a very common...when I first started, no one was measuring women, and now there's lots of different measurements. And they're often pay-to-play surveys, so they're not really very valuable. Ours is objective and fully transparent journalism. But then afterwards, our business model how we typically used to pay for this is that companies that did well on our index were then invited to be quote, "certified." And this was a business model that was sort of suggested to us at the Clinton Global Initiative, to which I belonged in 2016. And they loved what we were doing, using the free market to drive gender equality. Because, you know, our whole point is that women and people who care about women and equality, we have a lot of power as consumers, or as taxpayers, or as tuition payers, or as donors to nonprofits. And whenever you give money to an organization or a company, you have the right to sort of ask questions about the fairness of that organization. Well, that's our whole ethic, really. I answered that question and came around to a different idea, but yes, no. So, the companies do participate to be certified, and some of them are interested and some of them are not, and that's fine. We do projects with them sort of like when we...we've talked about MasterCard, and we did a big conference with them in New York. This is pre-pandemic. And then, we did a big, global exhibit with P&G, and Eli Lilly, and Microsoft at TED Global, which was very fun. It was all about fairness. And it was great to talk to technologists such as yourself. And we made a booth about fairness in general, not just about women. And we had a fairness game, and it was very interesting to just discuss with people.  I think people like to think about fairness, right? I don't know if you have children, but little children get very interested in the idea of what's fair very early on. Yeah, so some companies participate...now we have companies...we do some work in B2B procurement which is something that your listeners might be interested in thinking about is that just, like, supplier diversity. If I were purchasing your services, your company services, I would ask about the gender metrics of your organization. I already learned they're quite good. So, big companies buying from other companies can put a gender lens on their B2B procurement. And so, that's a project we're doing with Salesforce, Logitech, Zoetis, Andela, which is another tech provider, and Quinnox, which is a similar sort of tech labor force, I believe. And so, we're going to be releasing a database about B2B suppliers. Actually, I should make sure that you get on it. That's a good idea. CHAD: Yes. AMY-WILLARD: That's a good idea because then it's going to be embedded in procurement platforms because this is a huge amount of money. It's even probably more...it could be more money than consumer spending, right? B2B spending. So, I'm excited about working with more companies on that to help promulgate this data and this idea because it's an easy way to drive fairness in a culture. When the government isn't requiring fairness, at least large companies can. And in some countries, actually, the government requires its vendors to do well on gender. Like, Italy now has a certification for gender, the government does, and companies that do well are privileged in RFPs and also get a tax deduction. CHAD: I don't want to say something incorrect, but I think the UK has, like, a rule around equity in pay... AMY-WILLARD: Yeah, absolutely. You're absolutely correct. CHAD: And yet they don't have equity in pay, the data shows. AMY-WILLARD: That's right. And we don't have that in the United States. It's voluntary in the U.S. We measure that, actually, too. That's seven points over a hundred points scale is whether they, one, publish the results of their pay study. In the U.S., though, we do it in a way that isn't rigorous as the way they do it in the UK. In the UK...you're great to remember that, Chad, in the UK, I mean, I wish my government did that. In the UK, companies report on the overall salaries paid to men and the overall salaries paid to women. So, that means if, you know, all the million-dollar jobs are held by men, it shows very clearly, and all the five-dollar jobs are held by women, it shows very clearly there's an imbalance. And in the United States, we just say, "Oh, well, is the male VP paid the same as a female VP?" That's sort of easier to do, right? CHAD: When we've talked with some larger companies about different products we're creating or those kinds of things, sometimes what I hear is they're looking for big wins, comprehensive things. And so, I was wondering whether you ever get pushback or feedback that's like, "Well, not that your issue is not important, but it's just focused on one aspect of what our goals are for this year." AMY-WILLARD: Right. Yeah, that's always a hard thing because when I think about fairness to half of the population, it's a hard thing for me to think that's not hugely important. CHAD: Yes. AMY-WILLARD: I have a really hard time, but yes, of course, we get that a lot. And, you know, quite frankly, when we did this B2B project with Logitech and Zoetis, they would ask their vendors, like, the major consulting companies and big companies, to take a SaaS assessment that we do. We have a SaaS product that private companies can take, or just instead of doing our journalism, they can just get their own assessment. And they were very, very reluctant to do this. That was just, you know, half an hour. It was a thousand-dollar assessment. And it took many months to convince these companies to do it. And that was their big customers. So, yes, it is very hard to have...what's the word? Coherence on what one company wants versus what a big company wants, and it's hard to know what they want. And it's, yeah, that's a difficult road for sure. And it changes [laughs]. CHAD: Part of the reason why I asked is because from a product perspective, from a business perspective, at thoughtbot, we're big fans of, like, what can be called, like, niching down or being super clear about who you are, and what you believe, and what you offer. And if you try to be everything to everybody, it's usually not a very good tactic in the market. AMY-WILLARD: That's right. That's right. CHAD: So, the fact that you focus on one particular thing like you said, it's very important, and it's 50% of the population. But I imagine that focus is really healthy for you from a clarity of purpose perspective. AMY-WILLARD: That's right. But at the same time, now there's lots of...when I started in 2016, there weren't a lot of things in this space, and now there's many, many, many, many, many, many, so corporations that want to sort of connect to the community of women or do better for women. There's many different options. So, there's many flavors of this ice cream. Even though we're niche, the niche is very crowded, I would say, actually, and people are very confused. I mean, I think I remember hearing from Heineken that they're assaulted daily by things to, you know, ways to support women in different organizations and events. And they said they took our call because we were different. But yeah, there's many competitors. But, I mean, that's the main thing. In any business, in any endeavor in life, one has to show one's value to the people who may participate, and that's a challenge everywhere, isn't it? CHAD: Yeah. AMY-WILLARD: But the niching down thing is...and interesting we hear a lot these days is that women are done. We've moved on from that. Now we care about racial equality, and we say, "That's a yes, and… We can't move on." CHAD: Well, the data doesn't show that we've moved on. AMY-WILLARD: The data doesn't show that at all, and we're going way backwards, as you well know. So, I mean, actually, I don't know if you know, there's something called the named executive officers in public companies. Are you familiar with that? The top five paid people. CHAD: Yeah. AMY-WILLARD: They have to be registered with the government. Well, that number really hasn't changed in six years. That's where the big capital is, and the stock options, and the bonuses, and the big salaries. So, to me, that's very important that I would like, you know, rights and capital to be more...well, I want rights to be solid and capital to be flowing. And so, that's what we hope to do in our work. 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. CHAD: So, going back to the founding of Gender Fair, when did you know that this was something you needed to do? AMY-WILLARD: I wanted to serve, you know, you want to be useful in life. And I wanted to do work in this field that I care so much about. As I said, I think I told you I started doing journalism before, and I realized anyone could take the journalism, and they could, you know, Upworthy would publish things we would create and then not pay us for it. And I thought that's crazy. But it's interesting talking to my husband. My husband's, like, a very privileged White guy. And I remember he said something to me very interesting. He said, "You either have power, or you take it." And he said, "Women have all this power." So, he helped me understand this. Like, you know, I think sometimes as women or communities that are underserved, you start thinking very oppositionally about what you don't have. But at the same time, you can realize that you do have this power. So, what we're trying to do with Gender Fair is remind people they have this economic power, and they can use it everywhere, you know, in addition to our consumer database. I told you that we're doing a B2B database this year. And we also...I think next week I'm going to release a database of 20,000 nonprofits looking at their gender ratings. That was done as a volunteer project by Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology if you know them. So, yeah, this is an ethic that you can take everywhere in your life is you have this power, even as a consumer. Chad, even in your little town, you can ask your coffee shop if they pay fair wages. Like, this is just a way of looking at the world that I hope to encourage people to do. CHAD: Along the journey of getting started, I assume you ran into many roadblocks. AMY-WILLARD: Mm-hmm. CHAD: Did you ever think maybe this is too hard? AMY-WILLARD: Oh yes. Well, not in building. In building, you're very optimistic, you know, it's just like when you're writing your first book. You think it's going to be a bestseller. Like, you build something, and you think the whole world is going to use it right away, and you're going to...I did have a great...when I first launched, I had a wonderful, I had, you know, press in Fortune. I had Chelsea Clinton. I had big people writing about us. Melinda Gates has written about us many, many times. The fact that...well, I've always wanted to build, like, a consumer revolution of women, and I'm going to keep at it. But it's very daunting. It's very daunting when you're trying to move a boulder such as, you know, big institutions and companies that don't really want to change, and they're not motivated to do it. So, yes, those are my roadblocks. It's not creating the massive amount of change that I wanted to do. And I'm not going to give up, but, yes, it is very daunting, and it's very daunting to see how little people care. Some people don't care about it, but some people in power don't care about it. But I think if you asked, you know, regular women, they would say, "We would like fair pay. We would like equal opportunity. We would like paid parental leave." They would want all these things, and hopefully, together, we can fight for them. CHAD: Well, and, like you said, the premise of what you're doing is you're focused on the power that you do have, which is the dollars that you spend with these companies. I think that's such a smart angle on this because especially for...it seems like the core in terms of the consumer-facing companies. That's so inherent in what this is. AMY-WILLARD: That's right. CHAD: Yeah, the angle of empowering consumers, and giving them the information, and leveraging the power that consumers have with these companies seems really smart to me... AMY-WILLARD: That's right. If it works -- CHAD: As opposed to individually going to the companies and saying, you know -- AMY-WILLARD: "Please make it." Yeah. And some people would refute your use of the word empower because that implies that people don't have power. So, when I give speeches...I have a pair of beautiful gemstone red pumps, and I say it's the ruby slippers. We had this power all along. We just were not exercising it. But this power will only work, Chad, if it's done in the aggregate. So, our challenge is to reach the aggregate of American women. I have to, you know, I have to go reach 50 million women this year. That's my goal. Reach 50 million women with this message that we have the power in the aggregate to make change. And that's the only way this will work. If it's just one by one, it really doesn't. When I first launched, I found when I showed the app to people on the lower end of the economic scale, like, you know, people in the cash register; they understood this more than middle-class women. They understood the fact that if all women come together and, you know, buy from this company or don't buy from this company based on how they treat women, they understood that as a collective power. Whereas middle-class women who don't have as many struggles didn't really groove to that idea as quickly, which I thought was very...to me, it was very interesting, you know, individuals feel more powerful on the higher end of the social scale. They may or may not -- CHAD: That is interesting. AMY-WILLARD: Yeah. So, yeah, that's my goal. We'll see if I can do it. That's going to be my life's work, I think, Chad. CHAD: How do you reach 50 million people? AMY-WILLARD: I don't know. That's what I'm going to think about. You know, we're talking to different people about campaigns. We actually stopped the consumer work during the pandemic because it just, you know, everything changed. And so, now, this year, we're going back. I don't know; I mean, I guess if Ryan Reynolds tweeted about me, you know, that would help. If [laughs] anyone listening has any ideas how to reach 50 million women...no, maybe 3 million is what I need to create social change. CHAD: I imagine that it doesn't just come down to spending money on advertising. One, you might not have that money. AMY-WILLARD: No. And that would be, you know, that also would be not in the ethics of what Gender Fair is, for example, right? That means I would be paying money to Facebook and basically Facebook, I guess, and Google. If you look at the major spends of nonprofits, they're advertising with these big tech giants. And so, we have...actually, we have some partnerships with large women's organizations, and I think that's the way we hope to spread that. And if I had money for advertising, I would want to spend it with other women's organizations, or women's owned media, or women influencers. There's another idea I talk about in my work I call the female domestic product, and so talking about how much money women earn or capital we control. And the more we can grow that female domestic product, the more we can achieve equality actually. I always say, in America, you get as much equality as you can pay for sadly. CHAD: I was just about to say, "Sadly." AMY-WILLARD: Sadly, yeah. It's true. We still don't have the Equal Rights Amendment. A hundred years. CHAD: Well, 50% of the population would say, "Why do we need an Equal Rights Amendment [laughs]?" AMY-WILLARD: All men are created equal, but yeah, it's quite astonishing. I don't know. Do you have daughter, too, or just a son? CHAD: I have a son, and my younger one is non-binary. AMY-WILLARD: Well, I'm sorry to be so binary. Excuse me. CHAD: It's okay. AMY-WILLARD: Well, interesting. And that's great, too, isn't it? Because we see how fluid gender is and their rights are just as important as a woman's rights. And these are, you know, women and non-binary people are often excluded from things. And so, we are all working together just to create fairness. I'm sure that the same thing happens in your family, too. CHAD: Yeah. I think fairness is one of those things. Sometimes equality is not necessarily the same as fairness. AMY-WILLARD: Yes. CHAD: But I think, like you said at the top of the show, fairness is something that we seemingly learn very early on. But one of the ways that it comes across is I'm being. It is unfair to me, especially in little kids, at least with my kids [laughs]. AMY-WILLARD: Of course, yes. CHAD: That was the thing that they learned first and caused them the most pain. And it was very difficult for them to see that something was unfair for somebody else. So, I remember saying to my kids when they were little, "Fair doesn't mean you get your way." AMY-WILLARD: That's right. Not fair. CHAD: Right [laughs]. AMY-WILLARD: It's true. But then, you know, it's funny. When I talk about equal pay, I often say to people, "When I used to cut cakes for my children, I cut equal slices, and I didn't put them under the table," like, you know what I mean [laughter]? So, why are we so cagey about the slices of economic pie we give to one another? I mean, there's no reason why pay has to be secret, right? If it's fair. You could easily talk to people. Well, you know, Chad gets paid more money because he's the CEO, and he does the podcast, and he has to talk to the bank, you know what I mean? So, you could easily explain that to people. And I don't know why we have to keep salaries a secret from one another. It seems very irrational to me and not really a part of fairness. CHAD: Yeah. Yep. That's something...so, all of our salary bands at thoughtbot are public on the internet. AMY-WILLARD: Cool. On the internet. Oh, I'm very impressed. CHAD: Yeah. So, you can go to thoughtbot and use our compensation calculator. You enter in your location, what role you have. AMY-WILLARD: Oh. So, you do it for other people. Oh, that's cool. That's a great service. And that was just some sort of tech that was sort of pro bono tech that you all built for the world. CHAD: Yeah, we created it for ourselves. AMY-WILLARD: And then you shared it. CHAD: Mm-hmm. AMY-WILLARD: Then you open-sourced it. Great. Well, I bet you have a lot of happy employees. CHAD: I like to think so [laughs]. I do think that there is an inherent understanding of fairness. And when people ask how we do things at thoughtbot or how we should do things, I say, "How do you want it to be?" I think that guides a lot of how we do things and why a lot of stuff we do is just common sense. And it's not until ulterior motives or maintaining power comes into play where the people in power don't want to give it up. Because, like you said, people don't understand that by giving someone else a bigger piece, they think that that means their piece is smaller. AMY-WILLARD: Right. Or they just think they deserve it. I was reading last night about succession planning and CEOs. And apparently, a lot of them just stay...oh, sorry, in big public companies, not in their own companies, they stay on way too long. And all these consultants are saying it's the four Ps, you know, position, privilege, pay, and then...I forget the other one. But one of them was jets. They don't want to give up their jets. So yeah, I think when you have things, it seems fair, and sharing them seems...giving up some of what you have seems unfair. But I do think humans can see fairness. But sometimes, when you have a lot, it's hard to see it. You're able to justify why it may be not unfair to people who don't have as much as you do. But anyway, I can't change human nature, but most people do understand fairness. I think you're right about that. CHAD: Well, one thing...I noticed...so, you're a Public Benefit Corporation. AMY-WILLARD: Yes. CHAD: Did you set out to be a Public Benefit Corporation from day one? AMY-WILLARD: Yes, you know, originally, when it came to how was I going to pay for this, the first part I paid myself with my own money. I hired MBAs. I hired researchers. I built the tech. And then, I wasn't sure how I was going to pay for it going forward. But I knew I didn't want to become a nonprofit because, in my mind, there are so many things that...there are so many problems that women have that need to be solved by nonprofit organizations, planned parenthood first among them. Like, I don't want to take money away from women's organizations that help women fleeing abusive homes. So, I wanted to see if I could pay for this in the private sphere, which we've been able to do, and not have to seek donations because, really, I felt very strongly about not taking money out of that. That's part of the FDP, the part of the female domestic product, but the part that's contributed by people philanthropically. And there isn't a lot of philanthropic dollars going to women, as I mentioned before. So, yes, I knew definitely I wanted to be a Public Benefit Corporation. And there's no tax benefits to that, you know, I don't know if you are yet, but... CHAD: No, it's something that we've looked at, but it's very attractive to me. AMY-WILLARD: Right. And there's also the private version of it being a B Corp, which is also very useful. It's an onerous process. Public Benefit Corporation isn't quite as onerous, I don't believe. I mean, we're in Delaware and New York, but it just says that you're, I mean, we exist for the public good. I'm not existing to make millions of dollars. I'm existing to create social change. And some organizations don't want...are leery of working with us because we're not a nonprofit so that's to assuage them. Well, it's not really about...we're not about enriching shareholders. It's just a different way to pay for it. But yeah, I would encourage all companies to look into being a Public Benefit Corporation or do a B Corp assessment or a Gender Fair assessment. It helps them, you know, operate in a world that is increasingly more values concerned. Maybe 20 or 30 years ago, it wasn't so on the top of mind of many people. We were coming out of, you know, warring '80s capitalism. But nowadays, the younger people, especially, are very focused on issues of fairness and equality. So, I think those tools making business better that way are very useful. CHAD: Well, I would encourage, you know, everyone listening to go check out the app, if you're at a company, to look at doing the assessment. Where can people do those things? AMY-WILLARD: Ah, well, yeah, I would encourage them to do all those things. You're right, Chad. I would encourage you to download the app and check some of your favorite brands. It's very simple. Do the paid subscription. And then, if you're a company, you can do an online assessment. You just go Gender Fair assessment, and you'll find it. If you're a business and would like to participate in our B2B database, you can also do the assessment, or there's a coalition for Gender Fair procurement, where you can get information. We had the prime minister of Australia speak at our launch. It was quite excellent. We'll be launching our nonprofit. Actually, I think it's already online. It's called genderfair-nonprofits.org, if you want to see how your favorite nonprofits do. But, basically, we're here to help any business or organization do better on gender. And you can email me amy.cross@genderfair.com. And I would love to help anyone in their journey for fairness of any kind. Yeah, many ways to participate. Just go to genderfair.com or genderfairprocurement.com. CHAD: Awesome. Amy, thank you so much for sharing with us. I really appreciate it. And thank you for all the good that you're doing in the world with Gender Fair. AMY-WILLARD: Well, I appreciate the way you're running your company in a very new, interesting, and apparently ethical way. Privately, I could look at your website and your career page and figure out how you're doing. But it sounds, to me, when I've talked to people, that you're doing very well. And I honor your curiosity about learning from others. CHAD: Awesome. Well, listeners, 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 hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on Mastodon @cpytel@thoughtbot.social. 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. AD: Did you know thoughtbot has a referral program? If you introduce us to someone looking for a design or development partner, we will compensate you if they decide to work with us. More info on our website at: tbot.io/referral. Or you can email us at: referrals@thoughtbot.com with any questions.

Joël shares a unique, time-specific bug he encountered, which causes a page to crash only in January. This bug has been fixed in previous years, only to reemerge due to subsequent changes. Stephanie talks about her efforts to bring more structure to her work-from-home environment. She describes how setting up a bird feeder near her desk and keeping chocolates at her desk serve as incentives to work more from her desk. Together, Stephanie and Joël take a deep dive into the challenges of breaking down software development tasks into smaller, more manageable chunks. They explore the concept of 'vertical slice' development, where features are implemented in thin, fully functional segments, contrasting it with the more traditional 'horizontal slice' approach. This discussion leads to insights on collaborative work, the importance of iterative development, and strategies for efficient and effective software engineering. thoughtbot Live Streams (https://www.youtube.com/@thoughtbot/streams?themeRefresh=1) Stephanie's Live Stream (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWmCOMbOxTs) Joël's Talk on Time (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54Hs2E7zsQg) Finish the Owl Meme (https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/572078-how-to-draw-an-owl) Full Stack Slices (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/break-apart-your-features-into-full-stack-slices) Elephant Carpaccio (https://blog.crisp.se/2013/07/25/henrikkniberg/elephant-carpaccio-facilitation-guide) Outside-in Feature Development (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/testing-from-the-outsidein) Working Iteratively (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/working-iteratively) Transcript:  STEPHANIE: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Stephanie Minn. JOËL: And I'm Joël Quenneville. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. STEPHANIE: So, Joël, what's new in your world in the year 2024? JOËL: Yeah, it's 2024. New year, new me. Or, in this case, maybe new year, new bugs? I'm working on a project where I ran into a really interesting time-specific bug. This particular page on the site only crashes in the month of January. There's some date logic that has a weird boundary condition there, and if you load that page during the month of January, it will crash, but during the entire rest of the year, it's fine. STEPHANIE: That's a fun New Year's tradition for this project [laughs], fixing this bug [laughs] every year. JOËL: It's been interesting because I looked a little bit at the git history of this bug, and it looks like it's been fixed in past Januarys, but then the fix changes the behavior slightly, so people bring the behavior back correct during the rest of the year that also happens to reintroduce the bug in January, and now I'm back to fixing it in January. So, it is a little bit of a tradition. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that is really funny. I was also recently debugging something, and we were having some flakiness with a test that we wrote. And we were trying to figure out because we had some date/time logic as well. And we were like, is there anything strange about this current time period that we are in that would potentially, you know, lead to a flaky test? And we were looking at the clock and we're like, "I don't think it's like, you know, midnight UTC or anything [laughs] like that." But, I mean, I don't know. It's like, how could you possibly think of, like, all of the various weird edge cases, you know, related to that kind of thing? I don't think I would ever be like, huh, it's January, so, surely, that must [laughs] mean that that's this particular edge case I'm seeing. JOËL: It's interesting because I feel like there's a couple of types of time-specific bugs that we see pretty frequently. If you're near the daylight savings boundary, let's say a week before sometimes, or whatever you're...if you're doing, like, a week from now logic or something like that, typically, I'll see failures in the test suite or maybe actual crashes in the code a week before springing forward and a week before falling back. And then, like you said, sometimes you see failures at the end of the day, Eastern time for me, when you approach that midnight UTC time boundary. I think this is the first time I've seen a failure in January due to the month being, like, a month boundary...or it's a year boundary really is what's happening. STEPHANIE: Yeah. That just sounds like another [laughs] thing you have to look out for. I'm curious: are you going to fix this bug for real or leave it for [laughs] 2025? JOËL: I've got a fix that I think is for real and that, like, not only fixes the break in January but also during the rest of the year gives the desired behavior. I think part of what's really interesting about this bug is that there are some subtle behavioral changes between a few different use cases where this code is called, part of which depend on when in the year you're calling it and whether you want to see it for today's date versus you can also specify a date that you want to see this report. And so, it turns out that there are a lot more edge cases than might be initially obvious. So, this turned into effectively a product discussion, and realizing, wait a minute, the code isn't telling the full story. There's more at a product level we need to discuss. And actually, I think I learned a lot about the product there. So, while it was maybe a surprising and kind of humorous bug to come across, I think it was actually a really good experience. STEPHANIE: Nice. That's awesome. That's a pretty good way to start the year, I would say. JOËL: I'd say so. How about you? What's new in your world? STEPHANIE: So, I don't know, I think towards the end of the year, last year, I was in a bit of a slump where I was in that work-from-couch phase of [laughs] the year, you know, like, things are slowing down and I, you know, winter was starting here. I wanted to be cozy, so I'd, you know, set up on the couch with a blanket. And I realized that I really wasn't sitting at my desk at all, and I kind of wanted to bring a little bit of that structure back into my workday, so I [chuckles] added some incentives for me to sit at my desk, which include I recently got a bird feeder that attaches to the window in my office. So, when I sit at my desk, I can hopefully see some birds hanging out. They are very flighty, so I've only seen birds when I'm, like, in the other room. And I'm like, oh, like, there's a bird at the bird feeder. Like, let me get up close to, like, get to admire them. And then as soon as I, like [laughs], get up close to the window, they fly away. So, I'm hoping that if I sit at my desk more, I'll spontaneously see more birds, and maybe they'll get used to, like, a presence closer to the window. And then my second incentive is I now have little chocolates at my desk [laughs]. JOËL: Nice. STEPHANIE: I've just been enjoying, like, a little treat and trying to keep them as a...okay, I've worked at my desk for an hour, and now I get a little reward for that [laughs]. JOËL: I like that. Do you know what kind of species of birds have been coming to your feeder? STEPHANIE: Ooh, yes. So, we got this birdseed mix called Cardinal and Friends [laughs]. JOËL: I love that. STEPHANIE: So, I have seen, like, a really beautiful red male cardinal come by. We get some robins and some chickadees, I think. Part of what I'm excited for this winter is to learn more how to identify more bird species. And I usually like to be out in nature and stuff, and winter is a hard time to do that. So, this is kind of my way of [chuckles] bringing that more into my life during the season. So, this is our first episode after a little bit of a break for the holidays. There actually has been some content of ours that has been published out in the world on the internet [laughs] during this time. And just wanted to point out in the few weeks that there weren't any Bike Shed episodes, I ended up doing a thoughtbot Rails development livestream with thoughtbot CEO Chad Pytel, and that was my first-time live streaming code [laughs]. And it was a really cool experience. I'm glad I had this podcast experience. So, I'm like, okay, well I have, you know, that, like, ability to do stuff kind of off script and present in the moment. But yeah, that was a really cool thing that I got to do, and I feel a little bit more confident about doing those kinds in the future. JOËL: And for those who are not aware, Chad does–I think it's a weekly live stream on Fridays where he's doing various types of code. So, he's done some work on some internal projects. He did a series where he upgraded, I think, a Rails 2 app all the way to Rails 7, typically with a guest who's another teammate from thoughtbot working on a thing. So, for those of our listeners that might find interesting, we'll put a link in the show notes where you can go see that. I think it's on YouTube and on Twitch. STEPHANIE: Yes. JOËL: What did you pair on? What kind of project were you doing for the livestream? STEPHANIE: So, we were working on thoughtbot's internal application called Hub, which is where we have, like, our internal messaging features. It's where we do a lot of our business operations-y things [laughs]. So, all of the, like, agency work that we do, we use our in-house software for that, and so Chad and I were working on a feature to introduce something that would help out with how we staff team members on projects. In other content news [laughs], Joël, I think you have something to share as well. JOËL: Yeah. So, we've mentioned on past episodes that I gave a talk at RubyConf this past November all about what the concept of time actually means within a program and the different ways of representing it, and the fact that time isn't really a single thing but actually kind of multiple related quantities. And over the holiday break, the talks from that conference got published. I'm pretty excited that that is now out there. We'd mentioned that as a highlight in the previous episode, highlighting accomplishments for the year, but it just wasn't quite out yet. We couldn't link it there. So, I'll leave a link in the show notes for this episode for anyone who's interested in seeing that. STEPHANIE: Sounds like that talk is also timely for a debug you -- JOËL: Ha ha ha! STEPHANIE: Were also mentioning earlier in the episode. So, a few episodes ago, I believe we mentioned that we had recently had, like, our company internal hackathon type thing where we have two days to get together and work with team members who we might not normally work with and get some cool projects started or do some team bonding, that kind of thing. And since I'm still, you know, unbooked on client work, I've been doing a lot of internal thoughtbot stuff, like continuing to work on the Hub app I mentioned just a bit ago. And from the hackathon, there was some work that was unfinished by, like, a project team that I decided to pick up this week as part of my internal work. And as I was kind of trying to gauge how much progress was made and, like, what was left to accomplish to get it over the finish line so it could be shipped, I noticed that because there were a couple of different people working on it, they had broken up this feature which was basically introducing, like, a new report for one of our teams to get some data on how certain projects are going. And there was, like, a UI portion and then some back-end portion, and then part of the back-end portion also involved a bit of a complex query that was pulled out as a separate ticket on its own. And so, all of those things were slightly, you know, were mostly done but just needed those, like, finishing touches, and then it also needed to come together. And I ended up pairing on this with another thoughtboter, and we spent the same amount of time that the hackathon was, so two days. We spent those two days on that, like, aspect of putting it all together. And I think I was a bit surprised by how much work that was, you know, we had kind of assumed that like, oh, like, all these pieces are mostly finished, but then the bulk of what we spended our time doing was integrating the components together. JOËL: Does this feel like a bit of a finish the rest of the OWL meme? STEPHANIE: What is that meme? I'm not familiar with it, but now I really want to know [laughs]. JOËL: It's a meme kind of making fun of some of these drawing tutorials where they're like, oh; first you draw, like, three circles. STEPHANIE: [laughs] JOËL: And then just finish the rest of the owl. STEPHANIE: [laughs] JOËL: And I was thinking of this beautifully drawn picture. STEPHANIE: Oh, that's so funny. Okay, yeah, I can see it in my head [laughs] now. It's like how to go from three circles, you know, to a recognizable [laughs] owl animal. JOËL: So, especially, they're like, oh, you know, like, we put in all the core classes and everything. It's all just basically there. You just need to connect it all together, and it's basically done [laughs]. And then you spend a lot of time actually getting that what feels like maybe the last 20 or 10% but takes maybe 80% of the time. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that sounds about right. So, you know, kind of working on that got me thinking about the alternative, which is honestly something that I'm still working on getting better at doing in my day-to-day. But there is this idea of a vertical slice or a full-stack slice, and that, basically, involves splitting a large feature into those full-stack slices. So, you have, like, a fully implemented piece rather than breaking them apart by layers of the stack. So, you know, I just see pretty frequently that, like, maybe you'll have a back-end ticket to do the database migration, to create your models, just whatever, maybe your controllers, or maybe that is even, like, another piece and then, like, the UI component. And those are worked on separately, maybe even by different people. But this vertical slice theory talks about how what you really want is to have a very thin piece of the feature that still delivers value but fully works. JOËL: As opposed to what you might call a horizontal slice, which would be something like, oh, I've built three Rails models. They're there. They're in the code. They talk to tables in the database, but there's nothing else happening with them. So, you've done work, but it's also more or less dead code. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's a good point. I have definitely seen a lot of unused code paths [laughs] when you kind of go about it that way and maybe, like, that UI ticket never gets completed. JOËL: What are some tips for trying to do some of these narrower slices? Like, I have a ticket, and I have some work I need to do. And I want to break it down because I know it's going to be too big, and maybe the, like, intuitive way to do it is to split it by layers of your stack where I might do all the models, commit, ship that, deploy, then do some controllers, then do some view, or something like that, and you're suggesting instead going full stack. How do you break down the ticket more when all the pieces are interrelated? STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's a great point. One easy way to visualize it, especially if you have designs or something for this feature, right? Oftentimes, you can start to parse out sections or components of the user interface to be shipped separately. Like, yes, you would want all of it to have that rich feature, but if it's a view of some cards or something, and then, yeah, there's, like, the you can filter by them. You can search by them. All of those bits can be broken up to be like, well, like, the very basic thing that a customer would want to see is just that list of cards, and you can start there. JOËL: So, aggressively breaking down the card at, like, almost a product level. Instead of breaking it down by technical pieces, say, like, can we get even smaller amounts of behavior while still delivering value? STEPHANIE: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I like that you said product level because I think another axis of that could also be complexity. So, oftentimes, you know, I'll get a feature, and we're like, oh, we want to support these X number of things that we've identified [laughs]. You know, if it's like an e-com app you're building, you know, you're like, "Do we have all these products that we want to make sure to support?" And, you know, one way to break that down into that vertical slice is to ask, like, what if we started with just supporting one before we add variants or something like that? Teasing out, like, what would end up being the added complexity as you're developing, once you have to start considering multiple parameters, I think that is a good way to be able to start working more iteratively. And so, you don't have to hold all of that complexity in your head. JOËL: It's almost a bit of like a YAGNI principle but applied to features rather than to code. STEPHANIE: Yeah. Yeah. I like that. At first, I hesitated a little bit because I've certainly been in the position where someone has said like, "Well, we do really need this [laughs]." JOËL: Uh-huh. And, sometimes, the answer is, yes, we do need that, but what if I gave you a smaller version of that today, and we can do the other thing tomorrow? STEPHANIE: Right. Yeah, it's not like you're rejecting the idea that it's necessary but the way that you get about to that end result, right? JOËL: So, you keep using the term vertical slice or full-stack slice. I think when I hear that term, I think of specifically an article written by former thoughtboter, German Velasco, on our blog. But I don't know if that's maybe a term that has broader use in the industry. Is that a term that you've heard elsewhere? STEPHANIE: That's a good question. I think I mostly hear, you know, some form of like, "Can we break this ticket down further?" and not necessarily, like, if you think about how, right? I'm, like, kind of doing a motion with my hand [chuckles] of, like, slicing from top to bottom as opposed to, you know, horizontal. Yeah, I think that it may not be as common as I wish it were. Even if there's still some amount of adapting or, like, persuading your team members to get on board with this idea, like, I would be interested in, like, introducing that concept or that vocabulary to get teams talking about, like, how do they break down tickets? You know, like, what are they considering? Like, what alternatives are there? Like, are horizontal slices working for them or not? JOËL: A term that I've heard floating around and I haven't really pinned down is Elephant Carpaccio. Have you heard that before? STEPHANIE: I have, only because I, like, discovered a, like, workshop facilitation guide to run an exercise that is basically, like, helping people learn how to identify, like, smaller and smaller full-stack slices. But with the Elephant Carpaccio analogy, it's kind of like you're imagining a feature as big as an elephant. And you can create, like, a really thin slice out of them, and you can have infinite number of slices, but they still end up creating this elephant. And I guess you still get the value of [chuckles] a little carpaccio, a delicious [laughs] appetizer of thinly sliced meat. JOËL: I love a colorful metaphor. So, I'm curious: in your own practice, do you have any sort of guidelines or even heuristics that you like to use to help work in a more, I guess, iterative fashion by working with these smaller slices? STEPHANIE: Yeah, one thought that I had about it is that it plays really well with Outside-In Test Driven Development. JOËL: Hmmm. STEPHANIE: Yeah. So, if, you know, you are starting with a feature test, you have to start somewhere and, you know, maybe starting with, like, the most valuable piece of the feature, right? And you are starting at that level of user interaction if you're using Capybara, for example. And then it kind of forces you to drop down deeper into those layers. But once you go through that whole process of outside-in and then you arrive back to the top, you've created your full-stack feature [laughs], and that is shippable or, like, committable and, you know, potentially even shippable in and of itself. And you already have full test coverage with it. And that was a cool way that I saw some of those two concepts work well together. JOËL: Yeah, there is something really fun about the sort of Red-Green-Refactor cycle that TDD forces on you and that you're typically writing the minimum code required to pass a test. And it really forces you out of that developer brain where you're just like, oh, I've got to cover my edge cases. I've got to engineer for some things. And then maybe you realize you've written code that wasn't necessary. And so, I've found that often when I do, like, actually TDD a feature, I end up with code that's a lot leaner than I would otherwise. STEPHANIE: Yes, lean like a thin slice of Elephant Carpaccio. [laughter] JOËL: One thing you did mention that I wanted to highlight was the fact that when you do this outside-in approach for your tiny slice, at the end, it is shippable. And I think that is a core sort of tenet of this idea is that even though you're breaking things down into smaller and smaller slices, every slice is shippable to production. Like, it doesn't break the build. It doesn't break the website. And it provides some kind of value to the user. STEPHANIE: Yeah, absolutely. I think one thing that I still kind of get hung up on sometimes, and I'm trying to, you know, revisit this assumption is that idea of, like, is this too small? Like, is this valuable enough? When I mentioned earlier that I was working on a report, I think there was a part of me that's like, could I just ship a report with two columns [laughs]? And the answer is yes, right? Like, I thought about it, and I was like, well, if that data is, like, not available anywhere else, then, yeah, like, that would be valuable to just get out there. But I think the idea that, like, you know, originally, the hope was to have all of these things, these pieces of information, you know, available through this report, I think that, like, held me back a little bit from wanting to break it down. And I held it a little bit too closely and to be like, well, I really want to, like, you know, deliver something impressive. When you click on it, it's like, wow, like, look at all this data [laughs]. So, I'm trying to push back a little bit on my own preconceived notions that, like, there is such a thing as, like, a too small of a demo. JOËL: I've often worked with this at a commit level, trying to see, like, how small can I get a commit, and what is too small? And now you get into sort of the fraught question of what is a, you know, atomic commit? And I think, for me, where I've sort of come down is that a commit must pass CI. Like, I don't want a commit that's going to go into the main branch. I'm totally pro-work-in-progress commits on a branch; that's fine. But if it's going to get shipped into the main branch, it needs to be green. And it also cannot introduce dead code. STEPHANIE: Ooh. JOËL: So, if you're getting to the point where you're breaking either of those, you've got some sort of, like, partial commit that's maybe too small that needs more to be functional. Or you maybe need to restructure to say, look, instead of adding just ten models, can I add one model but also a little bit of a controller and a view? And now I've got a vertical slice. STEPHANIE: Yeah, which might even be less code [laughs] in the end. JOËL: Yes, it might be less code. STEPHANIE: I really like that heuristic of not introducing dead code, that being a goal. I'm going to think about that a lot [laughs] and try to start introducing that into when I think something is ready. JOËL: Another thing that I'll often do, I guess, that's almost like it doesn't quite fit in the slice metaphor, but it's trying to separate out any kind of refactor work into its own commit that is, you know, still follows those rules: it does not introduce dead code; it does not break the build; it's independently shippable. But that might be something that I do that sets me up for success when I want to do that next slice. So, maybe I'm trying to add a new feature, but just the way we built some of the internal models, they don't have the interface that I need right now, and that's fine because I don't want to build these models in anticipation of the future. I can change them in the future if I need. But now the future has come, and I need a slightly different shape. So, I start by refactoring, commit, maybe even ship that deploy. Maybe I then do my small feature afterwards. Maybe I come back next week and do the small feature, but there are two independent things, two different commits, maybe two different deploys. I don't know that I would call that refactor a slice and that it maybe goes across the full stack; maybe it doesn't. It doesn't show to the user because a refactor, by definition, is just changing the implementation without changing behavior. But I do like to break that out and keep it separate. And I guess it helps keep my slices lean, but I'm not quite sure where refactors fit into this metaphor. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's interesting because, in my head, as I was listening to you talk about that, I was visualizing the owl again, the [laughs] owl meme. And I'm imagining, like, the refactoring making the slice richer, right? It's like you're adding details, and you're...it's like when you end up with the full animal, or the owl, the elephant, whatever, it's not just, like, a shoddy-looking drawing [laughs]. Like, ideally, you know, it has those details. Maybe it has some feathers. It's shaded in, and it is very fleshed out. That's just my weird, little brain trying [laughs] to stretch this metaphor to make it work. Another thing that I want to kind of touch a little bit more about when we're talking about how a lot of the work I was spending recently was that glue work, you know, the putting the pieces together, I think there was some aspect of discovery involved that was missed the first time around when these tickets were broken up more horizontally. I think that one really important piece that I was doing was trying to reconcile the different mental models that each person had when they were working on their separate piece. And so, maybe there's, like, an API, and then the frontend is expecting some sort of data, and, you know, you communicate it in a way that's, like, kind of hand-off-esque. And then when you put it together, it turns out that, oh, the pieces don't quite fit together, and how do you actually decide, like, what that mental model should be? Naming, especially, too, I've, you know, seen so many times when the name...like, an attribute on the frontend is named a little bit different than whatever is on the backend, and it takes a lot of work to unify that, like, to make that decision about, should they be the same? Should they be different? A lot of thought goes into putting those pieces together. And I think the benefit of a full-stack slice is that that work doesn't get lost. Especially if you are doing stuff like estimating, you're kind of discovering that earlier on. And I think what I just talked about, honestly, is what prevents those features from getting shipped in the end if you were working in a more horizontal way. JOËL: Yeah. It's so easy to have, like, big chunks of work in progress forever and never actually shipping. And one of the benefits of these narrower slices is that you're shipping more frequently. And that's, you know, interesting from a coding perspective, but it's kind of an agile methodology thing as well, the, like, ship smaller chunks more frequently. Even though you're maybe taking a little bit more overhead because you're having to, like, take the time to break down tasks, it will make your project move faster as a whole. An aspect that's really interesting to me, though, is what you highlighted about collaboration and the fact that every teammate has a slightly different mental model. And I think if you take the full-stack slice and every member is able to use their mental model, and then close the loop and actually, like, do a complete thing and ship it, I think it allows every other member who's going to have a slightly different mental model of the problem to kind of, yes, and... the other person rather than all sort of independently doing their things and having to reconcile them at the end. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I agree. I think I find, you know, a lot of work broken out into backend and frontend frequently because team members might have different specialties or different preferences about where they would like to be working. But that could also be, like, a really awesome opportunity for pairing [laughs]. Like, if you have someone who's more comfortable in the backend or someone more comfortable in the frontend to work on that full-stack piece together, like, even outside of the in-the-weeds coding aspects of it, it's like you're, at the very least, making sure that those two folks have that same mental model. Or I like what you said about yes, and... because it gets further refined when you have people who are maybe more familiar with, like, something about the app, and they're like, "Oh, like, don't forget about we should consider this." I think that, like, diversity of experience, too, ends up being really valuable in getting that abstraction to be more accurate so that it best represents what you're trying to build. JOËL: Early on, when I was pretty new working at thoughtbot, somebody else at the company had given me the advice that if I wanted to be more effective and work faster on projects, I needed to start breaking my work down into smaller chunks, and this is, you know, fairly junior developer at the time. The advice sounds solid, and everything we've talked about today sounds really solid. Doing it in practice is hard, and it's taken me, you know, a decade, and I'm still working on getting better at it. And I wrote an article about working iteratively that covers a lot of different elements where I've kind of pulled on threads and found out ways where you can get better at this. But I do want to acknowledge that this is not something that's easy and that just like the code that we're working on iteratively, our technique for breaking things down is something that we improve on iteratively. And it's a journey we're all on together. STEPHANIE: I'm really glad that you brought up how hard it is because as I was thinking about this topic, I was considering barriers into working in that vertical slice way, and barriers that I personally experience, as well as just I have seen on other teams. I had alluded to some earlier about, like, the perception of if I ship this small thing, is it impressive enough, or is it valuable enough? And I think I realized that, like, I was getting caught up in, like, the perception part, right? And maybe it doesn't matter [chuckles], and I just need to kind of shift the way I'm thinking about it. And then, there are more real barriers or, like, concrete barriers that are tough. Long feedback loops is one that I've encountered on a team where it's just really hard to ship frequently because PR reviews aren't happening fast enough or your CI or deployment process is just so long that you're like, I want to stuff everything into [chuckles] this one PR so that at least I won't have to sit and wait [laughs]. And that can be really hard to work against, but it could also be a really interesting signal about whether your processes are working for you. It could be an opportunity to be like, "I would like to work this way, but here are the things that are preventing me from really embracing it. And is there any improvement I can make in those areas?" JOËL: Yeah. There's a bit of a, like, vicious cycle that happens there sometimes, especially around PR review, where when it takes a long time to get reviews, you tend to decide, well, I'm going to not make a bunch of PRs; I'm going to make one big one. But then big PRs are very, like, time intensive and require you to commit a lot of, like, focus and energy to them, which means that when you ask me for a review, I'm going to wait longer before I review it, which is going to incentivize you to build bigger PRs, which is going to incentivize me to wait longer, and now we just...it's a vicious cycle. So, I know I've definitely been on projects where a question the team has had is, "How can we improve our process? We want faster code review." And there's some aspect of that that's like, look, everybody just needs to be more disciplined or more alert and try to review things more frequently. But there's also an element of if you do make things smaller, you make it much easier for people to review your code in between other things. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I really liked you mentioning incentives because I think that could be a really good place to start if you or your team are interested in making a change like this, you know, making an effort to look at your team processes and being like, what is incentivized here, and what does our system encourage or discourage? And if you want to be making that shift, like, that could be a good place to start in identifying places for improvement. JOËL: And that happens on a broader system level as well. If you look at what does it take to go from a problem that is going to turn into a ticket to in-production in front of a client, how long is that loop? How complex are the steps to get there? The longer that loop is, the slower you're iterating. And the easier it is for things to just get hung up or for you to waste time, the harder it is for you to change course. And so, oftentimes, I've come on to projects with clients and sort of seen something like that, and sort of seen other pain points that the team has and sort of found that one of the root causes is saying, "Look, we need to tighten that feedback loop, and that's going to improve all these other things that are kind of constellation around it." STEPHANIE: Agreed. On that note, shall we wrap up? JOËL: Let's wrap up. STEPHANIE: Show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. JOËL: This show has been produced and edited by Mandy Moore. STEPHANIE: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review in iTunes. It really helps other folks find the show. JOËL: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us @_bikeshed, or you can reach me @joelquen on Twitter. STEPHANIE: Or reach both of us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. JOËL: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeeee!!!!!!! AD: Did you know thoughtbot has a referral program? If you introduce us to someone looking for a design or development partner, we will compensate you if they decide to work with us. More info on our website at: tbot.io/referral. Or you can email us at referrals@thoughtbot.com with any questions.

Mac Reddin is the CEO of Commsor. He discusses Commsor's evolution from community-led growth software to a go-to-network model, emphasizing the importance of various overlapping networks in a company's ecosystem. He shares his journey from running a Minecraft-based company as a teenager to founding Commsor, which initially began as a newsletter and evolved into a community and then a product. Mac stresses the effectiveness of authentic community building and relationship-based growth over traditional sales and marketing strategies. He criticizes cold calling and email tactics, advocating for genuine interactions and relationship-building. Commsor's approach, including personal onboarding of every user and fostering a company culture where employees are encouraged to express their individuality and interests, has shown success and satisfaction internally and in the market. Chad reflects on his experiences at thoughtbot, aligning with Reddin's perspective on community and user-centric approaches. He emphasizes trust and freedom within his team, allowing for authentic individual contributions to the company's growth and reputation. Together, they discuss the importance of personal connections in business and how modern sales tactics might need reevaluation in favor of more genuine, relationship-based approaches. Commsor (https://www.commsor.com/) Follow Commsor on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/commsor/) or X (https://twitter.com/Commsor). Follow Mac Reddin on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mac-reddin/), GitHub (https://github.com/teaguns), or X (https://twitter.com/TheTeaGuns). Visit his website at macredd.in (https://macredd.in/). Follow thoughtbot on X (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) 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 as co-host today is Sally Ladrach, Revenue Enablement Manager at thoughtbot, great company I've heard of. Sally, thank you for joining. SALLY: Yeah, thanks for having me on. CHAD: And also joining us today is Mac Reddin, Founder and CEO of Commsor, which builds tools to help individuals and companies of all sizes grow faster, more authentically, and more sustainably through the power of go-to-network. Mac, thanks for joining us. MAC: Thanks for having me. CHAD: Mac, can you tell us a little bit more about what Commsor is and how you sort of arrived at creating it? MAC: I struggle to do that every time someone asks me. It's always, like, a slightly different answer. So, we're about four years old now. But we kind of pivoted, soft pivoted, depending on how you want to look at it, into what we're doing now at the beginning of this year. So, we're kind of not that new and very new, depending on what perspective you look at. We were originally building what we called community-led growth software. So, we were helping companies measure their community as an intentional part of their go-to-market initiative. And there's a whole rabbit hole on why we changed, and how we changed, and how we ended up where we are now. But I think go-to-network is sort of an evolution of community-led from this realization that companies don't have a singular community. They might have a, you know, a forum, or a Slack, or a community manager, and there's, like, it's very easy to be like, that is their community. But in reality, there's influencers, investors, creators, advisors, personal brands, executives, champions, customers, community members, like, all these different overlapping networks, hence go-to-network, that actually make up this sort of ecosystem that enables a company to thrive. CHAD: Now, did you have a community, or, like, did it grow from something, or did you just have the idea? MAC: I started my first company when I was 17; built on top of Minecraft, and it was very community-centric, and I didn't really realize at the time. But I got lucky enough to sell that business. And, you know, after looking back at all the hats I've worn running a, you know, a tiny, bootstrapped company, I realized the community management part had been what I enjoyed the most and that the community part had been the kind of competitive advantage of that business. And that sent me down a path of thinking about community and business more intentionally after having kind of stumbled into it as a, I guess, late teenager. So, Commsor started...originally, I knew I wanted to build something in the community space. So, we actually started...it started as a newsletter, actually. It was a substack called Community Chat Weekly, which was just, like, an aggregation newsletter as I was, like, doing research into the more professional community world. And then it became a small Slack community, which then became the community club. And Commsor, as a product, was born out of building a community for community people and just diving headfirst into that world. SALLY: So much community, I love it [laughs]. MAC: Yeah. I try to say, like, a couple of different words, like world or something instead of community. SALLY: [laughs] MAC: And just, like, we used to joke that we were a community company for community people, by community people, with a community of community people. CHAD: [laughs] MAC: I was, like, just too much of the same word [laughs]. SALLY: I love that. So, it's interesting. One of the reasons why I really wanted to get you and Chad together, in particular, is because the whole go-to-network motion that you're so passionate about and that you've built this product around very closely aligns with how Chad has really led and grown thoughtbot over the last 20 years. And I thought it would be so cool to bring those perspectives together. And one of the things that you mentioned around community was that it gave you a competitive advantage. I'm curious to know, Chad, does that resonate with you? Have you seen that in thoughtbot over the last, you know, couple of decades as you've been doing this? CHAD: Yeah, definitely. I mean, one of the things that is my sort of go-to talking points, both at conferences and that kind of thing, is that one thing that has been really a big part of thoughtbot's success is being willing to be clear about who we were and what we believe. And when we do that, then the people who want what we have and believe what we believe and are excited by that can find us and, you know, follow us. And, eventually, when they're in a position to need help, we're top of mind. And this idea, I think, holds back a lot of companies because you think your market is the total addressable market. And the reality is you're never going to work with the total addressable market. So, you're better off finding the people who believe what you believe in your niche and your community. And being that big fish in that small pond has been really beneficial for us. SALLY: That's awesome. Yeah, I think it was kind of a culture shock, honestly, coming to thoughtbot because I had been so immersed in sort of the SaaS world and the mass outreach, cold outreach, sort of, I want to say, traditional go-to-market motion that's been used over the last ten years. And I came here, and there were so many things that thoughtbot did or didn't do that I just was honestly kind of shocked, you know, as an example, not using third-party cookies on our website [laughs]. And, Mac, when we were talking, it sounded like you're also doing some of those things that we joked might make a CRO cry [laughs]. So, I was curious to ask what some of those things were and see how that kind of matches up to what thoughtbot is doing in our approach, too. I'd be curious to know. MAC: There are so many things. I mean, I get CROs all the time, not, like, yelling at me, but I get the whole like, "Young man, you don't understand how sales works," type comments all the time. I got one recently that was, "Don't talk about sales until you've sold in a recession." It was like, what do you think we've [laughter] been doing the last 18 months? But okay. But yeah, so we don't do cold calls. We don't do cold emails. We don't do any of that traditional stuff that software companies do. And I guess you all as a, you know, more of a, like, service-based product, as a founder building a software-based product, more than half of the cold outbound I get is, like, developer agencies and stuff like that. It's, like, the classic scourge of outbound in a lot of ways, right? So, there's an element of, like, zigging when everyone else zags. And one of my favorite stats...I can't remember the exact number, so don't fully quote me on it. But -- CHAD: It's not like we're recording or anything. It's totally fine. [laughter] MAC: Yeah, well, I mean, I think the gist of the message is more important than the exact number. And it was a stat that there's been a 100x increase in prospecting activities over the last decade. So, for every cold email, cold call, in-mail ad impression that you would have seen ten years ago, you now get 100 as a buyer. And I always say this thing to people; I'm like, it doesn't matter how good your outreach is. You can have the best well-crafted cold email, cold call; your timing can be perfect; everything could be right: relevance, timing, everything. The problem is, increasingly, buyers have been so pissed off at the deluge of shit they've gotten for ten years that it doesn't matter. Like, my phone does not ring if I don't have your number. I am physically uncoldcallable. And I've talked to a lot of CROs, and they're like, "Well, we'll just, you know, marketing will get your lead some other way. And then they'll pass it over to us, and we'll still get to you." And it's like, okay, like, that doesn't really solve the problem. So, like, there's a lot of these weird things where sales and marketing aren't aligned. They expect each other to solve the problem for each other. They're pure volume-based, and we don't do any of that. And a lot of CROs and a lot of VPs of sales love to point out how wrong we are for that, but it's working so far. And also, it's so much more enjoyable to build a company that way. Like, our salespeople, our SDRs, and all that stuff, they don't hate their jobs. They're not, like, sticking their face to the grindstone every morning and being like, "Oh yeah, I got to play pump-up music before I go to work. Otherwise, I'm not going to get through the day." It just creates a better work environment. It's better for us. It's better for the buyers. It's better all the way around. CHAD: So, for thoughtbot, I know that a lot of this has come naturally for us because, as developers and designers, we've produced a lot of open source that flows from our work that then builds community around it. We write on a blog, which we're very fortunate to have a lot of people read over the years, which fosters reputation for us and community around it. But what does that look like for other companies who maybe aren't, like, an agency like us doing that kind of thing? What are the kinds of things that it looks like? MAC: I think you hit the nail on the head earlier when you said it's about, like, showing off who you are and what you believe in and creating space so people can come to you. But in the, you know, the high growth SaaS world, the last ten years, people have not been a fan of waiting for people to come to you. It's, like, grow at all costs, blitzscale, all that sort of mentality. For us, the way it looks is...I guess an example–so, we did this sort of semi-accidental campaign on LinkedIn over the last, I guess, two and a half months with these purple hoodies. And there's a whole backstory. They were an accident, and we were like, "Shit, we have too many hoodies. What do we do with them?" So, we made a thing out of them. And we thought we were going to get 25. We ended up getting 250 [laughter]. It's a whole thing. We just started, like, we sent them to a few folks, and someone posted a photo without us asking being like, "Look at this awesome hoodie Commsor sent me." And their post went, like, insane. Like, by LinkedIn standards, it went insane. It was, like, 100 comments. Like, "How do I get one? Oh my God, I love it. It's so cool. Can I get one?" So, we just started sending them to people, like, no goals, no intention, just brand building, just building connections, building relationships. I personally, from hoodies that I can attribute, have booked over 200 calls about our product with our ICP doing that without trying to. There's almost this element of, like, by not trying to sell, it's become easier to sell. There's, like, an element of like, I'm just sending you a hoodie because I think you're cool, and I want to get to know you. And it's a fine line because I think a lot of companies try to do that. But you can always tell there's an undertone of, yeah, I'm sending you these cookies because, like, I'm really hoping you get on a sales call with me. But we genuinely were, like, we have too many hoodies. We're just trying to get rid of them. I don't want to pay to store them. Like, please, I'm begging you, please take our hoodie. SALLY: [laughs] MAC: And then, it just turned into this, like, whole FOMO game. It's like the authenticity was purely there. All in all, we spent about, including shipping, everything, like, $8,000 on hoodies, so not a tiny amount of money but also not huge by marketing budget standards. And I had a conversation with a CMO recently. He was like, "You should have just spent LinkedIn ads. That's such a waste of money. You can't track it. It's not attributable," et cetera. I was like, "We've gotten, I think, close to a million impressions on LinkedIn of people posting our hoodies talking about us. We couldn't have paid for that." So, there's, like, this whole area where it's like, if you actually just go out there and build relationships, build community, get to know people, tell them what you believe in, yeah, people will not agree with you. Like, when I say I think modern go-to-market is broken and the way people sell is broken, I get a lot of sales leaders who are like, "You're an idiot. Like, that's wrong. You objectively don't know what you're doing. You've never been a salesperson by title. Don't spread this shit." But then you get a lot of people who are like, "Yeah, you're right. It's not working. I want to hear what you have to say. I want to talk to you. I want to brainstorm with you." The amount of times that I get DMs from salespeople who are like, "Hey, I totally agree with that post you just wrote, but I can't publicly because my VP of sales is going to read me out if they see me agreeing with you. But like, yeah, this shit doesn't work anymore," like, 10 to 20 times a day, I get messages like that. SALLY: And as a consumer of LinkedIn feed, you know, I've been following Mac for a while, but also follow a couple of other folks at Commsor and people who are in their networks. I can 100% validate that the Dino Hoodie is, in fact, now a status symbol on LinkedIn. So [laughs], I thought that was, you know, brilliant. And I'm not going to lie; I had some FOMO, too. I was like, where's my Dino Hoodie? And, in fact, when I talked to Mac, I was like -- CHAD: [laughs] SALLY: I know that we just met, but can I get one of those? [laughs] CHAD: I see now. This was just a ploy to get a hoodie. MAC: I've gotten, like, reverse sales now. It's like, you know, you get pitch slapped on LinkedIn, or someone adds you, and right away, they're trying to sell to you. I've gotten that. [laughter] But they're trying to convince me to give them a hoodie. Like, somehow, we've created the reverse thing where, like, salespeople are reaching out to me to reverse pitch–so I can give them something. SALLY: That is hilarious. And I promise that was not my intention; was just to get a hoodie from you. But there's so much there that I think would be interesting to unpack. Chad, I'm just kind of curious to know your impression of what Mac has shared around the sort of flak that he's gotten around, you know, what you're doing isn't going to work, or whatever. Have you gotten any of that over the years? Are you surprised to hear that? Just interested to hear your thoughts. CHAD: No, I think it happens when you are willing to put yourself out there with an opinion, with a belief. And it's going to resonate with the people that it resonates with. And the flip side of that is there are going to be people who believe that you're wrong. You know, when we were doing very early on with test-driven development, for example, it was not an established industry practice. You could find blog posts from people out there saying. "It's bad. We tried it at my startup and our product failed, and it was too slow. It held us back from being successful." But the people who believe in it...if we were the only company in Boston who was doing it and a company that believes in test-driven development was never going to work with a company that didn't do test-driven development, so we were the one company that they could work with because we believed in the same practices. And that's the hard thing in that is, usually, if you're on the right track to finding the right niche or to the right belief that's going to really resonate with a group of people, the people that you're turning off is probably going to be a louder, more vocal group. And so, being strong in the face of that is really important. And I'll also just call out that, like, this is one area where it's easy to say, "Well, this works because you've been successful." There are other founders probably who, like, they have a legitimately bad idea. And they ignore all the sort of haters, and they say, "Oh, those are just the haters." And yet they don't get the success because there wasn't the people out there who actually did believe what they believe or had a need for the product that they were creating, or something like that. And I think it's important to ignore the noise or to push past the noise, but you do need to let it in a little bit so that you understand whether you're on the right track at all, I've found. What about you, Mac? MAC: Yeah, it's a never-ending battle to know what to listen to, and what to ignore, and how to apply it or if to apply it, and things like that. I agree. I think there is an element of, like, it's like, what's that [inaudible 14:47] saying? Like, if no one thinks you're crazy or wrong, you're probably too late as well with your idea, right? Like, if you're like, "Here's my idea," and everyone's like, "That's a great idea," It's been done. You're very late to the party at that point. There's no, like, right or wrong answer because there's always context. You always know your idea and your business, hopefully, better than anybody else does. So, you can't just, like, take other people's advice. I actually went through a whole period (It's like sort of a sidebar.), but where I was, like, impostor syndrome as a, you know, venture-backed CEO. I was like, oh, I got to, like, be the founder and run the company the way other people run companies at this stage. And it, like, objectively, almost killed us as a company. I have lived both sides of that extreme of like, being like, "No, I'm not going to listen to anybody's advice," and the negatives and positives of that, and the "I'm just going to follow everyone's advice and do what they say," and the negatives and positives of that. And now somewhere, maybe not quite in the middle, maybe a little bit leaning towards the ignore the advice because I believe in what we're doing. CHAD: And you need to actually believe what you're saying. I think this is the wrong tactic to take if you don't actually believe it. SALLY: [laughs] CHAD: Because if it's not authentic to you, it's going to be really hard to build an authentic community and message and those kinds of things, yeah. MAC: People can tell. 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. SALLY: One of the things that you had mentioned before was sort of the technology that you've built Commsor on. And it was an interesting choice to me because it's not one of the more, you know, flashy or hot, new sort of programming languages that's out there. So, I was just kind of wondering, what is it? And why did you make the decision to build out the actual tool the way that you did? MAC: So, I definitely have to, like, put a giant asterisk over everything I'm about to say. I am not a technical founder [laughs]. So, like, anything I say here is just potentially wrong [laughter]. [inaudible 17:20] The decision was made because I had, you know, a great team that we put together and trusted them to make the decision, and that's the decision we've made. So, I mean, the bulk of the app is built on just, like, Ruby and React. It's pretty straightforward. We have had people be like, "Well, you should be using this," you know, whatever "Next.js, plus this, plus this, you know, it's better." But, like, the team we have, they've worked together in the past. So, they actually came into an acquihire. So, we're like, basically, like, you know, they'd worked together for three years in a company. They have systems in place. And at this stage, it's, like, debating what tool you're going to use when you start, like, just 99.9% of the time does not matter. There's no idea...you don't even know if it's going to work, the product, right? It's, like, and your customers don't care. Your customers don't care. Unless you're building a dev tool and it's, like, hyper-specific, but even then, they probably don't really care that much. So yeah, we have a good team. I trust them to make the decision. And it's what they know and what they're familiar with. So, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, we just went with the thing that would let us get things done the fastest. SALLY: Chad, I'm interested to know...the trust factor that you mentioned, Mac, is really key to a lot of thoughtbot's success. I think that one of the things that Chad has done well as he's grown the company is hired great people and then trusted them to get the job done however [laughs] they thought that it might best be done. So, Chad, I'm curious to know: whether you're deciding on a tech stack or how you're going to go to market or anything like that, what has the impact of trust been at thoughtbot as you've grown and scaled the company? CHAD: I think trust is one of [laughs]...I think it's very important. It's one of our core values. And, for us, that comes from not just trust being a nice thing to have. It's the one value that I can also point to and say I intentionally created an environment of trust. I've been doing freelancing and consulting for a long time, even before thoughtbot. And I knew that at thoughtbot, we were going to continually form and reform teams of people that hadn't necessarily worked together closely before. And that if every time we did that, we were going to have to be building trust with each other, that it would detract from the success of the product that we were trying to create and from the relationship that we were needing to build trust on urgently which was with our new client. And so I tried really hard to create an environment where when people show up on day one, everyone inherently trusts that they belong there and trusts them. It's not easy, and it's not perfect. But I think we've made a lot of progress on that. And then, when you have that kind of environment, recognizing that it changes the way that you work with each other. And so, when it comes to, like, technology decisions and everything, I mean, that is essentially how we work is understanding that everyone has trust of each other and that when you are put in a position to make a decision, it is your decision to make. But part of making decisions and part of having a trusting environment is communicating with each other. So, even if you're responsible for making the decision, part of your responsibility, then, is for bringing everyone else along with you. And sometimes that means setting up an environment where, okay, the results speak for themselves. But other times, it means educating people about, "Here's what we're going to do, and here's why," even if it is as simple as "This is what we know. We've been doing it for three years, and let's just get right to it." I don't know if that directly answers your question. But it's a big part of how we've done things and tried to create the culture that we've created. And I happen to be biased, but Ruby is a great choice. SALLY: [laughs] CHAD: I think it's taken for granted because it has been around for so long. But I talk about strong beliefs. I am up to speed on lots of web development frameworks and the ways that you build applications across a variety of different platforms, and tech stacks, and that kind of thing. We didn't choose Ruby on Rails because we thought it was going to be popular back in 2005. We chose it because it fundamentally was the best way that we could see, out of all the platforms at the time, to build web applications. It allowed us to do things in one line that normally would have, at the time, taken 20. And that allowed us to be faster and work the ways that we wanted to work. And embedded in that culture is things like testing and test-driven development, which we also believe in. The simple fact of the matter is there hasn't been a paradigm shift in web frameworks that is actually fundamentally better in the way that Ruby on Rails was better in the early 2000s. So, you can choose something else, but it's not going to be significantly better than Rails in terms of productivity, in terms of what it can do for your early-stage product. It basically just then comes down to there's choices you can make that will slow you down, definitely, in terms of architecture and everything in other platforms. But yeah, you can't go wrong with Rails, and you can't really go wrong with Ruby. And you can't go wrong with choosing what you know and what you're comfortable with, especially in the early days. SALLY: Yeah, I love that. One of the themes that I'm sort of hearing from both of you in how you've approached building tools; building your business is putting users at the center. And, Mac, I know you were saying, you know, I have all these CROs coming at me, right? Like VPs of sales being like, "The way you're approaching things isn't going to work. It's dumb; it's stupid." But then you also have these salespeople DMing you like, "Hey, I agree with you. I just can't say it out loud because I might get in trouble." And, ultimately, that salesperson really is your user, right? Because they're the ones that are building their network, that are leveraging it to then go get the sales for the company. So, I thought it was interesting that sort of that user-centered approach was something that was coming out with both because I know for Ruby, in particular, it's very well-loved by developers that use it. It's, like, a very developer-friendly sort of language. And so, I'm just wondering, you know, how do you, Mac, continue to keep users at the center when you have voices coming at you, when you have [laughs], you know, people telling you you're doing it wrong? What are some things that you do tactically to make sure that you stay aligned? MAC: I mean, the simple answer is talk to them all the time. We actually...every single user who gets onboarded to our product right now gets an introduction to me directly. That's part of, like, seeing how the product works as well. But every single user ends up speaking to me. Who knows if that'll scale? But right now, it's like, I have spoken for at least 30 minutes with every single person we've onboarded to our product. We onboard every user by hand right now, which is totally counterintuitive for the price point our product's at. But it's been really helpful to build that relationship, build that trust, get the research and the understanding of what we need to do next really quickly, have tight feedback loops. We have, like, I Dm users all the time. Like, I [inaudible 24:28] I probably have 50 to 60 unique DMs on LinkedIn per day. And someone was telling me like, "That's a waste of time as CEO and founder." I'm like, it's literally the only thing that matters. I'm talking to users, hearing what the market is saying, like, hearing all that live, not hearing it from people. We're also working on, right now, enabling anyone on our team to do an onboarding so that when we do scale, my goal would be that every person on our team, from an engineer to a success person to the CEO, would be onboarding a customer at least once every few weeks just to maintain that closeness and that connectedness. We're also working on things... I'm a huge fan of...do you know Arc browser? SALLY: I'm not familiar, no. CHAD: I haven't used it, but I am familiar with it, yeah. MAC: I'm using it right now. CHAD: [laughs] MAC: Highly recommend. Not an ad, I promise; just a fan. But they do, like, little things that they do, for example, like, when they would change log, instead of being written or instead of being just a CEO, it'll be like, "Here are the four new things released." And the first thing is, "Oh, here's Mac, the developer who worked on this feature sharing it. And here's, you know, this person who worked on this feature." So, it's like, each individual person becomes the face of the thing they worked on, rather than just like, oh, it's the faceless company, or it's, like, it's always the same, like, spokesperson who's always talking about it. So, enabling it to not just be me who talks to users all the time but the whole company enables the whole company to be more user-centric. SALLY: That's so interesting. Again, there's, like, so many parallels between how I've seen thoughtbot approach things and how you're approaching things with Commsor. When you mentioned that your goal is to sort of make it so that several different people are the face, and it's not just like, oh, Commsor is Mac only [laughs], that's something that I think I've seen Chad do throughout the years. So, Chad, do you have any examples of sort of how you've tried to scale the company, putting different faces and putting our experts out there, trying to make it so that thoughtbot is not, like, the Chad show? Because I feel like that's one of the things that, you know, you're great [laughs]. But I think that the fact that we have so many contributors to communities and people speaking at events has been really, you know, just good for business and good for the company. So, what are some ways that you've done that? And what benefits have you seen of doing sort of what Mac is trying to do right now within Commsor? CHAD: I don't know that I've been super intentional about this. It just came naturally, as we're all people who would do this, right? Like, you can't stop us from doing it. And so, I mostly just try to create an environment where you're not stopping people from doing things that they would normally want to do anyway. And to then recognize when, you know, someone else goes and creates open source, or a blog post, or speaks at a conference, or whatever. That comes back to benefit us through the reputation that it builds and the community that it builds. And I think a lot of organizations and teams and everything do a really good job of getting in people's way from doing things [laughs] that they would want to do. And so, that's really all I've tried to do is not get in people's way. MAC: I've spoken to a lot of people who are, like, under the impression that their company owns their LinkedIn account, which I always think is super interesting, or companies who, like, go out of their way to be like, "No, you can't speak about, I don't know, that you like barbecuing," or, like, well, you can't, like, be a person. You have to, like, you are just a representative of the company. And it's so stupid. It's, like, 90% of the growth we have is either word of mouth or people referencing that they've, like, built a relation or a connection with someone on our team, not just me, but, like, Ben or Katrine on our team, like, people like them. And then they want to learn about Commsor because they get to know them. And I think there's this old model where, like, if you just draw, like, circles, right? Like, here's the company, and here's people. It used to be here's the company, and then all the people are inside of it. But more and more, like, the way we're trying to build it is, like, you have, like, the people are a ring around the bubble that is the company. It's like, the people actually are the kind of that first interface, which is always what it is anyways, whether companies act that way or not. At the end of the day, people are the interface. But so many companies try to control that and, like, you know, put everyone through this, like, brand voice funnel that just...it just doesn't work. Yeah. SALLY: Yeah. Well, and it's ironic because I've heard so many sales leaders harping on people buy from people. People buy from people. And then they don't allow their salespeople to actually go be a human being and a person in any sort of a public [laughs] forum like LinkedIn. I've had that same conversation with so many sales folks that I've worked with, you know, over the years, especially the last few years, where like, oh, I feel like I could really put some great stuff out on LinkedIn, build some relationships, but I just I feel sort of stifled from doing that for fear of reprimand, or losing my job, or whatever it is. So, I definitely appreciate that, at thoughtbot, I don't feel that. I have felt that in the past in some roles, but I don't feel that here. And I'm just so grateful that I feel empowered to go share my thought leadership and things like that on LinkedIn. And it's interesting because that has yielded opportunities that I wasn't even looking for. So, yeah, I'm curious, Chad, if you've also seen things that we weren't necessarily looking for happening that way. CHAD: I do. As you were talking, though, I was just thinking, this is harder than it was before. Like, you may be excited to talk on LinkedIn [laughs], but I would say the number of people at thoughtbot who are actually excited to do authentic stuff on social media these days is way, way down. And it's been trending down for years, and it's particularly bad these last couple. And, you know, we have the kind of culture where we don't force people to do it. Is that something that you've seen, Mac? It's, like, individuals' sort of engagement, willingness? I think a lot of social media is just a mess right now, that kind of thing. And how is that affecting what you see in your strategy? MAC: Yeah, I don't think...it doesn't have to necessarily be social media, like, once again, the browser company example of, like, the update videos including people in it, right? It's like it's...there's ways that the company can intentionally elevate their people first, rather than being like, "Oh, yeah, here's social media, like, have fun. Go build a brand. Please do free marketing for us." Because that's kind of, like, what you're subtly hoping happens if one of your team members builds an audience on Twitter or LinkedIn. You're like, cool, we'll get, like, the splashover effect. I would say, right now, about 25% of our team is doing it really well without us prompting. Like, they just want to do it, and they're leaning into it and enjoying it. 25% want to do it but maybe aren't sure how or where. And we've actually, like, built systems internally to help, like, build, like, you know, give them the space to do it and whatnot. And then, half are just like, yeah, I'm not doing that. I don't have any interest at all. CHAD: For me, it's more that you don't need to do that just because someone else is doing it. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't try to find the thing that you're passionate about and the way that you can find your voice or a thing to contribute to, even if it's an external sort of open-source project or something like that. MAC: Yeah, I mean, we have things like it doesn't have to be tied to the company. Like, a great example...so, Katrine, who's our head of sales, and my sister [laughter]...I guess I should -- CHAD: Full disclosure. MAC: Like, put a little asterisk, you know, on there as well, yeah. Not why she has the job, but just happens to be that way. So, she actually started running this, like, Women in Revenue meetup with Gong, another company, with this other woman Ashley, like, almost two years ago, like, after she started Commsor. It wasn't tied to Commsor or, like, it wasn't tied to our business or anything like that. And then she came to me, like, a year ago and was like, "Oh, me and Ashley want to start our own podcast. What do you think?" And we ended up actually, like, funding the podcast. Like, we pay for the editing, the hosting, like, all of a sudden, they need to, like, do it. And yeah, so we get to [inaudible 32:30], like, yeah, this podcast is, like, presented by Commsor, even though it's like Katrine and Ashley's podcast. We're, like, the permanent sponsor of it, basically. But it's been interesting. And now it's like, and now she's involved in this group called Wednesday Women where it's like, she wants to elevate other women in revenue roles. That's not what Commsor's mission is. I'm not saying we don't believe in it but, like, that's not the reason Commsor exists, right? But we were like, yeah, we gave her the space to do it. There has been so much good that has come to Commsor from that, from her running her own meetups, hosting her podcast, building a brand around that, elevating other women. Like, the amount of people who come to us and want to learn more about Commsor or [inaudible 33:05] want to work with us, whatever, because of the stuff she has done on a thing she cares about outside of work, I mean, it's obviously very tied to her work still, but it's not. It's not Commsor marketing. It's not for Commsor. It's not backed by Commsor, like, in an official capacity. So, there are ways that, like, if people have those passions, like you said, it'll bring people who are like-minded, who will get to know them, who then inherently want to be like, "Oh, well, I love what Katrine is doing. What does Katrine do at Commsor? Oh, cool. What does Commsor do?" Like, you know, it's like, there's a funnel. Like, not everybody will follow that path. But a not insignificant portion of the people that are aware of our brand have come in through that path. CHAD: And this is a good example of something that I talk a lot about is, is that the most effective thing that could probably happen? Probably not. But I would rather someone do the thing that is 60% effective and 100% fulfilling to them than doing something that is soul draining that they don't want to do that's 99%. MAC: Well, I'll also counter that they will show up and be a better employee and team member because they're...it's like, so even if they're, like, doing less by the numbers, long term, they'll do more, like, especially in sales, right? Like, SDR culture has been this, like, you basically grind it out for 12 months, maybe 18 months as an SDR, and you hope that you make it to the AE role, and if you don't, not very many people...you don't become an SDR for ten years. It is not a career. It is a stepping stone of, like, I'm going to stick my face in the boiling water. I'm going to deal with it. I'm going to suck it up, and hopefully it pays off in the long term. And, like, a huge percent of those folks end up churning out into customer success roles or completely different industries or whatever because it's, like, no one wants to keep their face on the grindstone for that long. But by, like, building a sales and a marketing system that's actually enjoyable for the people that are doing it, one, they bring their authentic selves to work, which means they're more likely to do it. They're more likely to stick around. They're more likely to have fun with it. And when they're having more fun with it, that also reflects on the people in the market because people can tell. People can tell that Commsor is having fun. Like, it sounds kind of dumb, but I think especially in B2B, like, having fun is actually kind of a competitive advantage. And I don't mean fun in the sense of, like, oh, we post memes on our LinkedIn account. Like, that's not, like, corporate fun, but, like, actually, like, real people personalities showing through the work fun, like the dinosaur thing, right? Like, I think my entire LinkedIn personality now is, like, anti-bad sales tactics, and dinosaurs are cool, which is also sad and kind of counterintuitive because, like, bad sales tactics are also things that dinosaurs [inaudible 35:40] [laughter], sort of a, like, sort of a funny play on things. But, like, I think my LinkedIn bio is: DM me for a fun fact about dinosaurs. It's not what we do at Commsor. It's not trying to pitch you on anything. And I have had so many conversations where someone's just like, "I want a fun fact about dinosaurs." I'm like, "Sure. All right, cool. Like, here you go." And sometimes, it ends up going further. And, you know, maybe Commsor comes up naturally. Other times, they're like, "Cool. That's an awesome fact that made my day, thanks," and then that's it. That's the end of it. But when you can enable those personalities, and that authenticity, and that fun to show through the work, both sides benefit. And when you're talking about things that don't scale, whatever, that's one of the classic pushbacks I get. - It's like, "Well, how does this, like, go-to-network relationship selling, how does it scale?" They're like, "I need to close 100 deals this year. I got to scale." It's like, I did a graphic...I can't remember the exact numbers, but looked at, like, you know, the stats on cold calling, for example. And it was like, to get one deal, you need five meetings because, on average, industry-wide in SaaS, 20% of those meetings become deals. To get five meetings, you have to cold call 250 or more individual accounts because that's how many, on average, it takes with cold call rates. But on average, it takes seven to eight cold calls to actually get someone to answer. So, I have to call Sally eight times to get an answer. So, I have to make over 2,000 cold calls to end up with one meeting. It's just insane. Whereas if you look at like relationship selling, warm intros, and warm paths like that, they close at a 78% rate across the board. So, it's actually like, okay, I can go out and get a pool of 250, 500, 1,000 contacts and try to get four leads, or I can go build relationships with ten people and get four deals that way. It's like, you don't need it to scale in the same way if you're building with that. The problem is that sales and marketing over the last decade have been built on the predictable revenue model. If I make X cold calls, I'll get X meetings, and I'll book Y deals. So, everyone is like, okay, it's scalable. If I want to close twice as much revenue, I need twice as many SDRs making twice as many cold calls to close twice as much. That just doesn't work anymore. The whole model that startup growth has been built on for ten years it doesn't work. I mean, even if you look at, like, the IPOs of tech companies over the last decade, it's like less than 5% of them have been consistently profitable for the last three years. So, if we're all trying to build our companies and everyone's like, ooh, look at the way that XYZ, Uber, or WeWork, whatever, did over the last ten years, they actually haven't worked. We've been trained and tricked on this system for 10, 15 years of, like, growth is everything. But, like, I don't know, just look at WeWork over the last month, right? Like, that's the shining star of, like, does it matter? Like, you can grow to a billion dollars in revenue. But if you're losing a billion to make a billion, the company making 20 million and spending 5 million to make that is actually a better company. CHAD: Yeah. It's totally...some people that is what they want. But it does change your motivation when what you're trying to do is create a company that you enjoy working at that maybe isn't taking over the world but making a positive contribution to it. That changes your approach. MAC: Yeah, you're not trying to consume everything in sight. There's a lot of different ways to do it. And yeah, I think the last ten years, especially in startup and SaaS land, have tricked a lot of people into thinking there's only one way to do things, and it's throw money in a grinder and hope to God that you get more money at the bottom of it than you put in the top of it, even though 99% of the time that's never the case. CHAD: Well, Mac, thank you so much for joining and sharing with us. If folks want to find out more about Commsor or get in touch with you, what are all the different ways that they can do that? MAC: Well, they can DM me on LinkedIn for a fun fact about dinosaurs before they ask what their real question is. It's just Mac Reddin. I think I'm the only one on LinkedIn with that name, so it shouldn't be too hard to find me. I'm the guy with the dinosaur emoji next to my name, just to really lean into it. Yeah, and then Commsor, it's commsor.com. We're, like, just now starting to reveal what we've been building over the last six or nine months with our pivot into this go-to-network world. So, we're early on that front. But you can keep your eyes peeled, and there'll be more to see over the next few months. CHAD: And Sally, thanks so much for joining today and help facilitating the conversation. I really appreciate it. SALLY: Absolutely. It's been really fun. CHAD: If folks want to get in touch with you or follow along, where are the places they can do that? SALLY: I am all up in LinkedIn, so feel free to hit me up there. That's probably the best place. Also, if anybody out there ends up using Commsor, you can also find me in the Herd, which is the community that Mac has built, so feel free to find me there as well. CHAD: And you, listener, 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 hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on Mastodon at cpytel@thoughtbot.social. 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. Special Guest: Mac Reddin.

We released episode one of this podcast on June 11, 2012. Now, more than a decade later, we're celebrating the 500th episode of our show. In honor of this milestone, Victoria, Will, and Chad caught up with each of the past hosts of the show: Ben Orenstein, Chris Toomey, and Lindsey Christensen. We chatted about what they're up to now, what they liked and learned from hosting the show, their time at thoughtbot, and more! Follow thoughtbot on X (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) 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. CHAD: And I'm your other host, Chad Pytel. We released episode one of this podcast on June 11, 2012. Now more than a decade later, were celebrating this: the 500th episode of our show. In honor of this milestone, Victoria, Will, and I caught up with each of the past hosts of the show: Ben Orenstein, Chris Toomey, and Lindsey Christensen. We chatted about what they're up to now, what they liked and learned from hosting the show and their time at thoughtbot, and more. First up: Ben Orenstein. Ben was the very first host of the show back in 2012 when he was a developer at thoughtbot. He is now the co-founder and Head of Product at Tuple, a remote pair programming tool for designers and developers. Ben, it's great to talk to you again. It's been a while since you and I talked. How have you been? BEN: I've been decent, yeah. It's fun to be back to my roots a little bit. I told some folks that I work with that I was coming back to the pod for the 500th Episode, and they were stoked. So, it's kind of a treat to get to be on these airwaves again. CHAD: What have you been up to since you left this show and thoughtbot? BEN: Well, I started a company. So, I was at thoughtbot for a while; I think it was seven years. And I eventually sort of struck out to start my own thing–had a false start or two here and there. And then, I ended up starting a company called Tuple, and we still exist today, fortunately. Tuple is a tool for doing remote pair programming. We started off on macOS and then wrote a Linux client. And we're launching a Windows client now. But it's sort of, like, screen sharing with remote control for developers who are actually writing code and want to have great, low latency remote control and who care about screen share quality and that sort of thing. I started that about five years ago with two co-founders. Today, we are a team of 11, I think it is. And it's been going well. Our timing was really great, it turned out. We launched a little bit before COVID. So, remote work turned into a lot more of a thing, and we were already in the market. So, that helped us a ton. It was quite a wild ride there for a bit. But things have calmed down a little lately, but it's still fun. I'm, like, really enjoying being a co-founder of a software company. It was what I've always sort of wanted to do. And it turns out it actually is pretty fun and pretty great. Although there are, of course, the ups and downs of business ownership. It is never quite as calm or relaxing as being an employee somewhere else. CHAD: You started Tuple instigated by...full disclosure: thoughtbot's an early customer of Tuple. We're still a customer. We use it a lot. BEN: Woo-hoo. I appreciate that. Thank you. CHAD: If I remember right, you started and were sort of instigated to create Tuple because there was a prior product that then Slack bought, and then it started to degrade. And now, it no longer exists in the same way that it did before. BEN: Yeah. So, there was this tool called Screenhero, which I actually started using -- CHAD: [inaudible 02:14] BEN: Yeah, first at thoughtbot. Some other thoughtboter introduced me to it, and we would use it for pair programming. And I was like, oh, this is nice. And then yeah, Slack kind of acqui-hired it and more or less ended up shutting the product down. And so, there was this gap in the market. And I would ask my friends, I would ask thoughtboters and other developers, like, "What are you using now that Screenhero is gone?" And no one had a good answer. And so, after a while of this thing sort of staring me in the face, I was like, we have to try to solve this need. There's clearly a hole in the market. Yeah, so we were heavily inspired by them in the early days. Hopefully, we've charted our own path now. But they were definitely...the initial seed was, you know, let's do Screenhero but try to not get bought early or something. CHAD: [laughs] How did you or did you feel like you captured a lot of the Screenhero customers and reached them in those early days? BEN: I think so. The pitch for it was sort of shockingly easy because Screenhero had kind of blazed this trail. Like, I would often just be like, "Oh, we're making a thing. Do you remember Screenhero?" And they'd go, "Oh yeah, I loved Screenhero". I'd be like, "Yeah, we're going to try to do that." And they'd be like, "Nice. Sign me up." So, it for sure helped a ton. I have no idea what percentage of customers we converted. And they were a pretty large success, so probably a small fraction, but it definitely, like, made the initial days much easier. CHAD: Yeah. And then, like you said, COVID happened. BEN: COVID happened, yeah. I think we had been around for about a year when COVID hit. So, we were getting our feet underneath us. And we were already, like, the company was already growing at a pretty good rate, and we were feeling pretty good about it. I don't think we had quite hit ramen profitable, but we were probably pretty close or, like, flirting with it. Yeah, the business, like, I don't know, tripled or quadrupled in a matter of months. We had a few big customers that, like, just told everyone to start using Tuple. So, we had, like, thousands and thousands of new users kind of immediately. So, it was a crazy time. Everything melted, of course. We hadn't quite engineered for that much scale. We had a really rough day or so as we scrambled, but fortunately, we got things under control. And then had this, like, very nice tailwind. Because we started the company assuming that remote work would grow. We assumed that there would be more remote developers every year. And, you know, it's probably maybe 5% of dev jobs are remote or maybe even less, but we expect to see this number creeping up. We don't think that trend will reverse. And so, COVID just, like, it just yanked it, you know, a decade in the future. CHAD: You haven't tripled or quadrupled your team size, have you? BEN: No. Well, I mean, I guess, I mean, we started as 3, and now we're 11, so kind of. CHAD: [laughs] Yeah, that's true. BEN: Expenses have not grown as fast as revenue, fortunately. CHAD: That's good. That's basically what I was asking [laughs]. BEN: Yeah, yeah. We're still a pretty small team, actually. We have only, like, four or five full-time engineers on the team at the moment, which is kind of wild because we are now, you know, we have three platforms to support: Linux, Windows, and Mac. It's a pretty complicated app doing, like, real-time streaming of audio, webcams, desktops, caring about OS-level intricacies. So, I think we will be hiring more people soon, although we haven't said that for a long time. We sort of have always had a bit of a hire-slow mentality to try to get the right team members and, like, feel a real pain before we hire someone into it. But we have been getting a bit more aggressive with hiring lately. VICTORIA: Well, I really appreciate Tuple. I installed it when I first started working here at thoughtbot. And we have random pairings with everyone across the company. So, I'll randomly get to meet someone halfway across the world who's working on similar projects. And I think they really enjoy that I have a tool they like working to share what they're working on. So, I want to thank you for that. And I'm curious about when you really started to scale during COVID, what were some of the technology architecture trade-offs you came across, and where did you land with it? BEN: Well, we got fairly...I don't know if it was lucky, but we...for a long time, for years, even through COVID, maybe the first four years of the company, all Tuple calls were purely peer-to-peer. And there was no server that we owned intermediating things. This was, like, kind of one of the keys of, like, not having expenses. The scale of revenue was we could have lots more calls happen. And it wouldn't cost us bandwidth or server capacity. To this day, still, for any calls with three or fewer participants, they're purely peer-to-peer. And this is nice for latency purposes because it just...we can find the most direct path to the internet between two people. It's also nice from our cost perspective because we don't need to pay to send that data. And that was hugely useful as call volume went up immensely. Didn't have to worry too much about server load and didn't have to worry too much about bandwidth costs. CHAD: Today, is there a central service that makes the initial connection for people? BEN: Yes, yeah, yeah. So, there is a signaling server. So, when you launch the app, you sign in, and you see, like, oh, which of my co-workers are online? So, there is actually a Rails app that handles that, actually, increasingly less the Rails app. We have now...I think it's a Go service that actually manages all those. I'm further and further from the code every year. Some of the technical questions might be a little bit beyond me, or I might have slightly out-of-date info. But back to the architecture question for a second, we did a pretty big refactor when we decided to go from just being a Mac client to supporting other platforms, where we split out a cross-platform real-time communication engine written in C++ so that we could use that for all of the heavy lifting, all the managing of the connections, and the tricky bandwidth estimation, and all this stuff, and use that across different platforms. And so, today, you have the cross-platform engine, and then on top of that is a, like, a less specific layer for each of the operating systems that we support. CHAD: So, you mentioned you're less and less in the code these days. So, what do you spend your time doing then? BEN: It's a mix of things. These days, it's basically mostly -- CHAD: Just cocktails on the beach, right? BEN: Cocktails, yes [laughs], cocktails on the beach, appearing on podcasts trying to sound important and impressive, yeah. Mostly product work. So, right before this, I just got off a call with some folks from The Browser Company. They are some of our first alpha users for our new Windows clients. So, I hopped on the call with them and, like, watched three of them install the product and inevitably run into some bugs. And, you know, chatted through those with the engineer that was working on it, prioritized some stuff, made some decisions about what's coming up next, and what we're going to ignore. So, mostly product work these days. For the first five years of the company, I was CEO, so I was doing kind of everything: marketing, and also hiring, and also product. About two months ago, I stepped down as CEO, and one of my other co-founders, Spencer, stepped up. And so, now my focus has narrowed to be mostly just product stuff and much less on the marketing or hiring side. VICTORIA: Yeah, you mentioned that it was a little more comfortable to be an employee than to be a founder. I don't know if you could say more about that because, certainly, a lot of engineers are smart enough and capable enough to run their own company. But what really informed your choice there, and do you regret it? [laughs] BEN: I definitely don't regret it. thoughtbot was a close second in terms of wonderful professional experiences. But running my own thing has been the most interesting professional thing I've done by a big margin. It has also been more stressful. And, Chad, I don't know if you remember, I think, like, maybe eight years ago, you tweeted something like, if you want to sleep well at night, and, like, value that, like, peace of mind, like, don't start a company or something. I have experienced that. CHAD: [laughs] BEN: A lot more, yeah, like waking up in the middle of the night worrying about things. It feels a little bit like the highs are higher; the lows are lower. Being an employee somewhere, it's like, if this company fails, I know I can go get another job, right? Like, you're a developer. You're extremely employable. But as the owner of the company, if the company fails, like, a huge chunk of your net worth is gone. Like, this thing you poured your life into is gone. It's way more stressful and traumatic to have that happen, or have that threatened to be happening, or just imagine that happening. So, overall, I have found the trade-off to be totally worth it. It's awesome to make your own decisions and chart your own path. And when it works, it can work in a way that being a salaried employee can't. So, I'm happy with those trade-offs. But I think that is a good question for people to ask themselves as they consider doing something like this is, like: is that the kind of trade-off that you want to make? Because it has significant downsides for sure. WILL: I am a big fan of Tuple also. I love it. It [inaudible 10:08] easy, especially with remote work. You hit the jackpot with COVID and remote work, so kudos for that [laughs]. Was there anything...because I know from our previous companies, about over...hopefully a lot more of the good stuff than the bad stuff. But was there anything that you learned? Because you were at thoughtbot for seven years. Was there anything that you're like, oh my gosh, I learned that, and it's helped me till this day while I'm running my company? BEN: Yeah, quite a bit, actually. I think it'd be hard to tease apart exactly which lessons, but I do...so I ran Upcase for thoughtbot and also FormKeep. So, I got a chance to kind of run a small division of the company, while still being a normal employee and, like, having not much of that risk. And I think that was a really wonderful opportunity for me to, like, practice the skills that I was interested in. Just, like, how do you market a thing? How do you design a product and have it be good? How do you prioritize user feedback? There were a ton of lessons from those days that I feel like made me better at running our company when we actually took a shot at it. So, there were, like, the specific things that I learned by the work I was doing there. But then just, like, I mean, I think I am the programmer I am today because of, like, the weekly dev discussions that happened. Like, spending so much time with Joe Ferris and, like, trying to copy as much of his brain as possible, like, really, like, imprinted on me as, like, a programmer. And also, just, like, a lot of the sort of cultural things from my time at thoughtbot of, like, you should be sharing the things you're learning. Like, writing blog posts is a great use of time. Like, doing open-source work is a great use of time. And maybe you can't directly trace how doing, like, working in public or sharing information benefits the company. It's hard to, like, attribute it from a marketing sense. But if you sort of have faith that in the large, it's going to work out, it probably will. That feels like a thoughtbot lesson to me, and I think it has served us really well; where I recorded a weekly podcast for a long time called The Art of Product. I'm recording a new podcast called Hackers Incorporated with Adam Wathan of Tailwind fame. And I don't ever think, like, hmm, how many new leads do we think we get per episode, and how many hours has that taken? What's the ROI? I just have this sort of reflex that I developed from thoughtbot time of, like, you should be putting stuff out there, or you should be giving back. You should help other people. And that will probably help your business and make it work in the long term. CHAD: That's a good lesson [laughs]. One of the other things, you know, while you were a host of Giant Robots, you were the first host. I remember, you know, encouraging you to be the first host, and I think we talked about that in one of the episodes along the way. But we also transitioned the format a little bit, especially as you started to work on products here; you know, it was more about the building of those products and following along with those. And one of the things that sort of half-jokingly defined, I think, your impact on a lot of products was pricing, experimenting with pricing, learning about pricing, increasing prices more than people were maybe comfortable doing so. How has that worked out with Tuple, pricing in particular? BEN: It's really hard to say. It's hard to know what, like, the other path would have been through the world-. We sort of decided from, like, the early days that we wanted to have, like, a fairly premium price. Like, we wanted to be the product that was really good and was, like, a little bit annoyingly expensive, but you still paid for it because it felt worth it. And I think people could debate in both directions whether we nailed that or not. We have had a price increase that we ended up rolling back. We went, like, a little too far one time and said, "You know what? I think we're a little bit over," and we reverted that. But I would say even today, we are still a fairly pricey product. I mean, I'm pretty happy with how the company has done. I can't prove to you that, like, if the price were half what it is, we would have, you know, better success or not. CHAD: I think it'd be very hard to make the argument that if it was half that, you would have double the number of customers. BEN: Yeah, that's probably not true. CHAD: Not with the customers that you have, who are companies that will pay for products that they use as much as Tuple. BEN: Yeah, I'm happy serving the kind of companies, and they end up being mostly tech companies that really value developer happiness. When their developers come to them and they say, "We don't want to pair over Zoom. We like this thing. It's better. It feels nicer to use," they say, "Okay," and they buy the tool for them. There are places where that's not the case. And they say, "We already have a thing that does screen sharing. You're not allowed to buy this." We don't invest a lot of time trying to sell to those people or convince them that they're wrong. And I'm pretty happy serving sort of the first group. CHAD: So, you've mentioned that you've still been podcasting. To be honest, I didn't realize you were starting something new. Is it live now? BEN: It is live now, yeah. CHAD: Awesome. Where can people find that? BEN: hackersincorporated.com. It's about the transition from developer to founder, which is kind of what we've been touching on here. Yeah, hopefully, the audience is developers who want to start something or have started something who are maybe a little bit further behind progression-wise. And it's kind of, like, I have some lessons, and Adam has some lessons, and, you know, we don't think that we're experts. But sometimes it's useful to just hear, like, two people's story and sort of see, like, what seemingly has worked for them. So, we've been trying to share things there. And I think people will find it useful. VICTORIA: I was going to ask you for a lesson, maybe give us a little sample about how would you advise someone who's built a product and wants to market it, and it's targeted towards developers since you mentioned that previously as well. BEN: Yeah, in a way, the question already contains a problem. It's like, oh, I built the product; now how do I market it? It's a little bit indicative of a very common failure mode for developers, which is that. They sort of assume, okay, after you make the product, you then figure out how you're going to market it. And marketing is sort of a thing you layer on later on when you realize that just, like, throwing it on Twitter or Product Hunt didn't really work. When we started building Tuple, I was out there marketing it already. So, I had two co-founders, so this is a luxury I had. My two co-founders were writing code, and I was out doing stuff. I was recording podcasts. I was tweeting about things. I was making videos. I was giving conference talks. And I was getting people to hear about our product well before it was done. In fact, I was even selling it. I was taking pre-orders for annual subscriptions to the app while it was still vaporware. So, I would say, like, you basically can't start marketing too early. If you start marketing early and no one really cares, well, then you don't really have to build it probably. I would actually even go a little further and say, like, I started marketing Tuple before we had a product available. But in reality, I started marketing Tuple seven or so years before that when I started publishing things through thoughtbot. It's like when I was traveling around giving talks about Ruby, and when I was making screencasts about Vim, and when I was running Upcase, I was, over time, building an audience. And that audience was useful for thoughtbot, and it also was useful for me so that when I left, I had something like 10,000 Twitter followers or something, a few thousand people on our mailing list. But there were a lot of developers that already sort of knew me and trusted me to make fairly good things. And so, when I said, "Hey, I've made a new thing, and it's for you," I really benefited from those years of making useful content and trying to be useful on the internet. And in the early days, we had people sign up, and they would say, "I don't even really think I'm going to use this. But I've learned so much from you over the years that I want to support you, so I'm going to pay for a subscription." VICTORIA: I like your answer because I think the same thing when people ask me, like, because I am an organizer for Women Who Code, and I know all these great people from showing up for years in person months over months. And so, then people will ask, "Oh, how do I recruit more women in my company?" I'm like, "Well, you got to start showing up [laughs] now and do that for a couple of years, and then maybe people will trust you," right? So, I really like that answer. WILL: How has your relationship with Chad continued to grow since you left? Because seven years at the company is a lot. And it seems like you're still on really, really good terms, and you're still friends. And I know that doesn't happen at every company. BEN: I mean, it was tough deciding to leave. I think, like, both of us felt pretty sad about it. That was the longest I'd ever worked anywhere, and I really enjoyed the experience. So, I think it was tough on both sides, honestly. But we haven't kept in that much touch since then. I think we've emailed a handful of times here and there. We're both sociable people, and we sort of get each other. And there's a long history there. So, I think it's just easy for us to kind of drop back into a friendly vibe is sort of how I feel about it. CHAD: Yeah. And the way I explain it to people, you know, when you're leading a company, which Ben and I both are, you put a lot of energy into that and to the people who are on that team. If you're doing things right, there's not really hard feelings when someone leaves. But you need to put in a lot of effort to keep in touch with people outside of the company and a lot of energy. And, to be honest, I don't necessarily do as good a job with that as I would like because it's a little bit higher priority to maintain relationships with them, the people who are still at thoughtbot and who are joining. BEN: What you're saying is I'm dead to you [laughter]. That's CEO, for you're dead to me. CHAD: No. It's just...no hard feelings. BEN: Totally. CHAD: I think one of the things that has been great about the show over the years is that we haven't been afraid to change the format, which I think has been important to keeping it going. So, there is sort of; in fact, the website now is organized into seasons. And I went back and re-categorized all the episodes into seasons. And when the seasons were made up of, like, sort of the format of the show or particular hosts...when we started, it was just an interview show, and it was largely technical topics. And then we started The Bike Shed, and the technical topics sort of moved over there. But it also went with your interests more under the product and business side. Then you started working on products at thoughtbot, so it started to go even more in that. And I think Chris joined you on the show, and that was sort of all about those topics. BEN: Yeah, that makes sense. I think if you don't let the hosts kind of follow their interests, they're going to probably burn out on the thing. It's not fun to force yourself, I think, to record a podcast. CHAD: Yeah. And then when you left, you know, I took over hosting and hosted by myself for a while, went back to the interview format, but then was joined by Lindsey for a little while. We experimented with a few different things: one, interviews, but then we did a whole, just under a year, where we followed along with three companies. And each month, we would have an interview episode where we talked to them, all three companies, about the same topic. And then, we also did an episode with just Lindsey and I talking about that topic and about what we learned from the startup companies that we were following along with for the year. And now we're back to interview freeform, different guests, different topics. It seems like we're going to stick with that for a little while. But, obviously, as Will and Victoria have said, like, we'll probably change it again in some way, you know, a year, two years, three years from now. VICTORIA: Yeah, and I'm definitely bringing my interest around DevOps and platform engineering, so you'll see more guests who have that focus in their background. And with that, sometimes my interview style is more; how do I ask a question that I can't read from your developer docs and that I might not understand the answer to? [laughs] That's kind of where I like to go with it. So yeah, I'm really excited about...it's probably one of my favorite parts of my job here at thoughtbot because I get to meet so many interesting people. And, hopefully, that's interesting to everyone else [laughs] and our guests, yeah. BEN: Totally. Well, I dramatically underestimated how awesome it would be to meet all kinds of cool people in the industry when I started the podcast. I didn't truly connect in my head, like, wait a second, if I have a 45-minute conversation with, like, a lot of prominent, awesome people in our field, that's going to be really interesting and useful for me. So, I think, yeah, it's nice to be in the hosting seat. VICTORIA: And it's so surprising how I'll meet someone at a conference, and I'll invite them onto the podcast. And the way it winds up is that whatever we're talking about on the show is directly relevant to what I'm working on or a problem that I have. It's been incredible. And I really appreciate you for coming back for our 500th Episode here. CHAD: Ben, thanks very much again for joining us, and congratulations on all the success with Tuple. And I wish you the best. BEN: Thank you so much. Thanks for being a continuing customer. I really appreciate it. CHAD: Next, we caught up with Chris Toomey, who had a run as co-host of the show with Ben throughout 2016. CHRIS: Hi there. Thanks for having me. So, we're talking with all of the past hosts. I know you joined the show, and you were on it with Ben. And then you moved over to The Bike Shed, right? CHRIS: Yeah. So, I had co-hosted with Ben for about six months. And then I think I was transitioning off of Upcase, and so that ended sort of the Giant Robots “let's talk about business” podcast tour for me. And then, I went back to consulting for a while. And, at some point, after Derek Prior had left, I took over as the host of The Bike Shed. So, I think there was probably, like, a year and a half, two-year gap in between the various hostings. CHAD: Are you doing any podcasting now? CHRIS: I'm not, and I miss it. It was a lot of fun. It was, I think, an ideal medium for me. I'm not as good at writing. I tend to over-edit and overthink. But when you get me on a podcast, I just start to say what's in my head, and I tend to not hate it after the fact. So [chuckles], that combination I found to be somewhat perfect for me. But yeah, lacking that in my current day-to-day. CHAD: Well, what's been taking up your time since you left? CHRIS: I had decided it was time to sort of go exploring, try and maybe join a startup, that sort of thing. I was sort of called in that direction. So, just after I left thoughtbot, I did a little bit of freelancing, but that was mostly to sort of keep the lights on and start to connect with folks and see if there might be an opportunity out there. I was able to connect with a former thoughtbot client, Sam Zimmerman, who was looking to start something as well. And so, we put our act together and formed a company called Sagewell, which was trying to build a digital financial platform for seniors, which is a whole bunch of different complicated things to try and string together. So, that was a wonderful experience. I was CTO of that organization. And I think that ran for about two and a half years. Unfortunately, Sagewell couldn't quite find the right sort of sticking point and, unfortunately, shut down a little bit earlier in this year. But that was, I would say, the lion's share of what I have done since leaving thoughtbot, really wonderful experience, got to learn a ton about all of the different aspects of building a startup. And I think somewhat pointedly learned that, like, it's messy, but I think I do like this startup world. So, since leaving Sagewell, I've now joined a company called August Health, which has a couple of ex-thoughtboters there as well. And August is post their Series A. They're a little bit further along in their journey. So, it was sort of a nice continuation of the startup experience, getting to see a company a little bit further on but still with lots of the good type of problems, lots of code to write, lots of product to build. So, excited to be joining them. And yeah, that's mostly what's taking up my time these days. CHAD: So, I know at Sagewell, you made a lot of technical architecture, team decisions. It was Rails in the backend, Svelte in the frontend, if I'm not mistaken. CHRIS: Yep, that's correct. CHAD: You know, hindsight is always 2020. Is there anything you learned along the way, or given how things ended up, that you would do differently? CHRIS: Sure. I was really happy with the tech stack that we were able to put together. Svelte was probably the most out there of the choices, I would say, but even that, it was sort of relegated to the frontend. And so, it was a little bit novel for folks coming into the codebase. Most folks had worked in React before but didn't know Svelte. They were able to pick it up pretty quickly. But Inertia.js was actually the core sort of architecture of the app, sort of connected the frontend and the backend, and really allowed us to move incredibly quickly. And I was very, very happy with that decision. We even ended up building our mobile applications, both for iOS and Android. So, we had native apps in both of the stores, but the apps were basically wrappers around the Rails application with a technology similar to Turbolinks native–if folks are familiar with that so, sort of a WebView layer but with some native interactions where you want. And so, like, we introduced a native login screen on both platforms so that we could do biometric login and that sort of thing. But at the end of the day, most of the screens in the app didn't need to be differentiated between a truly native mobile app and what like, mobile WebView would look like. So, we leaned into that. And it was incredible just how much we were able to do with that stack and how quickly we were able to move, and also how confidently we were able to move, which was really a nice thing. Having the deep integration between the backend and the frontend really allowed a very small team to get a lot done in a short time. CHAD: Does that code live on in any capacity? CHRIS: No. CHAD: Oh. How does that make you feel? [chuckles] CHRIS: It makes me feel very sad, I will say. That said, I mean, at the end of the day, code is in service of a business. And so, like, the code...there are, I think, probably a couple of things that we might be able to extract and share. There were some interesting...we did some weird stuff with the serializers and some, like, TypeScript type generation on the frontend that was somewhat novel. But at the end of the day, you know, code is in service of a business, and, unfortunately, the business is not continuing on. So, the code in the abstract is...it's more, you know, the journey that we had along the way and the friends we made and whatnot. But I think, for me, sort of the learnings of I really appreciate this architecture and will absolutely bring it to any new projects that I'm building from, you know, greenfield moving forward. VICTORIA: I'm curious what it was like to go from being a consultant to being a big player in a startup and being responsible for the business and the technology. How did that feel for you? CHRIS: I would say somewhat natural. I think the consulting experience really lent well to trying to think about not just the technical ramifications but, you know, what's the business impact? How do we structure a backlog and communicate about what features we want to build in what order? How do we, you know, scope a minimal MVP? All those sorts of things were, I think, really useful in allowing me to sort of help shape the direction of the company and be as productive of an engineering team as we could be. CHAD: A lot of the projects you worked on at thoughtbot were if not for startups, helping to launch new products. And then, a lot of the work you did at thoughtbot, too, was on Upcase, which was very much building a business. CHRIS: Yes. I definitely find myself drawn in that direction, and part of like, as I mentioned, I seem to be inclined towards this startup world. And I think it's that, like, the intersection between tech and business is sort of my sweet spot. I work with a lot of developers who are really interested in getting sort of deeper into the technical layers, or Docker and Kubernetes and orchestration. And I always find myself a little bit resistant to those. I'm like, I mean, whatever. Let's just...let's get something out there so that we can get users on it. And I am so drawn to that side, you know, you need both types of developers critically. I definitely find myself drawn to that business side a little bit more than many of the folks that I work with, and helping to bridge that gap and communicate about requirements and all those sort of things. So, definitely, the experience as a consultant really informed that and helped me have sort of a vocabulary and a comfort in those sort of conversations. WILL: How did Upcase come about? Because I know I've talked to numerous people who have gone through Upcase. I actually went through it, and I learned a ton. So, how did that come about? CHRIS: I think that was a dream in Ben Orenstein's eye. It started as thoughtbot Learn many, many years ago. There was a handful of workshops that had been recorded. And so, there were the video recordings of those workshops that thoughtbot used to provide in person. Ben collected those together and made them sort of an offering on the internet. I think Chad, you, and I were on some podcast episode where you sort of talked about the pricing models over time and how that went from, like, a high dollar one-time download to, like, $99 a month to $29 a month, and now Upcase is free. And so, it sort of went on this long journey. But it was an interesting exploration of building a content business of sort of really leaning into the thoughtbot ideal of sharing as much information as possible, and took a couple of different shapes over time. There was the weekly iterations of the video series that would come out each week, as well as the, like, longer format trails, and eventually some exercises and whatnot, but very much an organic sort of evolving thing that started as just a handful of videos and then became much more of a complete platform. I think I hit the high points there. But, Chad, does that all sound accurate to you? CHAD: Yeah, I led the transition from our workshops to Learn, which brought everything together. And then, I stepped away as product manager, and Ben took it the next step to Upcase and really productized it into a SaaS sort of monthly recurring billing model and took it over from there. But it still exists, and a lot of the stuff there is still really good [laughs]. CHRIS: Yeah, I remain deeply proud of lots of the videos on that platform. And I'm very glad that they are still out there, and I can point folks at them. VICTORIA: I love that idea that you said about trying to get as much content out there as possible or, like, really overcommunicate. I'm curious if that's also stayed with you as you've moved on to startups, about just trying to get that influence over, like, what you're doing and how you're promoting your work continues. CHRIS: I will say one of the experiences that really sticks with me is I had followed thoughtbot for a while before I actually joined. So, I was reading the blog, and I was listening to the podcasts and was really informing a lot of how I thought about building software. And I was so excited when I joined thoughtbot to, like, finally see behind the curtain and see, like, okay, so, what are the insider secrets? And I was equal parts let down...actually, not equal parts. I was a little bit let down but then also sort of invigorated to see, like, no, no, it's all out there. It's like, the blog and the open-source repos and those sort of...that really is the documentation of how thoughtbot thinks about and builds software. So, that was really foundational for me. But at the same time, I also saw sort of the complexity of it and how much effort goes into it, you know, investment time Fridays, and those sort of things. Like, a thoughtbot blog post is not a trivial thing to put up into the world. So many different people were collaborating and working on it. And so, I've simultaneously loved the sharing, and where sharing makes sense, I've tried to do that. But I also recognize the deep cost. And I think for thoughtbot, it's always made sense because it's been such a great mechanism for getting the thoughtbot name out there and for getting clients and for hiring developers. At startups, it becomes a really interesting trade-off of, should we be allocating time to building up sort of a brand in the name and getting ourselves, you know, getting information out there? Versus, should we be just focusing on the work at hand? And most organizations that I've worked with have bias towards certainly less sharing than thoughtbot, but just not much at all. Often, I'll see folks like, "Hey, maybe we should start a blog." And I'm like, "Okay, let's just talk about how much effort that [laughs] actually looks like." And I wonder if I'm actually overcorrected on that, having seen, you know, the high bar that thoughtbot set. CHAD: I think it's a struggle. This is one of my [laughs] hot topics or spiels that I can go on. You know, in most other companies, that kind of thing only helps...it only helps in hiring or the people being fulfilled in the work. But at most companies, your product is not about that; that's not what your business is. So, having a more fulfilled engineering team who is easier to hire—don't get me wrong, there are advantages to that—but it doesn't also help with your sales. CHRIS: Yes. CHAD: And at thoughtbot, our business is totally aligned with the people and what we do as designers and developers. And so, when we improve one, we improve the other, and that's why we can make it work. That is marketing for the product that we actually sell, and that's not the case at a SaaS software company. CHRIS: Yes, yeah, definitely. That resonates strongly. I will say, though, on the hiring side, hiring at thoughtbot was always...there was...I won't say a cheat code, but just if someone were to come into the hiring process and they're like, "Oh yeah, I've read the blog. I listen to the podcast," this and that, immediately, you were able to skip so much further into the conversation and be like, "Okay, what do you agree with? What do you disagree with? Like, let's talk." But there's so much. Because thoughtbot put so much out there, it was easy to say, like, "Hey, this is who we are. Do you like that? Is that your vibe?" Whereas most engineering organizations don't have that. And so, you have to try and, like, build that in the context of, you know, a couple of hour conversations in an interview, and it's just so much harder to do. So, again, I've leaned in the direction of not going anywhere near thoughtbot's level of sharing. But the downside when you are hiring, you're like, oh, this is going to be trickier. CHAD: Yeah. One of the moments that stands out in my mind, and maybe I've told this story before on the podcast, but I'll tell it again. When we opened the New York studio, it was really fast growing and was doing a lot of hiring. And one of the people who had just joined the company a couple of weeks before was doing an interview and rejected the person was able to write an articulate reason why. But it all boiled down to this person is, you know, not a fit for thoughtbot. Based on what they were able to describe, I felt very confident with the ability or with the fact that they were able to make that call, even though they had been here only a couple of weeks, because they joined knowing who we were, and what we stand for, and what our culture and our values are, and the way that we do things, and all that kind of thing. And so, yeah, that's definitely a huge benefit to us. VICTORIA: I've certainly enjoyed that as well, as someone who hires developers here and also in meeting new companies and organizations when they already know thoughtbot. That's really nice to have that reputation there, coming from my background—some really more scrappier startup kind of consulting agencies. But, you know, I wanted to talk a little bit more about your podcasting experience while you're here. So, I know you were on both The Bike Shed and Giant Robots. Which is the better podcast? [laughter] So, what's your...do you have, like, a favorite episode or favorite moment, or maybe, like, a little anecdote you can share from hosting? CHRIS: Well, I guess there's, like, three different eras for me in the podcasting. So, there's Giant Robots with Ben talking more about business stuff, and I think that was really useful. I think it was more of a forcing function on me because I sort of...Both Ben and I were coming on; we were giving honest, transparent summaries of our, like, MRR and stats and how things were growing, and acted as sort of an accountability backstop, which was super useful but also just kind of nerve-wracking. Then, when I joined the Bike Shed, the interviewing sequence that I did each week was just a new person that I was chatting with. And I sort of had to ramp them up on, hey, here's a quick summary on how to think about podcasting. Don't worry, it'll be great. Everybody have fun. But I was finding each of the guests. I was sort of finding a topic to talk about with them. So, that ended up being a lot more work. And then, the last three years chatting with Steph that was by far my favorite. There was just such a natural back-and-forth. It really was just capturing the conversations of two developers at thoughtbot and the questions we would ask each other as we hit something complicated in a piece of code or, "Oh, I saw this, you know, article about a new open-source repository. What do you think about that?" It was so much easier, so much more natural, and, frankly, a lot of fun to do that. And, two, I actually do have an answer to the favorite podcast episode, which is the first episode that Steph was ever on. It was before she actually joined as a co-host. But it was called “What I Believe About Software.” And it was just this really great, deep conversation about how we think about software. And a lot of it is very much, like, thoughtbot ideals, I would say. But yeah, Steph came in and just brought the heat in that first episode, and I remember just how enjoyable that experience was. And I was like, all right, let's see if I can get her to hang out a little bit more, and, thankfully, she was happy to join. WILL: What was your favorite position, I guess you can call it? Because you say you like the mixture of business and, you know, development. So, you've been in leadership as development director, CTO. You've been a web developer. You've been over content, like, with Upcase. What was your favorite position [inaudible 16:43] you were doing, and why was it your favorite? CHRIS: The development director role feels like sort of a cheating answer, but I think that would be my answer because it contained a handful of things within it. Like, as development director, I was still working on client projects three days a week. And then, one day a week was sort of allocated to the manager-type tasks, or having one-on-ones with my team sort of helping to think about strategy and whatnot. And then, ideally, still getting some amount of investment time, although the relative amounts of those always flexed a little bit. Because that one sort of encompassed different facets, I think that's going to be my answer. And I think, like, some of what drew me to consulting in the first place and kept me in that line of work for seven years was the variety, you know, different clients, as well as, even within thoughtbot, different modes of working in podcasts or video. Or there was a bootcamp that I taught, a session of Metis, which that was a whole other experience. And so, getting that variety was really interesting. And I think as sort of a tricky answer to your question, the development director role as a singular thing contained a multitude, and so I think that was the one that would stand out to me. It's also the most, you know, the one that I ended on, so [laughs] it might just be recency bias, but yeah. VICTORIA: Oh, I love that. Is there anything else that you would like to promote on the podcast today? CHRIS: No, although as you ask the question, I feel like I should, I don't know, make some things to promote, get back into some, I don't know, content generation or something like that. But for now, no. I'm, you know, diving into the startup life, and it's a wonderful and engrossing way to do work, but it does definitely take up a lot of my headspace. So, it's an interesting trade-off. But right now, I don't know; if folks are online and they want to say hi, most of my contact information is readily available. So, I would love to say hi to folks, anyone that listened in the past or, you know, has any thoughts in the now. Would love to connect with folks. But otherwise, yeah, thank you so much for having me on. CHAD: In 2017, I took over from Ben as solo host of the show but was joined by Lindsey Christainson as cohost in 2019. After some time away from thoughtbot, Lindsey is back with us and we sat down to catch up with her. VICTORIA: Why don't you tell me about your current role with thoughtbot? LINDSEY: I am currently supporting marketing and business development at thoughtbot, as well as working as a marketing consultant for thoughtbot clients. VICTORIA: Great. And I understand that you had worked with thoughtbot many years ago, and that's when you also came on as a co-host of Giant Robots. Is that right? LINDSEY: Yeah, a couple of years ago. I left thoughtbot in spring of 2021. And I forget how long my stint was as a co-host of Giant Robots, but over a year, maybe a year and a half, two years? CHAD: Yeah, I think that's right. I think you started in 2019. LINDSEY: Yeah. Yeah, that sounds right. And Chad and I were co-hosts, I think, similar to the setup today in which sometimes we hosted together, and sometimes we were conducting interviews separately. CHAD: And then we sort of introduced a second season, where we followed along with a batch of companies over the course of the entire season. And that was fun, and we learned a lot. And it was nice to have consistent guests. LINDSEY: Yeah, that was a lot of fun. I really liked that format. I don't know; they almost were, like, more than guests at that point. They were just like other co-hosts [laughs] that we could rely on week in, week out to check in with them as they're working on early-stage companies. So, every time we checked in with them, they usually had some new, exciting developments. WILL: I really like that idea. How did y'all come up with that? CHAD: I'm not sure. I think a few years before I had taken over hosting of the show, and I forget...my memory maybe is that I went to Lindsey and said, "You know, let's do something different." But I'm not sure. Does that match your memory, Lindsey? LINDSEY: Yeah, I think there were two main drivers; one was I think you were feeling like you were having similar conversations in the interviews every time. Like, you couldn't get to a certain depth because every time you were interviewing someone, you were doing, like, the, "Well, tell me your founding story." And, you know, how did you raise funding? It kind of got a little bit repetitive. And then, on the side, the few we had done together, I think we both really enjoyed. So, we were thinking, like, what's the format in which the two of us could co-host together more regularly? Because I'm a pleasure to talk to [laughter]. I think you were like, I need to talk to Lindsey more. [inaudible 3:13] VICTORIA: What is your hosting style? How would you describe your approach to hosting a podcast? LINDSEY: I mean, obviously, it's a podcast about products and business. I think as a marketer, I am, you know, drawn a lot to the marketing side, so tending to ask questions around go-to-market audience, users. That's always just, like, a particular interest of mine. But then also, like, the feelings. I love asking about the feelings of things, you know, how did it feel when you started? How did it feel when you made this tough decision? So, that's another thing I think I noticed in my interviews is asking about some of the emotions behind business decisions. VICTORIA: And I like hearing about how people felt at the time and then how they felt afterwards [laughs]. And, like, how people around them supported each other and that type of thing. That's really fun. I'm curious, too, from your marketing background and having to do with podcasts like; some founders, I think, get the advice to just start a podcast to start building a community. But I'm curious on your thoughts about, like, how does podcasting really play into, like, business and marketing development for products? LINDSEY: Oh yeah. It's become definitely, like, a standard channel in B2B these days. I feel like that it's pretty typical for a company to have a podcast as one way that they engage their audience and their users. In marketing, you're really vying for people's attention, and people's attention span is getting shorter and shorter. So, like, if you have an ad or a blog, you're getting, like, seconds, maybe minutes of someone's attention. And whereas something like a podcast offers a unique channel to have someone's undivided attention for, you know, 30 minutes, an hour, and if you're lucky, you know, checking back in week over week. So, it became a really popular method. That said, I think you're probably also seeing the market get saturated [laughs] with podcasts now, so some diminishing returns. And, you know, as always, kind of looking for, you know, what's the next way? What's the next thing that people are interested in in ways to capture their attention? CHAD: What is the next thing? LINDSEY: I don't know, back to micro-content? TikTok videos -- CHAD: Yeah, I was going to say TikTok, yeah. LINDSEY: Yeah, you know, 10-30 seconds, what can you communicate? VICTORIA: I see people live streaming on Twitch a lot for coding and developer products. LINDSEY: Yeah, I think we've seen some of that, too. We've been experimenting more at thoughtbot with live streaming as well. It's another interesting mechanism. But yeah, I don't know, it's interesting. It's another form of, like, community and how people engage with their communities. So, it's always evolving. It's always evolving, and sometimes it's not. Sometimes, people just do want to get in a room together, too, which is always interesting. WILL: What has been, in your experience, the good the bad? Like, how do you feel about the way that it has shifted? Because I think you started in, like, 2000, like, kind of earlier 2000, 2005, something around there. And it was totally different than now like you're saying. Because I feel like, you know, Channel 5 30-second ad, you know, with some of the marketing depending on what you're doing, to now to where you're, like, you're paying influencers to advertise your product, or you're doing an ad. Or it's more social media-driven and tech-driven. What has been your opinion and feelings on the way that it has grown and evolved? LINDSEY: Marketing, in general, yeah, I graduated college in 2005 and started my marketing career. And yeah, you could, like, actually get people to click on banner ads back then, which was pretty [inaudible 07:14] [laughs]. WILL: I forgot about banner ads [laughs]. LINDSEY: I don't know, yeah. I don't know. In order for myself to not just get too frustrated, I think I've got to, like, view it as a game kind of. What new things are we going to try? You know, what do we see work? But it can really depend. And I've always been in B2B side of things. And consumer, I'm sure, has its own kind of evolution around how people engage and how they consume content and byproducts. But in B2B, you know, it can really depend on industry too. You know, I'm working with a client right now in the senior living space, and they're really big in in-person conferences. So, that's how people consume, get a lot of their information and, make connections, and learn about new products. So, it's been interesting to work in an industry that what might be considered, like, a little bit more old-school channels are still effective. And then just thinking about how you weave in the new channels with the existing ones without ignoring them. They might get information in conferences, but they're still a modern human who will then, you know, search online to learn more, for example. VICTORIA: It reminds me of a phrase I like to say, which is that, like, technology never dies; you just have more of it. There's just more different options and more different ways to do things. And some people are always, you know, sometimes you have to be flexible and do everything. CHAD: So, tell us more about what you did in between...after you left thoughtbot, what did you do? LINDSEY: I was heading up B2B marketing for a company called Flywire, which is headquartered in Boston but is a global company now. And they were just kind of starting their B2B business unit, which, as I mentioned, B2B is my personal specialty. I had been connected to their CMO through the Boston startup community. And yeah, I was helping them kind of launch their go-to-market for B2B. The industries they were in before...they got their start in higher education and then expanded in healthcare and found a niche in luxury travel, and then we were figuring out the B2B piece. But yeah, I was there for about a year and a half. They actually went public the second week I was there, which was an interesting [laughs] experience. I knew they were, like, on that journey, but it was kind of funny to be there the second week, and people were, like, "Congrats." And I was like, "Well, I definitely didn't have anything to do with it because I just finished my onboarding, but thank you," [laughs]. CHAD: One of the things that really impressed me when you joined thoughtbot was the way in which you learned about who we were and really internalized that in a way where you were then able to pretty meaningfully understand our market, our positioning in the market, and come up with new strategies for us. I assume that's something you're good at in general [laughs]. How do you approach it? How did you approach it when you joined Flywire, for example? And how was it the same or different than how you approached thoughtbot? LINDSEY: Ooh, yeah, that's a good question. And I appreciate that comment because it's difficult. But I think, yeah, with any new organization that I'm joining, you know, I think starting out with your kind of mini-listening tour of your key stakeholders across, you know, the different departmental focuses to get a sense of, what are the challenges? What are the opportunities? It's actually like, you know, it's the SWOT analysis, kind of trying to fill in your own mind map of a SWOT analysis of where the company is. What are the major hurdles you're facing? Where are people trying to go? What have they tried that's worked? What have they tried that's failed? But then, like, I think for the culture component, I think a part of that maybe is, like, feel, and maybe something that I do have a knack for. Again, maybe this is, like, you know, emotional intelligence quotient, where it's like, you know, but it's the company, you know, who is this company? What is important to them? How do they work and go about things? I know thoughtbot is certainly very unique, I think, in that arena in terms of being, like, a really value-driven company, and one where especially, like, marketing and business work is, like, distributed across teams in a really interesting way. You know, I'm sure the fact that it fascinated me and was something I could get passionate and get behind was something that also helped me understand it quickly. CHAD: I was excited that...or it was sort of a coincidence because I had reached out to you and without realizing that you had left Flywire. And Kelly, who had been doing a combined sales and marketing role, was going on parental leave. And so, it was fortuitous [laughs] that you were able to come back and help us and provide coverage, like, Kelly was out. LINDSEY: Yeah, it definitely felt like stars aligned moment, which, you know, I'm pretty woo-woo, so I believe in [laughter]...I believe in that kind of thing. You know, yeah, it was wild. It really did feel like your email came out of nowhere. And, you know, I mentioned it, obviously, to my partner and my friends. And they were like, "Oh, he definitely knows, like, that you left your last company." And I'm like, "I actually don't think he does [laughter]. I actually don't think he does." Yeah, and then we started chatting about me coming back to help. And it was great. thoughtbot makes it hard to work anywhere else [laughs]. So, I was happy to come back. I missed the team. CHAD: And one of the exciting things, and you've mentioned it, is you're not just doing marketing for thoughtbot now. We have started to offer your services to our clients. LINDSEY: Yeah, I'm super excited about this. And it's something I'd started thinking about. I had decided to take some time off between Flywire and my next thing and had started thinking about doing marketing, consulting. And as I'm doing that, I'm thinking a lot about how thoughtbot does consulting and, you know, wanting to emulate something like that. So, I started back up at thoughtbot. That wasn't part of the plan. I was just going to, you know, fill in for Kelly and help with marketing things. But then, you know, a good opportunity arose to work on a client, and I was really excited. When, you know, Chad, you and I chatted through it, we came to the conclusion that this was something worth exploring under the, you know, thoughtbot umbrella. And it's been a really great experience so far. And we now have brought on another client now. And if you're listening and need early-stage B2B marketing support, reach out to lindsey@thoughtbot.com. CHAD: Definitely. And Lindsey is pretty good, so you're going to like it [laughs]. LINDSEY: Yeah, you're going to like the way you look. WILL: Yeah, definitely. Because I can even feel your presence here, you know, coming back. Because even like, you know, the market where it's at now and some of the suggestions that, you know, you've been helping us. For example, like, I do a lot of React Native, and you're like, "Hey, you know, blog posts have done a lot of traction, you know, let's get some more blog posts out in the market to help with the traffic and everything." So, the question I have with that is, like, thank you for even suggesting that because it's, like, those little things that you don't even think about. It's like, oh yeah, blog posts, that's an easy transition to help the market, clients, things like that. But with the market the way it is, what has been your experience working during this time with the market? I don't know if you want to call it struggling, but whatever you want to call it that, it's doing [laughs]. LINDSEY: Yeah, I mean, the economy is difficult now. We also went through a really tough spot when I was here last time. During COVID, you know, we faced a major company challenge. And, I mean, I'll let Chad speak to it, but I would imagine it's probably one of the bigger, like, economic inflection points that you faced. Would you say that? CHAD: Yeah, definitely. The thing about it that made it worse was how quickly it happened. You know, it was something that you didn't see coming, and then, you know, about 40% of our business went away in a single month. That's the kind of thing that was a real shock to the system. I think the thing that made it difficult, too, was then the aspects of COVID, where we were no longer able to go into our studios. We were all working remotely. We were isolated from each other. And so, that made executing on what needed to be done in order to make the company survive additionally challenging. LINDSEY: Yeah, so I think, like, going through that experience, also, and seeing how the team and the leadership team rallied together to get through it. And then, you know, ultimately, I think 2021 and 2022 have, like, really good years. That was a really positive experience. And something I'll definitely take with me for a while is just, like, keeping a cool head and just knowing you have, like, really smart, talented folks with you working on it and that you can get through it. And just, like, doing some, I mean, we relied on what we did best, which was, like, design thinking, using design exercise to think about, like, how we might re-organize the company, or what other services we might try launching, or how might we re-package, you know, larger services into smaller more palatable services when people have, like, kind of tighter purse strings. So, that was, like, a great educational experience, and I think something we just continue to do now: be open to change, be open to changing how we package services, what clients we go after, and coming at it with, like, an agile, experimental mindset and try to find out what works. VICTORIA: I really appreciate that. And it aligns now with the new service we've developed around you and the marketing that you provide. And I'm curious because I've had founders come up to me who say they need help with marketing or they need to, like, figure out their marketing plans. So, say you've met a founder who has this question, like, what questions do you ask them to kind of narrow down what it is they really need and really want to get out of a marketing plan? LINDSEY: I've been thinking about this a lot recently. And, like, obviously, I see other marketing leaders in the market. Marketers like to talk about what they do on LinkedIn [laughs], so I get to...I read a lot about different people's approaches to this. And some people kind of go in and are like, okay, this is what you need. This is how we're going to do it, and they start executing on it. And I really do take a very collaborative approach with founders. I think they're, especially in early stage, they're your most important asset in a way, and a lot of their intuition around the market and the business, you know, it's gotten them to where they're at. And so, I think starting from the point of, like, taking what they view as priorities or challenges, and then helping them better explore them or understand them with my own marketing experience and expertise, to

We are thrilled to announce the third session of our new Incubator Program. If you have a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply to our eight-week program. We'll help you validate your market opportunity, experiment with messaging and product ideas, and move forward with confidence toward an MVP. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. We look forward to seeing your application in our inbox! Peter Voss is the CEO and Chief Scientist of Aigo.ai, a groundbreaking alternative to conventional chatbots and generative models like ChatGPT. Aigo's chatbot is powered by Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), enabling it to think, learn, and reason much like a human being. It boasts short-term and long-term memory, setting it apart in terms of personalized service and context-awareness. Along with host Chad Pytel, Peter talks about how most chatbots and AI systems today are basic. They can answer questions but can't understand or remember the context. Aigo.ai is different because it's built to think and learn more like humans. It can adapt and get better the more you use it. He also highlights the challenges Aigo.ai faces in securing venture capital, given that its innovative approach doesn't align with current investment models heavily focused on generative or deep learning AI. Peter and Chad agree that while generative AI serves certain functions well, the quest for a system that can think, learn, and reason like a human demands a fundamentally different approach. Aigo.ai (https://aigo.ai/) Follow Aigo.ai on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/aigo-ai/) or YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl3XKNOL5rEit0txjVA07Ew). Follow Peter Voss on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/vosspeter/). Visit his website: optimal.org/voss.html (http://optimal.org/voss.html) Follow thoughtbot on X (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) 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 Peter Voss, CEO and Chief Scientist at Aigo.ai. Peter, thanks so much for joining me. PETER: Yes, thank you. CHAD: So, tell us a little bit about what Aigo.ai does. You've been working in AI for a long time. And it seems like Aigo is sort of the current culmination of a lot of your 15 years of work, so... PETER: Yes, exactly. So, the quick way to describe our current product is a chatbot with a brain, and the important part is the brain. That basically, for the last 15-plus years, I've been working on the core technology for what's called AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, a system that can think, learn, reason similar to the way humans do. Now, we're not yet at human level with this technology. But it's a lot smarter and a lot more usable than traditional chatbots that don't have a brain. CHAD: I want to dig into this idea a little bit. I think, like a lot of people, I've used just traditional chatbots, particularly like ChatGPT is the latest. I've built some things on top of it. What is the brain that makes it different? Especially if you've used one, what is using Aigo going to be different? PETER: Right. I can give a concrete example of one of our customers then I can talk about the technology. So, one of our big customers is the 1-800-Flowers group of companies, which is Harry & David Popcorn Factory and several others. And wanted to provide a hyper-personalized concierge service for their customers where, you know, the system learns who you buy gifts for, for what occasions, you know, what your relationship is to them, and to basically remember who you are and what you want for each of their 20 million customers. And they tried different technologies out there, you know, all the top brands and so on, and they just couldn't get it off the ground. And the reason is because they really don't learn. And we now have 89% self-service on the things that we've implemented, which is pretty much unheard of for complex conversations. So, why can we do that? The reason is that our system has deep understanding. So, we have deep pausing, deep understanding, but more importantly, that the system remembers. It has short-term memory. It has long-term memory. And it uses that as context. So, you know, when you call back a second time, it'll remember what your previous call was, you know, what your preferences are, and so on. And it can basically use that information, the short and long-term memory, and reason about it. And that is really a step forward. Now, until ChatGPT, which is really very different technology from chatbot technology, I mean, chatbot technology, you're assuming...the kind of thing we're talking about is really augmenting call center, you know, automatic call center calls. There, you need deep integration into the customers' back-end system. You obviously need to know what the latest product availability is, what the customers' outstanding orders are, you know, all sorts of things like, you know, delivery schedules. And we probably have, like, two dozen APIs that connect our system to their various corporate databases and so on. Now, traditional chatbots obviously can do that. You hook up the APIs and do things, and it's, you know, it's a lot of work. But traditional chatbot technology really hasn't really changed much in 30 years. You basically have a categorizer; how can I help you? Basically, try to...what is the intent, intent categorizer? And then once your intent has been identified, you basically have a flowchart-type program that, you know, forces you down a flowchart. And that's what makes them so horrible because it doesn't use context. It doesn't have short-term memory. CHAD: And I just wanted to clarify the product and where you mentioned call center. So, this isn't just...or only text-based chat. This is voice. PETER: Yes. We started off with chat, and we now also have voice, so omnichannel. And the beauty of the system having the brain as well is you can jump from text messaging to a chat on the website to Apple ABC to voice, you know. So, you can basically move from one channel to another seamlessly. You know, so that's against traditional chatbot technology, which is really what everybody is still using. Now, ChatGPT, of course, the fact that it's called ChatGPT sort of makes it a bit confusing. And, I mean, it's phenomenal. The technology is absolutely phenomenal in terms of what it can do, you know, write poems and give you ideas. And the amount of information it's amazing. However, it's really not suited for commercial-grade applications because it hallucinates and it doesn't have memory. CHAD: You can give it some context, but it's basically faking it. You're providing it information every time you start to use it. PETER: Correct. The next time you connect, that memory is gone, you know [crosstalk 05:58] CHAD: Unless you build an application that saves it and then feeds it in again. PETER: Right. Then you basically run out of context we know very quickly. In fact, I just published a white paper about how we can get to human-level AI. And one of the things we did and go over in the paper is we did a benchmark our technology where we fed the system about 300 or 400 facts, simple facts. You know, it might be my sister likes chocolate or, you know, it could be other things like I don't park my car in the garage or [chuckles], you know. It could be just simple facts, a few hundred of those. And then we asked questions about that. Now, ChatGPT scored less than 1% on that because, you know, with an 8K window, it basically just couldn't remember any of this stuff. So, we use -- CHAD: It also doesn't, in my experience...it's basically answering the way it thinks the answer should sound or look. And so, it doesn't actually understand the facts that you give it. PETER: Exactly. CHAD: And so, if you feed it a bunch of things which are similar, it gets really confused because it doesn't actually understand the things. It might answer correctly, but it will, in my experience, just as likely answer incorrectly. PETER: Yeah. So, it's extremely powerful technology for helping search as well if a company has all the documents and they...but the human always has to be in the loop. It just makes way too many mistakes. But it's very useful if it gives you information 8 out of 10 times and saves you a lot of time. And it's relatively easy to detect the other two times where it gives you wrong information. Now, I know in programming, sometimes, it's given me wrong information and ended up taking longer to debug the misinformation it gave me than it would have taken me. But overall, it's still a very, very powerful tool. But it really isn't suitable for, you know, serious chatbot applications that are integrated into back-end system because these need to be signed off by...legal department needs to be happy that it's not going to get the company into trouble. Marketing department needs to sign off on it and customer experience, you know. And a generative system like that, you really can't rely on what it's going to say, and that's apart from security concerns and, you know, the lack of memory and deep understanding. CHAD: Yeah. So, you mentioned generative AI, which is sort of one of the underlying pieces of ChatGPT. In your solutions, are you using any generative solutions? PETER: No, not at all. Well, I can give one example. You know, what 1-800-Flowers do is they have an option to write a poem for your mother's birthday or Mother's Day or something like it. And for that, we will use ChatGPT, or they use ChatGPT for that because that's what it's good at. But, you know, that's really just any other app that you might call up to do something for you, you know, like calling up FedEx to find out where your goods are. Apart from that, our technology...it's a good question you ask because, you know, statistical systems and generative AI now have really dominated the AI scene for the last about 12 years, really sort of since DeepMind started. Because it's been incredibly successful to take masses amounts of data and masses amounts of computing power and, you know, number crunch them and then be able to categorize and identify images and, you know, do all sorts of magical things. But, the approach we use is cognitive AI as opposed to generative. It's a relatively unknown approach, but that's what we've been working on for 15 years. And it starts with the question of what does intelligence require to build a system so that it doesn't use masses amounts of data? It's not the quantity of data that counts. It's the quality of data. And it's important that it can learn incrementally as you go along like humans do and that it can validate what it learns. It can reason about, you know, new information. Does this make sense? Do I need to ask a follow-up question? You know, that kind of thing. So, it's cognitive AI. That's the approach we're using. CHAD: And, obviously, you have a product, and you've productized it. But you said, you know, we've been working on this, or you've been working on this model for a long time. How has it progressed? PETER: Yes, we are now on, depending on how you count, but on the third major version of it that we've started. And really, the progress has been determined by resources really than any technology. You know, it's not that we sort of have a big R&D requirement. It's really more development. But we are a relatively small company. And because we're using such different technology, it's actually been pretty hard to raise VC money. You know, they look at it and, you know, ask you, "What's your training data? How big is your model?" You know, and that kind of thing. CHAD: Oh, so the questions investors or people know to ask aren't relevant. PETER: Correct. And, you know, they bring in the AI experts, and then they say, "Well, what kind of deep learning, machine learning, or generative, or what transformer model are using?" And we say, "Well, we don't." And typically, that's kind of, "Oh okay, well, then it can't possibly work, you know, we don't understand it." So, we just recently launched. You know, with all the excitement of generative AI now recently, with so much money flowing into it, we actually launched a major development effort. Now we want to hire an additional a hundred people to basically crank up the IQ. So, over the years, you know, we're working on two aspects of it: one is to continually crank up the IQ of the system, that it can understand more and more complex situations; it can reason better and be able to handle bigger amounts of data. So, that's sort of the technical part that we've been working on. But then the other side, of course, running a business, a lot of our effort over the last 15 years has gone into making it industrial strength, you know, security, scalability, robustness of the system. Our current technology, our first version, was actually a SaaS model that we deployed behind a customer's firewall. CHAD: Yeah, I noticed that you're targeting more enterprise deployments. PETER: Yeah, that's at the moment because, financially, it makes more sense for us to kind of get off the ground to work with, you know, larger companies where we supply the technology, and it's deployed usually in the cloud but in their own cloud behind their firewall. So, they're very happy with that. You know, they have complete control over their data and reliability, and so on. But we provide the technology and then just licensing it. CHAD: Now, a lot of people are familiar with generative AI, you know, it runs on GPUs and that kind of thing. Does the hardware profile for where you're hosting it look the same as that, or is it different? PETER: No, no, no, it requires much less horsepower. So, I mean, we can run an agent on a five-year-old laptop, you know, and it doesn't...instead of it costing $100 million to train the model, it's like pennies [laughter] to train the model. I mean, we train it during our regression testing, and that we train it several times a day. 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 user-centered product journey, a clickable prototype or Proof of Concept, and key market insights from focused user research. We'll help you to identify the primary user 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 roadmap for your new product. Get started at: tbot.io/sprint. CHAD: So, you mentioned ramping up the IQ is a goal of yours. With a cognitive model, does that mean just teaching it more things? What does it entail? PETER: Yes, there's a little bit of tension between commercial requirements and what you ultimately want for intelligence because a truly intelligent system, you want it to be very autonomous and adaptive and have a wide range of knowledge. Now, for current commercial applications we're doing, you actually don't want the system to learn things by itself or to make up stuff, you know, you want it to be predictable. So, they develop and to ultimately get to full human-level or AGI capability requires a system to be more adaptive–be able to learn things more. So, the one big change we are making to the system right now is natural language understanding or English understanding. And our current commercial version was actually developed through our—we call them AI psychologists, our linguists, and cognitive psychologists—by basically teaching it the rules of English grammar. And we've always known that that's suboptimal. So, with the current version, we are now actually teaching it English from the ground up the way a child might learn a language, so the language itself. So, it can learn any language. So, for commercial applications, that wasn't really a need. But to ultimately get to human level, it needs to be more adaptive, more autonomous, and have a wider range of knowledge than the commercial version. That's basically where our focus is. And, you know, we know what needs to be done, but, you know, it's quite a bit of work. That's why we need to hire about 100 people to deal with all of the different training things. It's largely training the system, you know, but there are also some architectural improvements we need to make on performance and the way the system reasons. CHAD: Well, you used the term Artificial General Intelligence. I understand you're one of the people who coined that term [chuckles] or the person. PETER: Yes. In 2002, I got together with two other people who felt that the time was ripe to get back to the original dream of AI, you know, from 60 years ago, to build thinking machines basically. So, we decided to write a book on the topic to put our ideas out there. And we were looking for a title for the book, and three of us—myself, Ben Goertzel, and Shane Legg, who's actually one of the founders of DeepMind; he was working for me at the time. And we were brainstorming it, and that's what we came up with was AGI, Artificial General Intelligence. CHAD: So, for people who aren't familiar, it's what you were sort of alluding to. You're basically trying to replicate the human brain, the way humans learn, right? That's the basic idea is -- PETER: Yeah, the human cognition really, yeah, human mind, human cognition. That's exactly right. I mean, we want an AI that can think, learn, and reason the way humans do, you know, that it can hit the box and learn a new topic, you know, you can have any kind of conversation. And we really believe we have the technology to do that. We've built quite a number of different prototypes that already show this kind of capability where it can, you know, read Wikipedia, integrate that with existing knowledge, and then have a conversation about it. And if it's not sure about something, it'll ask for clarification and things like that. We really just need to scale it up. And, of course, it's a huge deal for us to eventually get to human-level AI. CHAD: Yeah. How much sort of studying of the brain or cognition do you do in your work, where, you know, sort of going back and saying, "Okay, we want to tackle this thing"? Do you do research into cognition? PETER: Yeah, that's a very interesting question. It really gets to the heart of why I think we haven't made more progress in developing AGI. In fact, another white paper I published recently is "Why Don't We Have AGI Yet?" And, you know, one of the big problems is that statistical AI has been so incredibly successful over the last decade or so that it sucked all of the oxygen out of the air. But to your question, before I started on this project, I actually took off five years to study intelligence because, to me, that's really what cognitive AI approach is all about is you start off by saying, what is intelligence? What does it require? And I studied it from the perspective of philosophy, epistemology, theory of knowledge. You know, what's reality? How do we know anything? CHAD: [laughs] PETER: How can we be sure? You know, really those most fundamental questions. Then how do children learn? What do IQ tests measure? How does our intelligence differ to animal intelligence? What is that magic difference between, you know, evolution? Suddenly, we have this high-level cognition. And the short answer of that is being able to form abstract concepts or concept formation is sort of key, and to have metacognition, to be able to think about your own thinking. So, those are kind of the things I discovered during the five years of study. Obviously, I also looked at what had already been done in the field of AI, as in good old-fashioned AI, and neural networks, and so on. So, this is what brought me together. So, absolutely, as a starting point to say, what is intelligence? Or what are the aspects of intelligence that are really important and core? Now, as far as studying the brain is concerned, I certainly looked at that, but I pretty quickly decided that that wasn't that relevant. It's, you know, you certainly get some ideas. I mean, neural networks, ours is kind of a neural network or knowledge graph, so there's some similarity with that. But the analogy one often gives, which I think is not bad, is, you know, we've had flying machines for 100 years. We are still nowhere near reverse engineering a bird. CHAD: Right. PETER: So, you know, evolution and biology are just very different from designing things and using the materials that we need to use in computers. So, definitely, understanding intelligence, I think, is key to being able to build it. CHAD: Well, in some ways, that is part of the reason why statistical AI has gotten so much attention with that sort of airplane analogy because it's like, maybe we need to not try to replicate human cognition [chuckles]. Maybe we need to just embrace what computers are good at and try to find a different way. PETER: Right, right. But that argument really falls down when you say you are ignoring intelligence, you know, or you're ignoring the kind of intelligence. And we can see how ridiculous the sort of the current...well, I mean, first of all, let me say Sam Altman, and everybody says...well, they say two things: one, we have no idea how these things work, which is not a good thing if you're [chuckles] trying to build something and improve it. And the second thing they say...Demis Hassabis and, you know, everybody says it, "This is not going to get us to human-level AI, to human-level intelligence." They realize that this is the wrong approach. But they also haven't come up with what the right approach is because they are stuck within the statistical big data approach, you know, we need another 100 billion dollars to build even bigger computers with bigger models, you know, but that's really -- CHAD: Right. It might be creating a tool, which has some uses, but it is not actual; I mean, it's not really even actual artificial intelligence -- PETER: Correct. And, I mean, you can sort of see this very easily if...imagine you hired a personal assistant for yourself, a human. And, you know, they come to you, and they know how to use Excel and do QuickBooks or whatever, and a lot of things, so great. They start working with you. But, you know, every now and again, they say something that's completely wrong with full confidence, so that's a problem. Then the second thing is you tell them, "Well, we've just introduced a new product. We shut down this branch here. And, you know, I've got a new partner in the business and a new board member." And the next day, they come in, and they remember nothing of that, you know, [chuckles] that's not very intelligent. CHAD: Right. No, no, it's not. It's possible that there's a way for these two things to use each other, like generating intelligent-sounding, understanding what someone is saying and finding like things to it, and being able to generate meaningful, intelligent language might be useful in a cognitive model. PETER: We obviously thought long and hard about this, especially when, you know, generative AI became so powerful. I mean, it does some amazing things. So, can we combine the technology? And the answer is quite simply no. As I mentioned earlier, we can use generative AI kind of as an API or as a tool or something. You know, so if our system needs to write a poem or something, then yes, you know, these systems can do a good job of it. But the reason you can't really just combine them and kind of build a Frankensteinian kind of [laughs] thing is you really need to have context that you currently have fully integrated. So you can't have two brains, you know, the one brain, which is a read-only brain, and then our brain, our cognitive brain, which basically constantly adapts and uses the context of what it's heard using short-term memory, long-term memory, reasoning, and so on. So, all of those mental mechanisms of deep understanding of context, short-term and long-term memory, reasoning, language generation–they all have to be tightly integrated and work together. And that's basically the approach that we have. Now, like a human to...if you write, you know, "Generate an essay," and you want to have it come up with maybe some ideas, changing the style, for example, you know, it would make sense for our system to use a generative AI system like a tool because humans are good tool users. You know, I wouldn't expect our system to be the world chess champion or Go champion. It can use a chess-playing AI or a Go-playing AI to do that job. CHAD: That's really cool. You mentioned the short-term, long-term memory. If I am using or working on a deployment for Aigo, is that something that I specify, like, oh, this thing where we've collected goes in short term versus long term, or does the system actually do that automatically? PETER: That's the beauty of the system that: it automatically has short and long-term memory. So, really, the only thing that needs to be sort of externally specified is things you don't want to keep in long-term memory, you know, that for some reason, security reasons, or a company gives you a password or whatever. So, then, they need to be tagged. So, we have, like, an ontology that describes all of the different kinds of knowledge that you have. And in the ontology, you can tag certain branches of the ontology or certain nodes in the ontology to say, this should not be remembered, or this should be encrypted or, you know, whatever. But by default, everything that comes into short-term memory is remembered. So, you know, a computer can have photographic memory. CHAD: You know, that is part of why...someone critical of what they've heard might say, "Well, you're just replicating a human brain. How is this going to be better?" And I think that that's where you're just...what you said, like, when we do artificial general intelligence with computers, they all have photographic memory. PETER: Right. Well, in my presentations, when I give talks on this, I have the one slide that actually talks about how AI is superior to humans in as far as getting work done in cognition, and there's actually quite a number of things. So, let me first kind of give one example here. So, imagine you train up one AI to be a PhD-level cancer researcher, you know, it goes through whatever training, and reading, and coaching, and so on. So, you now have this PhD-level cancer researcher. You now make a million copies of that, and you have a million PhD-level cancer researchers chipping away at the problem. Now, I'm sure we would make a lot more progress, and you can now replicate that idea, that same thinking, you know, in energy, pollution, poverty, whatever, I mean, any disease, that kind of approach. So, I mean, that already is one major difference that you make copies of an AI, which you can't of humans. But there are other things. First of all, they are significantly less expensive than humans. Humans are very expensive. So much lower cost. They work 24/7 without breaks, without getting tired. I don't know the best human on how many hours they can concentrate without needing a break, maybe a few hours a day, or six, maybe four hours a day. So, 24/7. Then, they can communicate with each other much better than humans do because they could share information sort of by transferring blocks of data across from one to the other without the ego getting in the way. I mean, you take humans, not very good at sharing information and discoveries. Then they don't have certain distractions that we have like romantic things and kids in schools and, you know. CHAD: Although if you actually do get a full [laughs] AGI, then it might start to have those things [laughs]. PETER: Well, yeah, that's a whole nother topic. But our AIs, we basically build them not to want to have children [laughs] so, you know. And then, of course, things we spoke about, photographic memory. It has instantaneous access to all the information in the world, all the databases, you know, much better than we have, like, if we had a direct connection to the internet and brain, you know, but at a much higher bandwidth than we could ever achieve with our wetware. And then, lastly, they are much better at reasoning than humans are. I mean, our ability to reason is what I call an evolutionary afterthought. We are not actually that good at logical thinking, and AIs can be, you know. CHAD: We like to think we are, though. PETER: [chuckles] Well, you know, compared to animals, yes, definitely. We are significantly better. But realistically, humans are not that good at rational, logical thinking. CHAD: You know, I read something that a lot of decisions are made at a different level than the logical part. And then, the logical part justifies the decision. PETER: Yeah, absolutely. And, in fact, this is why smart people are actually worse at that because they're really good at rationalizations. You know, they can rationalize their weird beliefs and/or their weird behavior or something. That's true. CHAD: You mentioned that your primary customers are enterprises. Who makes up your ideal customer? And if someone was listening who matched that profile and wanted to get in touch with you, what would they look like? PETER: The simplest and most obvious way is if they have call centers of 100 people or more—hundreds, or thousands, tens of thousands even. But the economics from about 100 people in the call center, where we might be able to save them 50% of that, you know, depending on the kind of business. CHAD: And are your solutions typically employed before the actual people, and then they fall back to people in certain circumstances? PETER: Correct. That's exactly right. And, you know, the advantage there is, whatever Aigo already gathers, we then summarize it and pop that to the human operator so that, you know, that the customer -- CHAD: That's great because that's super annoying. PETER: It is. CHAD: [laughs] PETER: It is super annoying and -- CHAD: When you finally get to a person, and it's like, I just spent five minutes providing all this information that you apparently don't have. PETER: Right. Yeah, no, absolutely, that's kind of one of the key things that the AI has that information. It can summarize it and provide it to the live operator. So that would be, you know, the sort of the most obvious use case. But we also have use cases on the go with student assistant, for example, where it's sort of more on an individual basis. You know, imagine your kid just starts at university. It's just overwhelming. It can have a personal personal assistant, you know, that knows all about you in particular. But then also knows about the university, knows its way around, where you get your books, your meals, and, you know, different societies and curriculum and so on. Or diabetes coach, you know, where it can help people with diabetes manage their meals and activities, where it can learn whether you love broccoli, or you're vegetarian, or whatever, and help guide you through that. Internal help desks are another application, of course. CHAD: Yeah. I was going to say even the same thing as at a university when people join a big company, you know, there's an onboarding process. PETER: Exactly. Yeah. CHAD: And there could be things that you're not aware of or don't know where to find. PETER: Internal HR and IT, absolutely, as you say, on onboarding. Those are other applications where our technology is well-suited. And one other category is what we call a co-pilot. So, think of it as Clippy on steroids, you know, where basically you have complex software like, you know, SAP, or Salesforce, or something like that. And you can basically just have Aigo as a front end to it, and you can just talk to it. And it will know where to navigate, what to get, and basically do things, complex things in the software. And software vendors like that idea because people utilize more features of the software than they would otherwise, you know. It can accelerate your learning curve and make it much easier to use the product. So, you know, really, the technology that we have is industry and application-agnostic to a large extent. We're just currently not yet at human level. CHAD: Right. I hope you get there eventually. It'll be certainly exciting when you do. PETER: Yes. Well, we do expect to get there. We just, you know, as I said, we've just launched a project now to raise the additional money we need to hire the people that we need. And we actually believe we are only a few years away from full human-level intelligence or AGI. CHAD: Wow, that's exciting. So, if the solution that you currently have and people want to go along for the journey with you, how can they get in touch with Aigo? PETER: They could contact me directly: peter@aigo.ai. I'm also active on Twitter, LinkedIn. CHAD: Cool. We'll include all of those links in the show notes, which people can find at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions for me, email me at hosts@giantrobots.fm. Find me on Mastodon @cpytel@thoughtbot.social. You can find a complete transcript for this episode as well at giantrobots.fm. Peter, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it and all of the wisdom that you've shared with us today. PETER: Well, thank you. They were good questions. Thank you. CHAD: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks 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: Peter Voss.

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 (https://www.hioscar.com/) Follow Oscar Health on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/OscarHealth), YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/user/OscarHealthInsurance), Twitter (https://twitter.com/OscarHealth), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/oscarhealth/), or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/oscar-health/). Follow Neetu Rajpal on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/neeturajpal/), or Twitter (https://twitter.com/Nee2D2). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) 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 joining 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 members. 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 supporting members and providers, and brokers in-house. So we're fully cloud-native, distributed systems hosted on AWS and GCP with a giant data lake that supports all of our workflows. And this is a pretty unique integrated solution in terms 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 joining 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 support that new service area that we've just added. And that, I think, has been, like, a huge value add in terms of being able to add new locations to serve our members, 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 support and build the tech stack. Both of those things have been rather interesting. In terms 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 supporting. So we have a group of people who focuses primarily on the members 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 supports all of the areas. CHAD: Do people sort of opt in, or are their roles advertised in each of those places? Or, as you reorganize into those structures, have you seen ways that work successfully in terms of getting people into the right position? NEETU: Like, at the larger level in terms 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 supporting 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 terms, 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 passions 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 terms 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 user-centered product journey, a clickable prototype or Proof of Concept, and key market insights from focused user research. We'll help you to identify the primary user 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 roadmap 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 join 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 CPO, 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 terms 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 joined 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 join 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 supports 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 terms 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 join 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 terms 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 roadmaps, 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 members 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 account, 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 hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you could find me on Mastodon @cpytel@thoughtbot.social. 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.

Chad joins cohosts Victoria and Will to talk about thoughtbot's 20th birthday!

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 (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasper-cartwright-217b72113/) or Twitter (https://twitter.com/JW_Cartwright). Check out his website at jasperwcartwright.com (https://www.jasperwcartwright.com/). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) 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 joining 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 user persona, and then learning as much as you possibly can about them to inform a roadmap 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 join 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 user 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 members 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 join 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 joining 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 remember 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 terms 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 terms 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 terms 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 joined 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. Joining a network ostensibly is just like joining 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 support 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 support 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 user 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 downloads 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, upload 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 join. 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 advertise 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 support 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 terms. 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 terms of delivering experience. Like myself and my fiancée went to Comic-Con a couple of years ago. And I remember 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 signings. 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 hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on Mastodon @cpytel@thoughtbot.social. 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.

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 (https://www.harpoon.io/) Follow Harpoon on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/harpothewhale/), or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/harpooncorp/). Follow Dominic Holt on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/dominicholt/) or Twitter (https://twitter.com/xReapz). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) 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 joining 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 administration 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 remember 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 CPU spikes and it stops responding to requests. And so, how do you navigate that agreement with your users? 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 account when you're utilizing harpoon. So it's like a hybrid SaaS where we deploy everything into your account, 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 user 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 users to 2,000 users. 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 support 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 supporting 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 passionate 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 users 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 terms 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 users. 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 support 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 hosts@giantrobots.fm. 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.

Stacy Kehren Idema is the Founder and Managing Director of Global Collective, which is revolutionizing how men and women do business. Chad talks to Stacy about the work Global Collective does, starting a company based in France, and the differences between doing business in the U.S. and the U.K. The Global Collective (https://www.globalcollective.global/) Follow The Global Collective on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/global-collective-global/). Follow Stacy on Twitter (https://twitter.com/stacyidema) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/stacykehrenidema/). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) 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 Stacy Kehren Idema, the Founder and Managing Director of Global Collective, which is revolutionizing how men and women do business. Stacy, thank you for joining me. STACY: Chad, it is a pleasure. How are you today? CHAD: I'm well. I'm well. [laughs] I wasn't going to bring it up, but since you asked, I feel like whenever someone asks that question, I feel like I need to give an honest answer. STACY: Of course. CHAD: Because I think, so often, we don't answer honestly. We just sort of...so what's going on in my life right now is, unfortunately, even though we got our fourth boosters three weeks ago, my wife tested positive for COVID yesterday. STACY: Oh no. CHAD: And so she feels fine. She feels mostly fine. But we have kids and everything, so it throws a huge wrench into life right now. We're very fortunate that we've got vaccines, and it'll be mild and everything, but it is a big wrench in our life. STACY: It is. CHAD: Today, tomorrow, for the next week, so... STACY: I'm sorry. CHAD: Yeah, so she's in a different part of the house, quarantining away from all of us, and we're hoping for the best. STACY: Me too. CHAD: We could probably do a whole hour around how life is for all of us right now, coming in this different stage of the pandemic. I hesitate now to ask you, how are you today? [laughs] STACY: I'm here in London, so, for me, it's the end of my day. And fortunately, I haven't had COVID in a few months. But I know that experience and being even alone was enough to put a wrench in everything. So I get it. CHAD: Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's get back to Global Collective. I gave just a brief snippet. But can you tell people a little bit more about what it is you're actually doing? STACY: Yes, I would be honored. So the mission of The Global Collective is to revolutionize really how investment companies invest in female-founded and led businesses, and there are three key areas of that. It's really about changing gender perceptions by actually connecting the unique strengths of each gender. And if you were to even remove the gender piece, it's really talking about the core masculine and the feminine energies of how and what resides in all of us. How can we bring more of the flow and the creativity into business? The mission is also designed to eliminate the diversity gap. How can we make things better, more equitable, easier both for the men and the women, you know, going back to the genders? And something that's very near and dear to my heart is really about increasing the financial benefit and, frankly, the mental well-being in business because one thing that we don't talk enough about is the impact that mental health can have not only on our personal life but on business and vice versa. And I think it's starting to come out more and more. But with founders, with entrepreneurs, and with executives, that mental illness journey has actually increased, and there are some really interesting statistics on it. So, how can we make it a non-shaming conversation? And how can we actually help each other in this area? So the mission is really about transforming business into something different that I think we're all feeling the need for. And how it actually came about was from my 50 years of business and personal experience. I was born into business owners, into a family of business basically. My first husband was a generational business owner and had the hard position to be in, and he had to choose family over business. And then I, in my corporate career, had a really long tenured corporate career. I worked 26 years in companies as small as 40 as well as at Fortune 7 companies where we even did new initiatives, new businesses, startups within those. And modestly, most of my time was actually spent with male executives. And I'm a woman in business. I've been in business a really long time. So that's a little bit about the mission and how The Global Collective came about. CHAD: You're not the first guest we've had on the show that's talked about these issues. But I'm curious because it is more of a conversation right now. It's something that we've been talking about on the show. Is there something that people in that environment that maybe people still don't realize or that you need to just reiterate over and over again here are the challenges, here are the differences, here's what's happening in the real world right now? STACY: Specific to the mental health piece? CHAD: Either the mental health piece or just women in business and what it's like for them. STACY: Well, I think this is where I love to talk a little bit about the extremes and where those extremes are actually very similar. I believe that men feel like there's this weight of the world on their shoulders and that they have to provide, and serve, and do. And I also believe women do as well, you know, provide for their family, protect for their family. For many women, they may even be a single parent, and with that, they want to be able to go out and provide for themselves and do. So you have this desire, this deep desire to do both of those things differently, yet, we're going at it both parallel. And at some point, I think the convergence and really where things start to explode in a beautiful way is when we get to come together. Because if we go about it in a very myopic fashion, we often miss the things that are going on around us that could be a benefit. So from a very specific where I'm very focused on in the venture capital and investment space, so much of what has happened over the course of business time, if you will, and when venture capital investments started, which is, you know, I would imagine hundreds and hundreds of years, it has been mostly men that have done that investment. And when you look at the world as it exists today, it is mostly men that...I don't want to say control the money, but they're the ones in that business. So when you continue on doing the same thing that you've always done and you don't do anything new, that's telling us a couple of things: you don't know how, or you're afraid. And women, on the other hand, are going about doing their thing, working really, really hard. They're probably even more so working harder because it takes longer for them to earn just as much as a man. If they get funded, it takes longer to get funded, and then they actually get less, but they get to that point. And in the meantime, they've had to either endure additional risks to their family by not spending time with their family, or giving up their family and focusing on the business, or focusing solely on their family and giving up the business. So we don't have to do things the way that we're doing them now. And the other element, and where the mental health piece comes in, is this thought that we still have to do these things in these linear ways when we can actually come together and learn the beauty of what men do well in business and the beauty of what women do well in business, and figure out how to do it differently. CHAD: You mentioned you have a lot of experience working for other companies. So I'm curious, when did you start to feel like you needed to do something to solve this problem and potentially create a new company around it? STACY: I've always had a deep desire to do business differently. And what I didn't know at the time in my corporate career was why I didn't feel like I fit in. Having grown up in that business world and knowing what it was like before cell phones and you still had your landline, and a Sunday evening, the telephone rings, and you're sitting at dinner, and your parents dare not answer the phone because the phone will keep ringing until somebody answers. That's just how it happened in the small town I grew up in. Knowing that stress and that pain and watching them go through that to being married to a small business owner, and then being in the rooms and the spaces of the people and hearing the stress and the pain, there was this thing that followed me all the way through that knew that business had to be done differently. And I attempted to insert it a lot in my corporate career, and for most, because I wasn't a box-checker, I didn't fit in. But the deep desire to finally do it differently was in 2019 when I was made redundant. I had been working and doing coaching on the side, and it was my goal to finally go into business for myself. But in 2020, I divorced myself and decided to take myself on a journey. My children are a little older; they're in their early 20s. And I decided to just kind of come back to myself and understand what did I need to do this business for me and to do with what was deeply passionate within me. And could I do it in another country? So in 2021, I spent six months in London and, as part of that journey, did some work for a woman who owns a diversity, & inclusion, and belonging company. And through that experience and listening to her, along with a few other women, talk about that journey to get invested, there was something inside of me that just clicked. It was as if I was reliving sitting in front of capitol committees in my corporate world and listening to the same stories. I'm like, you know, that's just not how things have to happen. It was that moment that I knew it wasn't for me just about helping the women in business and helping them scale their business; it was something bigger than that because, in order to do that, to make that change, and to really make a meaningful change, you have to bring the men along for the journey. You have to help them. I know there are many men out there that are all for women-owned businesses, co-founded businesses, women-led businesses, and many of them come to me privately and talk to me about it. And my response is I need you not to tell me; I need you to show me. And with that, I've also learned that many of them are afraid. They're afraid to do something different, which tells me that we have to create a space for both the men and the women to thrive. Otherwise, we'll just keep spinning our wheels and doing the same thing over and over again. And it will be far more difficult to get to where we need to get to than how we can get to where we want to go doing it a different way. CHAD: So, what does the work Global Collective does look like? Is it coaching? Is it more than that? Is it different than that? STACY: My end vision, the bigger vision, is really this end-to-end ecosystem. So there are roughly five elements or five stages of a business idea: start, sustain, scale, and exit. The focus right now is on the scale and working through pilots with investors and with women in business to learn what and how we do it differently. Coaching will be a component of it, the mental health journey and navigating how that works for the founder and the business owner executive also becomes part of it. But it also is extensive external networks and communities that we bring into that ecosystem that can support both the investors and their journey and the women in business and their journey. Because the other elements that I have learned along the way is when these investors invest in these all-male-led firms, they don't even know how to help those businesses diversify. They themselves even know and have that challenge. Let's take, for example, a woman founder who would like to go on maternity leave. It's more often that she will leave that business because the pressure from the investors to stay in the business and choose business over family is great. Wouldn't it be fantastic if there was a collection of fractional C-suite individuals that get to come in and help that business along on that journey? And not only does the female founder get to be part of deciding who and what will be taken on and for how long, but the investor and the business. And then that way, everyone is along on that journey and is in agreement of what's going to happen. So there isn't that pressure to have to choose between business and family for anyone. CHAD: I guess that's part of where the collective idea and name comes from. STACY: Yeah. CHAD: That's great. You mentioned you moved to the UK as part of this journey. Are you working with companies primarily focused on the UK, or are you doing it globally? STACY: My focus right now is the U.S. and the UK. So I actually started a brand new business. I secured my own visa. And as part of that visa, I had to start a new business, which was this business. So yeah, the primary locations right now have been UK and U.S. If an opportunity came up in a different country, that would be fantastic, exciting, but that's where I've been focused are in those two areas. CHAD: When thoughtbot was getting started in Europe, like most locations that started for us, it was driven by someone who was from there originally and wanted to go back. So when we were getting started, me and my family...my wife was working for a company based in France at the time, and so we were able to go over for the summer. The kids were out of school for the summer. And so we spent several months there, and we loved it. And we're fully remote now, but when we had an office there, I would go about once a month. There's probably a small list of places where I could see myself living [laughs], and that's at the top of the list. Was that the case for you? Did something particularly resonate for you? STACY: You know, I had never been to Europe. And when I was looking at where I would go, I wanted a place that would be culturally diverse. I wanted a place where I could learn, just even be more immersed in history, and feel safe as a single woman in a foreign country. I'm grateful for my family. They're always very concerned about me, and frankly, so are my boys. Having two young adult men, I worried about them, but now they worry about me has started to come into play. For me, it was really about where can I be that would be safe, culturally diverse, and allow me the ability to travel, and to your point, to just go explore new things, really to take a different perspective even outside of the gender diversity piece, the cultural, the language, all of those things? And so this place is home, and I didn't know that when I set off. I thought it just would be; I'll go see how it is for three months. And then I wasn't even here a week, and I said three months wouldn't be enough and stayed six. And it was about five weeks into that journey that I said six months won't be enough; I need to be here longer. And then that's when I did more due diligence from the visa standpoint. 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. CHAD: Is there anything that either has stood out to you or surprised you about differences between business in the U.S. and the UK? STACY: It's fascinating to see how much they complain. The U.S. and the UK complain about each other and their work standards, yet how much they like what each other does. So I would say some of the biggest differences is that the city truly never seems to sleep, yet they definitely take time away from work and business and are very family-focused. That's probably some of the biggest things that I have learned as part of it, and especially having grown up in the culture that I grew up in, in corporate, where it was very much the grind of the nine-to-five plus. So there are some slight differences. I think, if anything, there's just so much more culture and people here that have come from so many other different parts of the world that that's probably the thing that I noticed the most. CHAD: Do you think that the work you're doing is ready to be received more or less in either of the places? STACY: I think different parts of it are more ready to be received in different parts in each country. CHAD: Can you tell me more about that? STACY: Yeah, there's probably more heavy gender influences here in the UK, especially with Scandinavian countries that are much more gender equitable. So I think that piece is very much a belief here. And there are other elements that support both sets of parents from a family standpoint in this country. So I think that is more readily received. I also do know that women-owned businesses are significantly less here and certainly less from getting funded. I think that's where the U.S. is further ahead in that game. However, the number of businesses that are started by women are significantly more than what they are here. It becomes more about who's louder with certain pieces. I think the U.S. is louder in that area. I think the UK is more open and receptive. CHAD: One of the things that I learned about investment in general between the U.S. and the UK is there's not, I mean, it's just not as big of a place as the U.S. The amounts are often less. And I'll say, speaking a little bit more generally, I would say people in the UK, investors in the UK, are a little bit focused on different things. They're maybe a little bit more risk-averse, or they're focused on different markets. So the investment community is a little bit different between the two different places. Does that make the opportunity for founders, particularly women founders, any different between the two different places? STACY: From the research that I've done through some interviewing with investors and then the research I've done on my own, there's a lot of little, smaller type of investment for female founders in the U.S. than there is in the UK. But that said, one thing that seems to be very prevalent is how much Europe, in general, talks about London being the epicenter for Europe and investment. You're asking a great question that I hadn't thought about in that framework. CHAD: Yeah, and I don't know the answer either [laughs], so... STACY: What I do know is in the U.S., there are more female-founded investment companies and female-led. However, I do know many of them are very much sticking to U.S. companies. But what I do know is that the UK is starting to leverage more and work in more partnership with U.S. investment companies. CHAD: So if I am an investment firm, chances are that my entire, especially the leaders in the firm, are probably all men, maybe not, but if not all men, then the majority. So if I was sitting in that seat, how do we get started on this journey? Contact you? [laughter] STACY: Yeah, contact me. [laughs] Honestly, it begins with a conversation. This is the really interesting piece that I don't think that we've yet talked about is women believe that men have control of all the money. And while they may be the ones that are leading more of these investment firms, it's not just up to them, if you will. There is this piece of the puzzle that, yes, we have these male-led investment firms, and they have repeatedly invested in mostly male-led businesses. But we have these women who have these beautiful businesses. Women are known for going to market with products and services that have fewer competitors in the market because 70% to 90% of consumer buying decisions around the globe are made by women. And so when they're out there buying and they see a gap, that's where a lot of these women start these businesses is based off of this gap that they see in the market, but they do have the power. How can I, as part of this...and even the men because I know I wouldn't be where I am today without the male mentors and influencers in my life encouraging me to be bolder and to be better. And they could see in me some things I wasn't yet willing to acknowledge. We, women, have to do the same for each other. We have to help each other be bolder, be braver, not assume that we are at the mercy of somebody else; we're not. We get to be in partnership with each other as women, and we get to go have these conversations with these men. So I think that's the part that's missing in that. So back to your question about if men want to get started in this, what do they do? Contact me, yeah, because let's start to have a conversation. There are so many men that know that they want to do different; they just don't know how. And when they do even see a woman come through the door, it's most often as a co-founder. They're not even sure what to do different to attract more of that. So that's when we get to talk about what is it that they're doing today? Where are they going to look? Who are they calling in? And how does that change their business? Because, at the end of the day, it's not as easy as just investing in women-owned businesses. And I get this question a lot; the question is, "Hey, Stace, are you going to bring us a list of women-owned businesses that we can invest in?" And my response is always with a smile. However, what I say is "No," or "You would have already done that because the list is already available to you." How they do business will transform. And that's the part that they get to go on this journey with The Global Collective is how do they transform their business as part of that? And that's scary to think. You've done something for so long. You do it really well. You make a lot of money doing it. Yes, there's risk, and as part of this, there's something even greater that would transform how you do business. So it becomes a longer conversation. It's not just about contacting me; I think that's the point I'm trying to get out. [laughter] It's a long-term relationship, and most don't consider that. And I certainly know that women don't either. CHAD: So, speaking of that, what is the flip side of this if I'm a woman thinking about doing something new or already working on something? What do I do to get started with this and position myself differently or better? STACY: It's A, building your network. And this is where it gets really uncomfortable for women because the fear of asking for money from men it's a real fear with this perception that they have control. But it's really our own mindset around money and the fact that there's enough of it available. So how do we create diversity in who we talk with, who we talk to? What is it that we are looking to bring to market? Doing some research but not doing so much that you get caught in your own bubble if you will. I would imagine, Chad, that especially those that you've interviewed and even on your own journey doing this as a founder or even being an executive, it can get kind of lonely. And sometimes we get into that I'm just going to do it, and I'm just going to do it. And I'm going to do it until it's perfect and kind of forget that along the way; we need checkpoints. So for women, it's the mindset factor of going in and doing something different, which means doing things that they've never done before: getting help, getting a coach, getting a mentor, putting together an advisory board, people that will hold you accountable, maybe even see your blind spots. It also is understanding that if you go pitch to one investment company, or one investment firm, or one investor and they say "No," okay, that doesn't mean that it's the end of the world. They just may not be for you at that time. And there's plenty more out there. So keep refining. Keep doing your thing. Continue to build your community. Continue to build your voice. And with that, also know that...and this is even part of my journey. You have to be confident in what it is that you're doing. You don't have to be confident in everything that you have to do to get it done, but you have to be grounded in what it is that you're bringing and what it is that you offer. Because the one thing that isn't talked about enough, and I've heard this enough with investors, is they're actually investing in the person. Yes, they're investing in a business, but they're investing in a person at the end of the day. And that part is overlooked. It's not just bringing something to market to bring it to market if you will. CHAD: I hear that a lot. I think you're absolutely right. And I think that that gets too close, maybe, to what one of the core problems is. I think if investors are used to investing in people rather than the product and the stream of people that they're used to investing in looks a certain way or behaves a certain way, they're making decisions heuristically, oh, this makes a successful co-founding pair, or this makes us successful founder. And when something shows up that doesn't match the rest of what they see or the heuristic that they have, they really aren't able to think that that will be successful. STACY: I know myself even being in the rooms that I've been in and doing the work that I did; this journey has been nothing short of a beautiful journey of learning. And the craziest things have happened, as in, they're more difficult than I would have ever imagined mostly because I got in my own way. Or it has required me to learn the nomenclature that's applicable to the investor world, that's very similar to working with capital committees and finance and corporate. However, they use the word slightly. They use either slightly different words or they use them in a different way. So I've been very lucky. One of my advisors is actually a serial tech entrepreneur who has gone for funding alone half a dozen times, and so even when he and I will sit and talk about things, I continue to learn from him every single time. I said it this way. It would resonate more in this way. Which when you think about that, that doesn't mean I change my story, and my belief, and my confidence, and my grounding, and what it is that I'm bringing; it just means that I'm learning to speak different languages, and/or to be able to assimilate in an easier way. If what I say doesn't resonate with one investor, I can find another way to describe what it is that I'm attempting to describe in a language that might resonate more with him. It's not just about here's my business. Here's how we're going to make money, and the bottom line number says I'm making revenue. It's about the bigger pieces of it. It's about being confident in your story, what it is that you're offering, what it is that your strengths are, frankly. And I think there's a disconnect there. Wow, this could be a whole topic of its own, the perception that the founder has to know how to do everything or that we believe that we have to do everything. And then, what's your staying power in all of this? And I think that's even lost on itself. It's not for the faint at heart. And you learn not to take things personal, and you develop a thicker skin. But you still have to remain rooted in your core values. CHAD: On that note of the misconception or the perception that founders need to know or do everything, there's something that I'm curious about that's sort of an extension of that for you. I've had other guests on the show where they're coming at it from a perspective of a lot of the same issues, but they're focused on getting more founders of color access to investment on both sides of that equation. The language you use is around gender and men and women, but we know there are people that don't fit into those boxes specifically, either. So how have you chosen what you've decided to focus on? And how do you not get overwhelmed from all the sorts of the landscape and how big this problem is? STACY: That's a great question because you're right, and I think about that often. I speak more in the norm, the heterosexual norm, genders. I am starting to talk more about the energies that really take away from the men and the women and really speak more about the masculine and the feminine. For me, that piece of it is where I'm staying focused because it's where I know I can do and make the most impact. However, I believe that when we start to make traction in this way, we also get to make traction from a race and a color...and this is where the corporate culture is starting, I think, to understand and become more well-versed in the masculine and feminine energies. And when you can speak more in that language about the benefits that every single person has regardless of gender, when we get to speak in that language that is more inclusive, then I also believe that we get to include more people, more humans because, at the end of the day, we're all human. That's the one thing that we all [laughs] have in common. We get to speak in that language. But I think the fact that my end vision...the end goal is so big that to your question about how do I not get lost in the rest of it, I know that will come along as part of it. Even though it may not be the language that I use, I know deep in my heart that creating this opportunity and the shift for people to see those perspectives and for me as a founder to also ensure that within my values, I look to have inclusivity in other ways other than gender myself will be of value. And in the meantime, those external...the business partnerships, the other elements of my business and who I get to work with or who we get to work with as a collective will include those that are more well-rounded into the language, and I can learn from them. And we get to do these things together, so I do believe that it comes together. I've really led with that so that I don't get so overwhelmed in attempting to accomplish everything. CHAD: Yeah. And I think the things you're working on feel different than just creating another business or another product like a SaaS product or that kind of thing, but I think a lot of the same principles still apply. And if you come out with something that is meant to be everything to everybody and you're not building from your experience, chances are good you're not going to be as successful as if you could focus and build from your experience and find your niche, and find the people who can help you do what you want to do and have the impact you want to have and then grow from there, as opposed to doing everything all at once. STACY: Yeah, I agree. CHAD: But it's tough because it's hard to say, "No, I'm not working on that now," because it is still important. STACY: It is. The one thing I did, unknowing that this was going to happen but almost three years ago, while in my former life and in my corporate career, I led global teams and worked with different teams across the globe and had a little bit more of that cultural experience. The one thing that I really got hung up on when I first started was figuring out what my niche was because I've had all of that experience. But what I do know is that you get to create your own niche. That was something that took me a really long time to figure out. I was so centered on conforming to what everyone else told me would be my niche. And I knew that there was something missing. And so part of what I do now, which is the beauty of living where I live now because there's so many different pockets of the culture pieces of it, race, religion, and ethnic backgrounds, I get to continue to build my network and my community with that thought in mind of being able to look for partnerships and have conversations, whether I'm here, whether it's those that are in the U.S. now that I have the attention of. It's all those things, and that just makes it better. CHAD: Yeah. Well, if this has resonated with people and they want to find out more, they want to get in touch with you, they want to start that conversation, where should they go to do that? STACY: They will find me...website is globalcollective.global. You will also find me on LinkedIn under Stacy Kehren Idema, as well as on Instagram under stacykehrenidema. CHAD: Stacy, I really appreciate you joining the show and sharing with us. I appreciate the impact that Global Collective seeks to have. And I wish you all the best, I really do. So, thank you so much. STACY: Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Thanks, Chad. CHAD: 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 hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter at @cpytel. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll see you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success. Special Guest: Stacy Kehren Idema.

John Ridd is the Co-Founder and CEO of Greenpixie, which is building solutions to reveal and reduce cloud emissions. Chad and Will talk to John about giving a clearer view of AWS emissions down to the service level, why cloud emissions are a much bigger sustainability issue than most people realize, and how this will be the next big issue of the climate crisis. Greenpixie (https://greenpixie.com/) Follow Greenpixie on Twitter (https://twitter.com/greenpixiehq), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/greenpixiehq/), or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/greenpixie/). Follow John on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-c-ridd/). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) 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. WILL: And I'm your other host, Will Larry. And with us today is John Ridd, the Co-Founder, and CEO of Greenpixie, which is building solutions to reveal and reduce the emissions of the cloud. CHAD: John, thank you so much for joining us. I have to admit that as a developer, this is something that I've been thinking a lot about recently. We practice test-driven development. We run continuous integration, even the things that we have running in the cloud in terms of the websites that we run and that kind of thing. I'm also just really becoming aware of when I make a new branch in everything that I run, and I'm making a code change and pushing that up to GitHub; it then kicks off a build every single time any team member is doing that. And I can just see the impact that even just a single software product can have potentially on our environment. And I've started to become more and more guilty about that. So I'm excited to talk to you about how [laughs] we might be able to fix that problem. JOHN: Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the big reasons that we've really seen the opportunity in the cloud emissions space is this disconnect really between how developers are incentivized to think, and rightfully so. They need to build and innovate at all costs; that's what drives the innovation in any tech company or any company. But the sustainability way of thinking and thinking, what am I building? What servers am I using and turning on? Just hasn't been in the conversation with developers. And they're the ones who are making these decisions using cloud providers to build out the products that the company needs. So it's great to hear that you're now aware of this impending issue from development. CHAD: So I'm excited to dig more into the product. But I'm curious, you were doing digital marketing before starting Greenpixie, right? JOHN: Yeah, I ran my own marketing consultancy, worked with a number of companies, big and small. And where I found my knack was sort of demand generation; really, starting off projects from nothing is what I've always done. It's clear now that...so Greenpixie was a bootstrap startup. Really using that ability to at least come up with an idea and take it from zero to one, bring demand to an issue, that's how Greenpixie started. And it actually started with the head of engineering, Chris, who I met at my co-working space, and really we traded ideas through a hackathon on the weekend. And I had this idea when it came to website emissions and just knew that there was a software and a product play there. And what we do is connect into Google Analytics, put it through some carbon algorithms, and give them the ability to see how much digital carbon the website is producing. And from my marketing background, we've developed our own marketing, internal marketing software, which is a combination of we've built our own email servers with a high inbox. And we do semantic web scraping to find relevant prospects in the sustainability space. So we built the MVP and put this idea for Greenpixie out to the world, and the overwhelming response that we got was people being shocked at the idea of digital carbon and how their digital operations do have a sustainability impact. It really gave us the confidence to think there's demand for this idea of emissions. And since then, we've now moved into carbon emissions down the carbon rabbit hole. But my marketing experience explains how it started in the first place. CHAD: So how does...sometimes when faced with, I think, all kinds of climate issues, people can feel overwhelmed or helpless or feeling like what do I do as an individual to have an impact? So what does Greenpixie and Cloud NetZero enable an individual, team, or company, or developer to actually see and do? JOHN: Cloud NetZero connects into the leading cloud providers. So at this stage, we can give a clearer view of your AWS emissions down to the service level. And this is a key first step. So we take a you can't affect what you can't measure philosophy. And that was a big, big step for us. And by cutting into the cost and usage reports and putting it through our carbon algorithms, we can then get visibility to engineers. So everything you're building up in the cloud, we then give a full transparent view of the associated emissions that are being created from that by using our algorithms and methodology to convert the electricity used from the computation and storage and take into account the geographic location of the data centers of which you're using. As you can imagine, there are different carbon intensities in different countries during different times of the day. So we actually hook up into an API that gives us this carbon intensity data down to the hour. So we give a really comprehensive view of your carbon emissions footprint, which is what we consider the gold standard in sustainability. Because what makes the digital vertical so unique within sustainability is we've got data coming out of our ears. [chuckles] The data is there to connect into the software, so we can give this crystal clear picture. Whereas in other branches of sustainability, if you're into supply chains, et cetera, you've got real-world problems that you have to put real-time into. So that's the first step that we do is giving you this clear picture of your emissions. And from that, we then proceed to suggest reduction strategies to reduce those emissions. WILL: John, I'll be honest. Before getting on the podcast with you, I never thought about my cloud emissions as a developer. Now I'm seeing, wow, there is a lot there with that. On your Twitter, I saw this stat: imagine driving 1.3 billion miles all the way to Saturn. The carbon you would release would be about the same as the amount from all of these streams of Netflix's top 10 shows in the month that were released, 6 billion hours of viewing. I'm just mind-blown just thinking about that. For someone who is just now thinking about my cloud emissions, what would you tell me as a developer or any CEO that's listening to the podcast? JOHN: So yeah, you're right. This is a much bigger sustainability issue than most people realize. Currently, it's estimated around 2% of global emissions are from the cloud and data centers use, which puts it near the level of the aviation industry. And because the cloud is so esoteric and it's called the cloud, you think it's light and fluffy, and you're like, okay, it's over there; it's fine. But there's a hard infrastructure that makes up the digital world that we enjoy, and that's thousands of racks of servers. That's so much gallons, like, millions of gallons of water used to cool these data centers. And because of this, there are countries such as Ireland and Singapore that have now begun to ban further construction of data centers. Because in Ireland, over 10% of the grid is taken up by these, well, I believe there was an article in The Telegraph that referred to these data centers as vampires, [laughs] vampires on the grid sucking all this energy up. And the reason that this exists is it comes down to a company level or to a developer level. You're renting these data centers in order to grow your operations. And this aggregate demand goes straight into why these data centers exist and how much electricity they're using. But what you can do for a certain output...because we're a tech company and we love tech. And that makes us different to maybe some sustainability, really hardline sustainability environmental point of view because we actually think you can achieve the same output for 40% less energy use. So there's waste that is pretty rife across the cloud space, and that also comes with the amount of money spent on the cloud. There can be servers that have been left turned on that are no longer used. There can be non-essential computation that could be moved to low carbon intensity hours of the day. And there's so much that can be done and still basically enjoy and build the tech that we all aspire to build. CHAD: I'm going to resist taking a tangent into What We Do in the Shadows and the energy vampire, or we can call them Colin, I guess, instead of vampires. JOHN: Yeah, yeah. [laughter] CHAD: So I used the calculator that you have on the website on our website, thoughtbot.com. I was pleased to see that it produces less carbon than 95% of websites. What goes into that calculation, though? JOHN: So what we do on the estimator, on the webpage, the calculator, so we take into account whether your server being used is green or standard based on requesting that homepage. And then, really, there's a lot of overlap with PageSpeed optimization, rightfully, so the heavier the web pages, the more images. And if it's been coded lazily and it's heavy, which it hasn't been in your case, which I'm sure you're really happy about, that basically does have an effect on the electricity used in order to serve the website. And we also provide a website carbon report, which goes a step further and takes into account your Google Analytics, which goes for all your pageviews and takes into account some other factors too. CHAD: When you're looking at the carbon footprint of a website, am I understanding that you're also taking into account the carbon footprint of the people viewing what it takes to view the website on the client too? JOHN: It's very interesting, and we are going into the client side of emissions. That is definitely something that we're looking into and continue to do so. But now we focus more on the cloud. We stuck with websites as our main priority, that would mean the next step was going into client side, and it can, and that logic does go up. And it shows the ability of measuring sustainability impact when it comes to digital because, of course, you can get device information from Google Analytics, and that can then be used to give an accurate prediction. But that is something that we would definitely consider doing in the future. But you see the potential. It can go in all these different directions. CHAD: A little bit of a meta question, then, so the calculator is running on people's websites. What is the carbon footprint of running the calculator on the site? [laughs] JOHN: Well, that's the thing; we do have transparency of our own operations. So we're a seed-stage startup, and our operations might get a lot bigger. But for now, and given the sustainable approach, we take with how we run our cloud and run these tools, around two tons of CO2 we produce in a month from operations. But looking into other tech companies, you can imagine how AWS can get when it comes to the bigger companies and everything in between. It can really be hundreds or tens of tons. That has been currently unaccounted for and not addressed, which put into perspective, it's acting on your carbon emissions as an individual. And let's say you're a developer who has the power to do this. You can have the effect of like ten times going vegan or not using air travel. So it's just really we really love the idea of combating carbon emissions, and developers, particularly combating carbon emissions is, using your unique skills in order to fight the climate crisis in a way that a non-technical person couldn't. CHAD: So what are some of the things that you're doing as a company to solve that for yourself? Are there particular cloud hosting providers that are actually better than others? JOHN: Yes, it does vary. So there are the big cloud providers, and we are on AWS due to the startup credit scheme, which, as you can imagine, that's very beneficial when you're starting from a bootstrapped model. And within AWS, you can actually...so choosing the geographic location of where you're spinning up the servers is one way you can reduce that. So our servers are in Ireland. So we're part of that issue actually, now that I think about it, because they have a relatively low carbon intensity. And that's one way that we ensure the carbon we're using is minimized. But there's a whole spectrum. So if you wanted to go at all costs and convenience and costs are out the window, there are niche carbon fighters, which actually are off-grid renewable power data centers. If you have the means, that is the optimum you can go in terms of the carbon intensity. But in terms of how we build, so just the typical making sure that we're turning off products, features, and servers that we don't use and being mindful of that, putting non-essential compute to low-carbon intensity periods in the day and just minimizing costs and using computation for a certain output is how we take that philosophy. 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 support 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. WILL: On your website, I see that 127 billion is wasted in idle cloud spend, so obviously, one of your goals is to reduce that amount. What other goals is your company looking forward to solving? JOHN: I would say our main goal is to reduce millions of tons of needless cloud emissions using scalable software. That is our guiding light. But within that, it correlates largely with cost savings for companies. So we could actually save companies millions of pounds as well or millions of dollars. So I'm from the UK; [laughter] I went for pounds. Yeah, that's the big push; that's our guiding light. And we really want to be the torchbearers for digital sustainability as an idea. So having the awareness, we take responsibility for driving awareness for the issue also. As a team, we have a great combination of technical minds but also creative and marketing, getting the message out there and demystifying carbon emissions. So it's a technical issue because there's a technical issue when you dig into it. But we want to put it in a way that a non-technical decision maker in the C-suite would understand the issue in terms of the effects that you can have as a company in a sustainability drive. CHAD: So you mentioned you got started from that original hackathon idea. And how did things progress for you from there? You now have a team of people working. Did you end up taking some investment in order to continue on? JOHN: We did. We actually started it...so we started it as a passion project from that hackathon, saw the potential. I saw a small business opportunity through the website measuring. And we saw there was demand out there, so we started there. Then we saw it as a side project and continued to see potential and made the call to basically...the initial team was three of us. We went full-time and said let's see what we can do with this. Then I came from a marketing consultancy...I self-funded it to the means that I could for the first six months. It's an interesting experience when you get possessed by an idea, and it's just I need to see this through. I see the potential. It's for a great cause. I think there's a big business opportunity here. And then, really, it came to that point, and we did start going down the investment route. We were part of an incubator associated with the University of Cambridge called Carbon13. It's a really interesting program where they put together experts in climate science, the developers. And you come together to try and come up with these big ideas to basically reduce millions of tons of emissions as a startup. And there was plenty. There was, for example, there was offsetting companies, there was carbon credit startups, everything you can imagine. And it was there that we got put on the investment journey because at the end of the program, you get what was an £80,000 investment to then move on and then go down the VC route. Turns out we didn't get the investment despite us being one of the favorites. It didn't work out for various reasons. And then we were in a situation where I was like, okay, we need to get this investment in order to keep going and scaling the team. And we ended up being VC-backed for our pre-seed from a company in London called Ascension. So we did a £250,000 pre-seed round to get things going. And that's why we have a team who is now working on this full-time. And it's been a bit of a journey, but the trials and tribulations of startups is just the game. And now we're looking to get our seed round. We're hoping to be closing by the end of the year. CHAD: Congratulations on the progress so far. Why do you think Ascension was interested in investing in you? JOHN: So, really, at pre-seed stage, I've talked to VCs and said market, founder, co-founders, anything else is just too early to really know with any certainty. So I think they saw that we were committed, enthusiastic about the idea. Will, the other co-founder, and CTO, is a full-stack developer. It's his second startup. And with my demand generation background, we thought we were a good fit. But really, I think a lot of time and thinking, and commitment has gone into (blood, sweat, and tears) has gone into thinking how we can create a product or software company that addresses carbon emissions. And I think investors have a good radar of when people are really committed, and that's what we were. WILL: You've recently done a soft launch of Cloud NetZero. Can you give me more information around that? JOHN: Yeah, absolutely. We did our soft launch, so this is after the pre-seed investment. We got the 250,000. And we built the product that we laid out in that pitch, which was a software that integrates to AWS and gives you this granular breakdown of your emissions by service. And that was what we presented on our soft launch. We did an in-person event, which we just got a small room and managed to...so around 50 people turned up, which we're pretty proud of. And people do seem to be attracted to this idea. We use my marketing background [laughs] to kind of bolster those numbers. But it was a really great experience. So it was actually on the side of our co-working space where we did a hackathon originally. And it was a bit of an experience, quite a heartwarming experience that everyone has come together. I'm just like, oh, it was in that room that it started as an idea, and now 50 people coming from VC backgrounds, from sustainability, from tech are all coming together. And considering we started in COVID times, to have everyone in the room was just great. So it was great. Yeah, thanks for highlighting it. I really have good memories of that soft launch. CHAD: So people can get a demo and sign up now. JOHN: Yeah, absolutely. So the product is up and running. It went from idea to reality which we're very, very proud of the product team for hitting it on time as well. So we did a 100-day push, and on the 100th day, it was ready for us. And we actually got a big update Monday next week, which is going to be the V 1.1. I call it V2, and then my CTO says, "No, it's V 1.1." [laughter] CHAD: Oh, you need to make your CTO understand that for marketing purposes, you need to make your version numbers bigger. JOHN: Yeah, yeah, he's just like, "If you think that's V2, you don't know what you're saying." [laughter] You can contact us, and we can basically show you the onboarding to get you closer to your cloud provider. And you can have a crystal clear picture of your carbon emissions. And the companies we're talking to now so software companies, so pretty well-known brands. We're now in conversation with as well as just your heavy-duty tech companies. And they're really our ideal client we're looking to now because they have a large amount of carbon emissions, and they want to be really measuring them for their sustainability initiatives. They are actually going to be required to...from the beginning of next year, there's regulation creeping in that's going to make companies measure their Scope 3 emissions, and we have the product to do that. And once we go over that first stage of measurement, then the next step is giving you recommendations to reduce it ultimately, and that will be both in cloud emissions and costs. So we actually are a cost-saving software ultimately because we can highlight wasted cloud spend, and there's a lot of it in these tech companies. CHAD: So you've launched. It sounds like you're focused on getting customers and making sales. How does the pricing work for the product? JOHN: At the moment, we are charging 10K a year to use the software. This is for...so it would be your mid-sized tech company is really who that's aimed for. Anything that goes into really heavy-duty cloud emissions analysis would be probably just down the road just because the complication gets considerably...there's a lot more computing that we need to do on our end, which there are costs associated with that. And there's a lot more, as you can imagine, a lot more hand-holding in order to get integrated and that type of thing. So the pricing would be larger for those more developed companies who have huge AWS accounts. CHAD: A lot of companies' pricing is one of the things that they struggle with early on. I assume you'll learn, and your pricing model will change. But is there something that particularly you weren't sure about when it came to the pricing? JOHN: So the pricing it's really what we're seeing from other parallel softwares on the market more towards the cost reduction side of the cloud. They don't focus on emissions. It's...we'll plug the right place for that. And I think given the opportunity cost, especially from the sustainability and measurement perspective, the alternative is companies are spending a lot of money on sustainability consultants to try and figure out these emissions for the reporting means, and our software does the heavy lifting for you, as any good product does. And with the cost savings on top of that, it's about right for now. But as we improve the product and can accommodate these bigger enterprise clients, the price model will evolve and probably get more expensive. But not to overcomplicate; it is the logic at this point. And once we do have the ability to take on these more complex arrangements, the pricing would reflect that. Yeah, so that's the plan. WILL: Well, John, I thank you for coming on the podcast and being a part of it. Is there anything else that you would like our audience to know? JOHN: We're shouting from the rooftops about carbon emissions. This is going to be the next big issue of the climate crisis. So I truly believe that there are estimates that digital emissions will rise past 10% of global emissions by 2030. Our thirst for data isn't going anywhere. And there's a real chance that computing principles such as Moore's Law that have allowed these improvements in hardware to keep up with the demand for data won't necessarily last forever. And from that, we need to really wake up to the fact that the digital world, despite it being, yeah, it seems like it happens by magic, there is real sustainability impact. But the good news is we think that using the scalability of software...because the scalability of software that has seen so much success for companies can be used to have an equally positive impact on the planet and prevent this issue of digital emissions by using the inherent scalability of digital and availability of data. So that's really what I'm preaching at the moment. And we believe the best first step for that would be a product called NetZero because it gives transparency over these emissions. You can see it in front of your eyes, and then decisions can be made in order to reduce them. That's what I chose to be my soapbox moment. [laughter] CHAD: That's great. John, if folks want to find out more, see that demo, get in touch with you; where are all the different places that they can do that? JOHN: greenpixie.com is where you can just contact us, and we'll be straight on the phone with you. Another place to see what we're really up to and get more ideas of digital sustainability the best place is probably our LinkedIn company page. We're quite active on there. If you want to take your first steps into digital sustainability, start there. And if you think your company is ready to act on their carbon emissions or you just want to find out a little bit more, then yeah, just contact us through our website, and we'll have a chat. CHAD: Awesome. Everything that John just mentioned is going to be linked in the show notes, along with a complete transcript for this episode. You can subscribe to the show and find all of that at giantrobots.fm. WILL: If you have any questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. CHAD: You can find me on Twitter @cpytel. WILL: And you can find me on Twitter @will23larry. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. CHAD: Thanks for listening, and see you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success. Special Guest: John Ridd.

Jordyn Bonds is the Director of Product Strategy at thoughtbot. Jordyn helps companies validate new product opportunities and reach that first key milestone, from validating an early adopter market to creating a pitch deck to building a prototype, proof of concept, or an MVP launch. Chad talks to Jordyn about what a Director of Product Strategy does, how Jordyn's career has evolved (She got to build madonna.com for the Confessions on the Dance Floor release and tour!!), and finding practices that keep you motivated and inspired to be working towards long-term, large goals. Follow Jordyn on Twitter (https://twitter.com/skybondsor) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/skybondsor/). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) 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 Jordyn Bonds, the Director of Product Strategy at thoughtbot. Jordyn helps companies validate new product opportunities and reach that first key milestone, from validating an early adopter market to creating a pitch deck to building a prototype, proof of concept, or an MVP launch. Jordyn, thank you for joining me not only on this podcast but at thoughtbot. JORDYN: Thank you. It's wonderful to be here. CHAD: You joined us in September of this year. And it's been really fun to watch...well, let me say it's always fun to watch people come into the company and begin to digest everything that's there, begin to, like, okay, I can see how this is working, and then to start to make your mark on things. And so thank you for everything you've done so far. And I look forward to seeing everything in the future too. JORDYN: I look forward to it too. It's been a super interesting experience. I think thoughtbot has a really unique culture, and it's been really fun to get on-boarded into it. CHAD: Cool. I'd love to talk a little bit more about that in a bit. But you have joined us as the Director of Product Strategy, which is actually a new position for us in the Ignite team, which is the team that focuses on those early-stage ideas, products, companies. Obviously, if we added the position, we thought it was important. We don't take those things lightly. What led you and made you perfect for that position? JORDYN: [laughs] I think taking something from a nascent notion, whatever that is, an idea for a product or newly identified market opportunity to that first concrete thing out in the world is a really special phase of the work of new product launches. And it is, over the course of my career, just the thing I have really zeroed in on professionally over time. That's kind of my wheelhouse. And so I think that's thing number one. But what makes it special is that I like to think of it like it's almost like the first few seconds of the existence of the universe after the Big Bang... CHAD: [laughs] JORDYN: where you are inventing the ground rules of the thing you are building as you are building it. And that is a very...it's just a really special time. And some people love it, and some people despise it. There's a lot of chaos and uncertainty, and you have to move forward despite all of that chaos and uncertainty. And some of us love the; I don't know, there's just this feeling that anything is possible, a sort of sense of newness and really paving the road while you're hacking through the jungle, and I just love that. And I feel like I want to help other companies love that phase too. [laughs] It's like a weird thing to say. I'm almost like an evangelist for that time. But I'm an evangelist for it because I feel like it's really important to make sure that you're tying the mission and vision of the business; you're weaving it into what it is you're doing in the product ASAP. Do it early. Make sure you're thinking about this stuff from the jump. And if I can be an evangelist for that kind of thinking and the processes that make it possible, it's just a really exciting thing for me to be able to do. CHAD: That's really cool. You saying that made me think about this sense that I have that oftentimes when you're faced with that period of time where everything is possible, and you're literally defining what the product and the business is going to be, maybe there are more than two buckets. But I think, generally, people fall into one of two buckets. There are the people who look at that and say, "Okay, here's what we're not going to do." And they're really good at saying no to things and narrowing down from that. Another group of people who maybe even really struggle with all of the possibility, and their reaction is to say "Yes," to everything. JORDYN: Right. Yep. CHAD: And you can probably say judged by the way that I introduced the concept which one I think is better. JORDYN: [laughs] CHAD: But that's the two buckets I see. Do you see that too? JORDYN: Oh, absolutely. And I will say partly why I am so enthusiastic about this phase is that I was a bucket number two person and worked very hard to become a bucket number one person because that's the mindset you have to get in. But it's a real delicate balance. It's not always clear; you have to be open to things changing. But saying no is way more important than saying yes in the sense that, you know, I think the phrase people like to use in startup land is you can't boil the ocean, and that is true. So it's much easier...the path is much easier and clearer if you start small. But if you're an entrepreneur, by nature, that's going to feel really uncomfortable to you because what you see out in the world is possibility and probably endless possibility, right? CHAD: Right. JORDYN: So the notion that you are going to squeeze yourself into the tiniest space to start when you see the giant opportunity. And PS, everyone is asking you to articulate that giant opportunity. You need to be able to tell that story so that you can recruit people to your cause. But at the same time, you need to be ruthlessly focused in the here and now on the small things, like, the constrained things you're going to do, for now, all the things you're going to say no to for now while keeping your eyes on this larger, expansive prize. It is just a really...it's an art; it is a hard thing to do. CHAD: How did you shift your mindset? JORDYN: Through failure. CHAD: [laughs] JORDYN: It was through painfully failing at doing this. [laughs] I made every textbook mistake, some of them fairly recently. [laughs] So there's a lot of folks out there who their first venture, their first foray into this world, was a success, and that's wonderful for them. That's great. But their advice is sort of suspect for me and for a lot of founders because it's like, well, you didn't... [laughs] maybe it was skill, maybe it was luck; it was probably a combination of both. Like, good for you that you did this. But if you've started a business, launched a product one time, and it was wildly successful, how are you in a position to teach me who might be on failure number two, or three, or whatever, how I need to change in order to be successful, what needs to change in order for me to be successful? Like, you're not going to be that useful to me. And so I find I'm in a much better position to help other people not fall into the same potholes that I did because I fell into them. I can look at folks and say, "I know what you're thinking. I know you've got your eyes on this large market opportunity. And you can see the mass market future ten years from now for this thing that you're building, that's great. But you have to start with the narrowest of early adopters." And you have to start with a pain point that is, quote, "hair on fire" is another phrase people like to use, like, just some pain point that people have that is just so painful for people right now that they are willing to pay someone to fix it. You got to focus on that despite this large, open-ended opportunity that's in the future. I can only really give that advice to folks credibly because I have done the opposite so many times that I can both empathize with where they're at in that impulse to boil the ocean, but I can also tell them how one way of disabusing yourself of that mindset. So I think back to actually...so I have an older sister. She was really terrible at math when we were younger. [laughs] And she was the best math teacher for me because it didn't come easy for her. Going to someone who's a math genius to help teach you what greater than or less than is is [laughs] not going to help you because it's self-evident to them. Like, how are they going to break that down for you? My sister was a great math teacher for me because her understanding of math was quite hard-won. So if I came to her and said, "Hey, I don't understand greater than or less than," which, PS, is truly what happened. CHAD: [laughs] JORDYN: I was like, I don't really...however, it was being explained to me did not [laughs] resonate. She was a great person to go to because she would not judge me for not understanding it, first of all, and she would have ways of breaking that down. So I'm that person for new founders, people just starting out trying to come up with a new product or explore a new opportunity. I have learned all the painful lessons on their behalf. So it's not like I'm coming to them with advice; that's just boilerplate advice I have read somewhere, and I'm now repeating to them. No, I have painfully learned these lessons. [laughs] Let me help you avoid that. CHAD: And you said it earlier...you used the phrase like not now or not yet. And I think that's a great way of just slightly...no doesn't mean no forever. [laughs] It just means not right now, not yet. Now's not the right time. JORDYN: Exactly. CHAD: And I think that's a healthy way of reframing it. You're trying to strike that balance between the opportunity and the future and what you're doing today to make the product successful and get it out the door. JORDYN: And you can do a lot of work around those bright, shiny, attractive future possibilities that make it feel...you can basically say, "Not yet, and here's what will have to happen for it to become now." You can kind of nurture those opportunities over time, and what will be the criteria to make them something you want to pursue now. It can kind of sate your desire to pursue them if you nurture the plan over time. So it's not like you just say, "Not yet," you say, "Not yet, and here's the evolving set of things that will tell us it's the right time." And having that shared alignment on the team around what those things are but keeping your eyes on them, actively monitoring the situation to be on the lookout when now is the time can satisfy your urge to be working toward that. I think that's what's really hard for founders who really have their eyes on this big opportunity is you can sometimes feel like you're not making any progress toward it because the progress is so incremental. So finding those practices that feed that thing for you, that keep you motivated and inspired to be working toward that long-term large goal, finding those ways to keep at it, to see the progress, keep refining why it is you're doing what you're doing and how it is you're getting there, can make you feel like you're pursuing and even when you're not [laughs] if that makes any sense. I just acknowledge that people need to do something. Just telling yourself or your team not yet is sometimes not enough because you're in it for that big vision, right? CHAD: Right. Yeah, that's great. One of the things that stood out to me when we first met was the variety of different experiences that you've held, different positions, different roles, different things you've done. You started doing web development. You've done user experience, product management, you've been CTO, you've been CEO of companies. You did product lead and VP of product. That variety of experience, I think is more than I have. [laughs] You have held those different roles. How has that evolved for you in your career? What's been driving that forward for you? JORDYN: I was always this product strategy person inside. I didn't necessarily know it. I didn't really even know. I mean, back in the early days of the web, a product mindset wasn't even really a thing, and advertising got a hold of the internet first. And so it was really about graphic design for a long time and a bunch of other things. But throughout that first decade that I spent as an engineer, as a front-end engineer, I was just constantly that annoying person on the team who was like, "Why are we building this? Who are we building it for? Why are we building this?" Because what I learned is as much as I liked to code, and I liked the puzzle of solving the problem of how to turn a design into a thing people could click on, that was really fun for me, but it was only fun for a while before I started to become really sad, disappointed that we would launch things that would be market failures in the sense of, yeah, we launched a thing, and we checked the box, but no one was using it. And I would come back and say...and I was mostly doing agency work at the time, and so there was not a lot of follow-up. We'd launch something, and then it was, like, move on to the next project. I wanted to know, was this successful? Did people use it? Are people using it? Like, how are they using it? Is it easy to use? And I wanted to answer those questions. And then, when I started to do more of that follow-up work, and then I was finding that most of the things we were launching were failures by my standards. No one cared about them. No one was using them. They were hard to use. And I wanted to make impactful things. And so I kept asking the questions, and I kept asking them earlier and earlier. This is how I ended up in user experience design. I was like, well, can we answer these questions first? Can we make a plan before we ever put pixels to screen, so to speak, [laughs] before we start building? Can we know something so that when we do build...which I had intimate understanding of how much work it is to build software. It's not nothing. It's a big investment of time and energy. And what I wanted increasingly was for that to be time and energy well spent for the entire team and for the universe. [laughs] And so that's how I ended up...I think of it as like swimming upstream in the sense that there's still a lot of waterfall process going on in software. And I was just constantly asking why and for whom earlier and earlier in the process, just so that we could make sure that what we were building was "The Right It," to quote a book title that a lot of folks [laughs] in startup land have read. Like, let's make sure it's "The Right It" before we invest a lot of time and energy, and, frankly, emotion into building something. That was really where this was coming from for me is that I think at heart, secretly or not so secretly, I'm still that engineer, that front-end engineer. And I want cool projects. I want to work on cool projects with cool people that are impactful. And I think that's true of most engineers. [laughs] No one is purely satisfied to just be given an assignment that they're supposed to execute without thinking about it. And getting into UX and then getting into product management was for me almost like a mission to make sure that by the time something got to engineering, it was a good idea. I just wanted to save engineers from terrible projects; that was my whole mission. [laughs] CHAD: Well, at thoughtbot, we have a set of core values, and one of them is fulfillment. And in the writing around that, the phrase we often use is we want to work on products that we believe deserve to exist. JORDYN: Yes. CHAD: And that doesn't just mean that they have a positive impact on the world instead of a negative impact. But we're very intentional about the words we use, so there's a double meaning to that phrase. It's having a positive impact on the world, but it also means that it's the right product. This is what we should be building that it deserves to exist. JORDYN: Yes, because you all know, we know how hard it is to make software. It's actually really hard. I think certainly building new products, you know, what a new product meant in 1920 is a very different thing than what [laughs] it means in 2022. And while it is a lot easier to bring new products into the world, like software products, internet products, it doesn't mean it's just easy. There's a lot of effort and resources that go into doing this, so let's make sure we're spending those things wisely. Is the product idea good? Does it deserve to exist, but also, have we done our homework to validate that people want this, that they're going to use it? And to the extent that you can. There are limits to the ability of any team to forecast that. But when you bring more of this experimental mindset to it as soon as possible, it's like you up the odds that you'll end up building something valuable. And like you were saying about the word deserve, the word valuable to me is very broad, valuable to users, valuable to the business, valuable to the world. Let's create things of value if we're going to go to the trouble of creating things. 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 user-centered product journey, a clickable prototype or Proof of Concept, and key market insights from focused user research. We'll help you to identify the primary user 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 roadmap for your new product. Get started at: tbot.io/sprint. CHAD: Have you found any tools, or techniques, or things that work particularly well for doing that? JORDYN: Yeah, and it's probably not going to be all that satisfying. There are no shortcuts, I think, is what's challenging about this. [laughs] The tool and the process that I always start with and come back to is talking to customers and talking to users if those two people are not the same. Talk to people, not about your product idea; talk to them about their lives. Talk to them about what is difficult for them, what is easy for them, what they value, and you will seldom go wrong if you start and return to that process and truly listen. This whole thing of talking to customers and talking to users is an art in and of itself. It's not idle, you know; it's not just a thing you toss off once in a while. [laughs] It's a skill. It's an art. And that is where you begin in it. Now, that is not the whole thing. But if you're starting there or returning there, you can always do this. I talk to teams all the time who have whiffed on this step of the process, and it's fine. Like, people who are builders, especially entrepreneurs, just want to get in there and start making something, like, I get that. CHAD: Well, I think it's the combination of really wanting to move quickly and get to something really, really quickly. But I also think there is an element of fear... JORDYN: [laughs] Yes. CHAD: that causes people so that these two things combined really set people up to not do this... JORDYN: To not do this, yes. CHAD: because they're afraid of what they'll learn. And so it's much easier to just say, "Well, I know what to build. Let's build it. And you don't need to actually talk to people who might tell you something that isn't aligned with what you think the product should be." JORDYN: 100%, 100%. Getting over that fear is hard, and you probably will just have to fail really hard without getting over it. I mean, that was certainly my experience, I mean, like several times. [laughs] I tried to build things without talking to anyone about it. I also was one of these people that built something that...and I can get into the story, but I built something that was successful enough without talking to a single person about it. And it really sent me down a fool's path for a while because I thought that's how it worked. But yeah, that fear is real. But I think the thing that got me around it eventually and gets me around it now is there's the rational side of this which is, well, wouldn't you rather know sooner than later that something is not a good idea or this is not a pain point? Sure. But the more visceral, emotional thing that got me around it is good ideas are actually a dime a dozen. You'll have good ideas. You'll have ten good ideas tomorrow morning. Your one idea that you have decided to explore and build out and build a company around it won't be your only idea. It is not the only good idea. [laughs] You will have more of those. If you had 1, you'll have 10. So talking to users means you'll figure out...you'll have the opportunity to come up with more of those ideas, and one of them will be the winner. All of them are probably good ideas on some level. Having ideas isn't the problem. People are afraid of talking to customers and learning that their idea is not good, but you got to turn that on your head. You talk to customers to learn what they need, and then you'll have 20 ideas about how to solve that for them, solve that need. The real fool's path here is to get attached to your first one idea that you had to solve a problem. It's to get attached to your problem before you have validated it. That's another pitfall here. But then to think that the first thought you had and how to solve it is going to be your only good idea, nah, you have lots of good ideas; we all do. [laughs] You'll have more. So really just focusing on that pain point and listening to people and then really doing the work to generate more and more ideas. Even if you think you have a good solution now, it's always worth thinking about what other solutions might be constantly because your solution that you've come up with might have some feasibility issues. It might have other problems that you haven't seen yet. So it's always good to have more solutions in the hopper in case the one that you're pursuing right now doesn't turn out to be the right one. CHAD: This is something that I don't know the answer to, and that is I do know you didn't originally start out as a developer, and it's not what your education is in. JORDYN: [laughs] No. CHAD: But how did you get into development? JORDYN: [laughs] I was in college. This was just such a lucky, random thing. But I was in college, and I was in a band, a rock band. And this was early '98, maybe even fall '97. We were just at practice one day, and someone in the band was like, "We need a website." And this was when this was like a new thing that people did. [laughs] And everyone in the room just turned and looked at me. And I was like, "Oh, I'm making the website? Okay." CHAD: Why? Were you a tech person in their mind? JORDYN: I don't know, I guess because I seemed scrappy and capable even then. I have no idea. But I was like, all right, I'll see what I can figure out. So I wandered into the computer lab and just went to the person running the computer lab and was like, "Hey, how do I make a website?" [laughs] And this guy whose name I don't remember which is horrible, I really wish I could reach out to this guy and be like, "Hey, I have a career because of you, thank you." CHAD: [laughs] JORDYN: He was like, "Oh, cool. Here's what you do." And he basically opened up Netscape and was like, "Hey, there's like a..." there was like an editor. I don't even remember what it was called now. If you recall, there was an editor in Netscape. He was like, "Here's the basics of this. And here's a website," which was the... [laughs] What was the name of this website? All of the articles on this website were titled something like, so you want to make a webpage? Or so you want to make an interactive image replacement? Or so you want to host a website on a server? Whatever, like, that was all the articles. And that website taught me how to code, and that guy put me on a path, and I just immediately was like, this is the most fun thing ever. I was like, I love this. [laughs] And it wasn't like two months before I had built the websites for a couple of departments on campus. My mom had a recruiting business at the time. She was like, "Can you make my recruiting business website?" It was just like, off to the races, which was great. But I graduated into the dot-com bust, which meant I could not get a job doing this. It's like entry-level folks always see a recession coming first, right? CHAD: Right. JORDYN: And everyone was like, "Oh my God, you can write HTML. You're going to get a six-figure job immediately," whatever. [laughs] And I was like, that is not what's happening here. I would have a job interview at someplace, and then they'd stop calling me. And I would find out that the company went under the day after I interviewed. That was what was happening. So I couldn't get a job, a professional job doing this for a while. But I kept doing it on the side basically for my friends and family and eventually managed to get back into some professional [laughs] aboveboard real roles doing this work, but it was a struggle at first. And it was only just because I just really loved doing it, which, again, to circle back to something we talked about before, was kind of a liability for me for a while. Liking coding makes you really unthoughtful about what you're coding because you're always happy to do it, right? [laughs] CHAD: Oh, I speak from personal experience, yes. [laughs] JORDYN: Yes, right. I just wasn't thinking, is this a good idea? I was thinking great, cool; I get to code more. I love this. That was fine early on because I did get a lot of experience. And the first real job I got doing this work was at a company that was building websites for musicians, and our main client was Warner Brothers music. And so I got to build the My Chemical Romance website. CHAD: Cool. JORDYN: I got to build madonna.com for the Confessions on the Dance Floor release and tour. CHAD: That's really cool. JORDYN: Like, it was really fun. And basically, I got to build a new website every two weeks for three years which was amazing bootcamp for me. The designers there were just fantastic. I learned more than I can ever even probably understand about doing that. But partly what I learned was [laughs] this feeling of this was where that feeling began where I was like, is this the right thing? Are we building the right thing? Or is this successful? That's when I started to ask those questions: is what we're doing what people want? So anyway, it was very fun. I got into it because I was in rock bands, which is strange. I don't think people typically find lucrative careers being in rock bands. [laughs] CHAD: I talk to a lot of people over the years through our apprenticeship program, through different things where there are people out there who connect with programming like you did and like I did. The difference is that, for whatever reason, I had that experience when I was 10. [laughs] And other people just never get the opportunity to be exposed to that until later. But it's remarkable when it happens, and you get that connection where it just connects with you at a level that almost nothing has before. It's like a constant dopamine hit when you're programming. JORDYN: Oh, it is. Yeah, I used to joke that, basically, I felt like I got to play video games for a living because that's what it felt like. It was just one puzzle game after another. It just didn't feel like work. I got to go to work every day and solve what felt like really interesting problems and puzzles. And at the end, there was a thing people used or could look at. It just felt like I'd hit pay dirt. I felt so lucky to have found it. But yeah, I haven't done this since the pandemic. But for several years before that, I was a Girls Who Code instructor, and being able to pay that experience forward and help middle school, high school-aged girls who hadn't necessarily had this experience yet find themselves in coding, that was really the mission me and my co-teacher had decided that was really what we were after. We didn't care if they walked away from doing this with any hard coding skills. What we wanted them to have in their minds was I can be a programmer, and that seems like fun or possible for me. That was all we wanted. And it was so amazing to see that moment where it clicked for them where they were like, "Oh, there's like a pattern here." And yeah, see that dopamine hit thing start to set up, you know, in their brains and know that it was only going to help them. I mean, I often said to them, "Major in whatever you want in college, but get a minor in computer science; that's where your job is. [laughter] Sorry to break this to you, but this is where your job is." [laughs] CHAD: Another thing that you've done is you've advised a lot of companies through a few different organizations: Underscore VC, the Harvard Innovation Lab. What makes a good advisor as opposed to a bad advisor? JORDYN: This is a really hard question, actually, because it's not often entirely clear in the moment whether a given advisor is...if you feel a lot of rapport with someone and they're helping you out in the moment, that's great. But often, one finds that something an advisor told you that did not land at all at the time comes back later to be something that's really useful. So I want to say up front that what makes a good advisor is really idiosyncratic to the founder, and to the advisor, and to the moment they find themselves together in. So with that as a big caveat, I think what I bring to this, what I go out of my way to bring to it, is that I've been in the trenches. I know what that feels like. And I trust founders, like, my job there is to just add some perspective. I've participated in building over 30 products, so I can help them. They might be doing their first product or business, and all I'm there to do is bring a bunch of other experience for them to pick some insights from. It's not actually my job, I don't think, to pre-filter that stuff for them. I'm very practical and hands-on. They bring a problem to me, and I'm like, "Okay, here's three times I've seen that situation before. And here are three things that happened." And I basically multiply their historical experience that they can draw from; that's sort of what I bring to this. There's another thing here when I've had valuable advisors, this thing that's kind of hard to articulate. But it's like, often early on, what you need is just someone to take you seriously, just really take you seriously as a founder and a leader. I go way out of my way to make it clear that I am doing that with them and that it is my assumption 100% that they will rise to that occasion, that they will figure out who they need to be, what resources they need to bring to bear in order to be successful. And doing that, taking them seriously and taking their ideas seriously, taking their experiences seriously, and really demonstrating that I think they have what it takes and I think that they can rise to this occasion, I think is probably the most valuable thing because most people don't do that. They come to your idea looking to tear it down, and I think it's well-meaning. They want to stress test you and your idea. That's all well and good. But, I mean, I'm often advising underrepresented founders and what they need is confidence. They need to be built up, not torn down. That doesn't mean I don't bring skepticism and help them try to think evermore clearly about what it is they're doing and why; I definitely do that. But there's this baseline of I think you are capable of doing this. I think you are a person who gets to do this; that is not in question for me. And that alone I think is probably the most valuable thing you can get from an advisor, [laughs] is just someone to take you seriously. CHAD: That's great. So for folks who have been familiar with thoughtbot for a while, we have a lot of advice out there in the world for how to build products, how to validate things, exercises to run, all that kind of stuff. And we bundle all of that up in what we call our playbook. And now, as we're sort of almost 20 years into this now, that's a big resource. And so we're doing something new, which is extracting the information that we have specifically targeted towards those earliest stages of a new product or a business into a separate playbook. You're taking your wisdom, and you're going to be able to add it to that as well. And it's going to be a little bit more targeted. So we've just launched that. And you can find it at thoughtbot.com/research-strategy-playbook. I would encourage folks to check that out. Jordyn, when it comes to sharing, we're big at that at thoughtbot, and I'm excited to have you as part of that. Is there something that you think our approach from the fact that we're a consulting company or an agency makes it either in good ways or bad ways different than joining a product company and what you might do in a new role, or in sharing, or in working on things that we work on? JORDYN: Yeah. I mean, I'm sure I'll have more to say about this when I've been here for a year. Having been here for a month, [laughter] this answer might be suspect. So far, anyway, the way I think about the differences here is that our role in working with product companies is to help them build the muscles to do this work, not to do it for them because they need to be able to do it going forward. We're not going to embed with them for the rest of time. So that's a big difference, and that's both good and bad in the sense that we can maintain a certain amount of perspective because we can bring a kind of insider-outsider, like, we've done this lots and lots of times. We've seen the myriad ways that can go. And so we can bring that experience to bear while also remaining somewhat, I mean, objective is maybe a problematic word here, but some flavor of that while remaining outside of the everyday operational reality of the business. So that can be a really helpful perspective. But I think the sort of risk there that I see is not being able to fully appreciate...that's the wrong word, but it's like, maybe not having the credibility we could have because we aren't going to be around to see this thing through. There's really, especially at early stages with projects, you really need people who are in it to win it, in it for the long haul. And so, I can see this looking like a tough sell for certain founders. But from what I know so far, what I know about myself, what I know about thoughtbot so far is that that couldn't be further from the truth for us. We really are invested in folks' long-term success. And we do want to leverage our ability to focus and stand slightly outside of day-to-day operations to help them gain that perspective. But that is really the give and take, I think, of being a consultant rather than being part of the company. CHAD: Now, it does make us...there are companies out there that that's not the goal, the goal is to make you dependent on them. JORDYN: Yes, right. [laughs] CHAD: That definitely is one of the unique things about thoughtbot is that that is not our goal. Our goal is to teach people to do what we do. But we do sometimes get criticized for, in those early stages, exactly that. It's like, where's your sense of urgency or your passion about this? And actually, we do have it. It's just the analogy I often use is we're like a professional sports team. [laughs] We make it look easy because we're really good at it. And a lot of environments are ones where in order to make things happen, you need to create an environment of stress or those kinds of things. And that's what people are used to. And so when they start working with us, and they don't see that, they think something is wrong. JORDYN: Yes, yes. 100%. And that is a huge cultural challenge with working with startups in general, where there is a real fire-fighting mentality. Like, let's get in there and make some stuff happen. Things are shifting constantly, and you've got to react. And I'm working 80-hour weeks to just make sure everything gets done. And I would hope..., and I've seen this to a certain extent in my month here so far, but the goal is for us to help folks work smarter, not harder, in the sense that more output does not mean more success. We do have the experience of having worked on so many products, each of us individually and then collectively as a company. It is our goal, and it is my personal sincere hope that we can help these companies see how to do this work better and more sustainably without burning yourself out. If you happen to be successful while focused on this kind of work more output, it's only by chance you were successful there. It wasn't because you worked that hard. [laughs] And it's hard to see. There is a lot of like hustle culture stuff out there that makes you feel like unless you are burning your candle at both ends, you're not doing it right. I think thoughtbot has the depth of experience to say," No, we can say otherwise," and to help companies figure out how to do that. I can absolutely see what you mean that people are like; these people don't have the fire in their belly, which couldn't be further from the truth. But it does feel very different from the inside. CHAD: I feel like I could talk to you all day, [laughs] but we have to keep the episode somewhat within our normal constraints. Jordyn, thank you so much. If folks want to follow along with you or get in touch with you, where are the best places for them to do that? JORDYN: So I am @skybondsor S-K-Y-B-O-N-D-S-O-R pretty much everywhere that you might want to... [laughter] A friend of mine gave me that nickname years ago. That's my handle pretty much everywhere. I spend a lot of time on Twitter, so that's probably the best place if you want to follow me or interact with me. But I'm also on LinkedIn and a lot of other places. CHAD: And you can subscribe to the show, find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on Twitter at, not as an exciting username as @skybondsor, but @cpytel. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot; thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success. Special Guest: Jordyn Bonds.

Will Larry, Software Developer at thoughtbot, joins Giant Robots as host!

Neil Macqueen is a leading industrial designer with 78 patents to his name, having previously spent ten years at Dyson and is now the Head of Design at Gembah, the world's first global marketplace for product development. Chad talks to Neil about being focused on industrial design or actual physical products as opposed to interfaces and digital products, working designers and developers, and design to manufacture as a process. Gembah (https://gembah.com/) Follow Gembah on Twitter (https://twitter.com/MadeWithGembah), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/madewithgembah/), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/MadeWithGembah/), or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/gembah-inc/), or YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfZ77_SRz9Q3-qIjmmY7xGg). Follow Neil on Twitter (https://twitter.com/neilmacqueen) and LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/neilmacqueen/). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) 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 Neil Macqueen, a leading industrial designer with 78 patents to his name, having previously spent ten years at Dyson and who is now the Head of Design at Gembah, the world's first global marketplace for product development. Neil, thank you so much for joining me. NEIL: Oh, it's great to be here with you today, Chad. Thank you for having me. CHAD: One distinction I feel like we always need to make, and this is one of the things we struggle with at thoughtbot; people want to put themselves out in the community and say, "Here's what I do," and people use the word product design. And there's actually a pretty big, you know, some designers are, or product developers are industrial design physical products and others are digital. What do you do at Gembah? NEIL: For me, myself, what I do at Gembah explicitly is far more focused around industrial design or actual physical products as opposed to interfaces and digital products. CHAD: And as the world's, you know, the self-described first global marketplace for product development, what does that actually mean? NEIL: What it means is that Gembah provides a platform in which anybody with an idea or an aspiration to even have an idea has a single source by which you can tap into all the resources you need to get your product to market. So I think a good metaphor for it would be that it's very easy for myself, yourself, any of the listeners today to become a seller. Like, I can set myself up with an eBay or an Amazon account this afternoon and start selling a product. There are very low barriers to doing that. Whereas if you want to become a product creator, that is a very disjointed process. And what you'll see from large companies like my experience at Dyson and other companies is that they have a vertically integrated business. They own each part of that product creation, development, engineering, production, logistics. It is all very integrated. And what we try and do and provide to creators is that single integrated structure by which you can have an idea, work with a designer, develop that in conjunction with a manufacturer, and then very seamlessly move over into your production and logistics. CHAD: You mentioned Dyson, and you spent ten years there and moved through various design roles. I definitely want to touch on that in a little bit. But what attracted you to Gembah? NEIL: I think, as with all people who are interested in ideas, whether digital or physical, it's the process of creating something that really attracted me, has attracted me to all my roles in the past, and certainly to Gembah. In as much as what I just described previously, it is a world first, like, it is a category-defining company. So I think what really attracted me to Gembah was the fact that what we're doing here is not only building lots of very interesting products and helping entrepreneurs, and product creators, and businesses, but what we're doing is developing a platform which is entirely unique and one of its kind. CHAD: I have to admit, I did a little bit of research on you, as I always do. And I looked at your Twitter, and I saw that a lot of your tweets were, I think, back from 2016, where you yourself designed...how would you describe it? A coffee press stand? NEIL: Exactly. And AeroPress stand. CHAD: Having been through that process and launching it on Kickstarter, is that part of what...you said I want to help other people do this. NEIL: Absolutely. And it is probably a very congregating experience in terms of people who go through crowdfunding campaigns and then try and do it yourself. And certainly, my experience, you know, Kickstarter is a wonderful platform. But everything thereafter for me as a creator doing something in my spare time and my evenings outside of my normal nine to five was incredibly challenging, you know, dealing with factories who had very broken English or really struggled to communicate both my idea and their complications accurately. And just how that unfolded into trying to get a product to market without somebody to help and guide me through that process, doing it entirely by yourself. So I think that was certainly a very challenging experience in terms of getting that coffee stand to market. And I think the same is true for lots of first-time creators and even businesses in trying to reduce costs, up efficiency of getting to market quickly. Like, who are the partners and people that you can work with and businesses you can partner with to help provide you with those benefits? And that's really what we try and provide at Gembah. And I think, as you mentioned at the start, certainly my past experiences make me think that what we're building here today certainly does bring a lot of benefit. CHAD: I've had quite a few people on the show who launched physical products themselves on Kickstarter or other crowdfunding platforms. And often, the conversation turns to how difficult it actually was from a supply chain perspective from a manufacturing perspective. One of the things that struck me about Gembah is that it is not a small operation. It has headquarters in the U.S, but team members live and work all over the world. Their website says there are 150-plus team members globally, so given that reach, it seems like it probably can be really helpful to people solving those challenges. I'm curious who the ideal customers of Gembah are. What is the profile of someone who works with Gembah? NEIL: For our ideal client at the moment, I think that's one topic, and we can go into that. But what we're really trying to do in terms of the company vision is to democratize the design process and creating a product that gets to market. So as much as for us as a company, you know, having gone through a series A funding round and heading towards a series B, yes, we have got a fairly focused view of who is our ideal client profile and persona. However, what we're really aiming towards is providing this vertically integrated system of design and marketplace resources to absolutely everybody. That is the vision, the vision that anybody can become a product creator for the first time. In as much as, like my metaphor said earlier, you can become a seller on eBay, you should be able to have as easy access to the resources that enable that product creation. CHAD: So there's an example I always like to use; it has legs a little bit, which is thoughtbot is a well-respected design and development company. And there's an opportunity, you know, we're working designers and developers. And as people who do this work, we often either buy products and see how they could be improved or have ideas for our own, whether it be notepads, or pens, or even mechanical keyboards are a really interesting thing. If we wanted to pursue something like that, how might we do that? NEIL: In the context of Gembah? CHAD: Yeah, or beyond. But yes. NEIL: So I think the first thing for anybody with an idea is to really have some very clear goals at the outset in terms of...and for anybody who is interested in user-centered design, three of the guiding principles for that are three things I always really lean on which is feasibility, viability, and desirability. So within all of those things, what are your ambitions for your product? In terms of ideally, every product should be desirable; people should want to buy it. Have you got the means by which to get it to market? And once you've got it there, will it provide you enough of a margin to have a sustainable business? So the viability of the product. And can you actually make it? You know, it's not made out of unobtainium, or it [laughter] might be. So I think a very easy starting point for absolutely everybody is to really go via those three guiding principles in terms of the desirability, viability, and feasibility of your idea. Where do you think you score on that matrix? And then if you think you really have got something in terms of an idea that really has merit and that you have the wherewithal that you want to see it through to fruition, certainly just picking up the phone and calling Gembah, that's a great second step. CHAD: Okay. So at Gembah, if someone picks up the phone before going through those three steps and is talking to you, do you help them take a step back and answer those three questions? NEIL: Absolutely. So I think what we really try and do is not only facilitate your product development journey. We're not a service provider; we're a service facilitator. We want to connect you with all of the resources within our platform and marketplace. And what we really try and steer towards is what is the product development journey that best suits your needs. And I think, typically speaking, if we were to use a broad brush, it falls into three camps which is, do you want to speed to market? And the fact you want to sell an idea very quickly. So, could you potentially white-label your product? So we provide these options to people. So there's a white labeling route. There's then a customized route which is to say, is there something fairly similar already commercially available in the market and that factories provide, and that you could adjust the feature set for your idea by perhaps 10%? That would actually then mean that you could get your idea customized in the factory and into market. So that's the customized route. Versus then an entirely unique product which is to say that you need to both develop the design and tooling for the product from the ground up. Intuitively, I would hope from white labeling all the way through to unique product development; you have a fairly matched scale of time and cost. The more involved, the more detail, the more unique, the more time, and the more cost proportionally increases. CHAD: How would you say that designing within a company like Dyson is different than being outside? NEIL: The thing that working for a company like Dyson and others like it really affords you is the freedom to research without the means of having to really focus on what is my next launch in a year's time. And what I mean by that is Dyson and other large, successful companies have exclusive product development innovation hubs and idea teams who, for every 100 products they develop, potentially only get one through to market and into the global markets. So I think as a designer, what you're really afforded there is the space and creativity to explore lots of ideas without the pressure of I have to have something out in this next six-month period into the market. I think that's very different to a small to medium-sized enterprise who have a set product line, and this may be your only product line. Like, you really need to be laser-focused in what is my incremental product development here so that I can maintain the attention of the public? As well as then trying to work concurrently on how do I evolve my product line to then broaden out my audience? So I think that's quite different in terms you have to be very focused. 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. CHAD: You started at Dyson as a design engineer, and you moved through up into a senior design engineer, then concept lead, to design manager of new product innovation. What was the journey from design engineer to eventually design manager? And what are the differences between those roles? NEIL: I think the key thing that changes within those roles is the level of autonomy and responsibility. And I think what scales up through each of those rungs is essentially how you can demonstrate competency for your core responsibility set. So as a design engineer, you're responsible for part-level designs like, here is, you know, you mentioned the mechanical keyboard earlier in the conversation. In that scenario, you would have a team of potentially four design engineers seeing that through to fruition. You would have a subset of those parts which you're exclusively responsible for. CHAD: So you might just be responsible for designing the best keycaps. NEIL: Exactly, exactly. So one chap will be just looking at the springs, and the tension, and how do they feel. Another one will be looking at the structural integrity; another one will be looking at the ergonomics. So I think you have the individual part and function. And what then levels up from that is as you go then into an advanced design engineer or a senior engineer is that you begin being responsible for the full assembly. So instead of having your keycap, you're now responsible for leading the whole team doing the whole keyboard. And then as you then progress through that, having demonstrated competency and reliability of delivering things, you then become a concept lead, which is to say that you have multiple projects on at the same time. You're leading the teams to do that. And then as you progress through that into design and management role, you then level that up again in terms of you're typically managing portfolios of projects within different market sectors. So I think if that answers your question directly enough, what it really builds on is for anyone aspiring, is you really need to focus on the basics first, like making sure that you are fundamentally a good designer and a good engineer who can demonstrate and communicate your logic and your thought process. And I think if you already underpin yourself with those sorts of fundamental competencies, that serves you really well as you move up through the ranks. CHAD: Some people I talk with, as they move up through those ranks, they feel like they are getting further and further away from what they actually love to do, which was design products. Is that something that you felt, or how did you not feel that? NEIL: I think as you move up through the management hierarchy, at the same time, typically the people that do that, I find and who are successful at it have a fairly focused view of what are their goals, what are they trying to achieve, and what is almost their trademark that they're known for. So for myself, how I've avoided that is...you asked me why I'm interested in Gembah, and that's because what I have very instinctively done both at Dyson and here is make sure that I've positioned myself to solve real problems. Probably everybody in a senior management position sometimes still misses getting on CAD or coding and just having the afternoon with no meetings. [laughs] CHAD: Yeah. NEIL: I think there's an element of that that you can't get away from. However, what really enthuses and keeps me really engaged and motivated in what I am doing now is to say I'm still solving problems, which is the fundamental heart of everything. So instead of designing the best keyboard for somebody who has carpal syndrome or hand problems, what we're now designing and developing is a platform that solves problems for a whole very broad user base. As long as you are always focused in your role in terms of how can I best serve and provide solutions to problems, I think what people will find is that you're actually always very fulfilled as a creator, maybe not as a mechanical engineer or electrical engineer, depending on your background, or a coder. But if you're fundamentally interested in solving problems and bringing solutions, you can still hold on to that very tightly. CHAD: Yeah. As head of design now, what does your day-to-day look like? NEIL: The majority of what it looks like is what I almost just mentioned with regards to how are we both developing and sustaining a business that provides and develops better solutions for our clientele as well as then dipping in and out of projects which require support and a little bit of extra attention? As I mentioned, as a design manager at Dyson, looking across portfolios of projects. My role now is really around making sure that all of our category leads, who are people looking after multiple projects that they, all have the support and tools that they need and require, as well as, as I mentioned, in particular cases, giving attention to some design projects that need help. And then roadmapping out, like, what is the future? What are the next incremental steps of functionality and platform features that we want to develop as a company and facilitate and bring to market for our customers? CHAD: What are some of those things that you're seeing across the portfolio that are needs that you're hoping to meet? NEIL: I think a very interesting new thing that we're bringing to market at the moment is what we call design to manufacture as a process. And what we really try and do there is we see in the market at the moment that people have a real sensitivity around cost-effectiveness with the global economies where they're at and supply chain. Like, how do I, number one, potentially diversify my supply chain? Or number two, how do I actually launch a new product with as little cost to myself as a business as possible? And what we do there is a report, a product opportunity report that profiles you as a business and a brand, and then overlaps that almost in a Venn diagram of where's the sweet spot in terms of available products in the markets that you could customize that would really suit your brand and that we could really effectively customize, and develop with a manufacturer and with a design team and get to market really quick, really cheap, but is still uniquely your own and has your special touch to it? CHAD: Obviously, a thing that has happened in this market or this industry over the last decade or so is crowdfunding and Kickstarter specifically. How have you seen that change things for people? NEIL: I think what it's meant is people get access to funds in a way that would have taken a very long time previously. And I think the other thing is people get feedback on ideas quite quickly as well, which maybe isn't the case across the broad spectrum. But for people who have an idea and want to very quickly test it with the markets in terms of does, this resonate with my user groups that I'm interested in? Like, is this a real set of user problems which I believe I've solved? Is that actually true? I think what it's provided product, you know, industrial design is typically, or any other type of product creator is this very quick access to people with capital who can invest and seeing their products through to fruition, which otherwise was actually a really hard and arduous task, not only getting feedback but then trying to raise capital separately. CHAD: In your opinion, what's the ideal point that something actually goes to crowdfunding? NEIL: The ideal timing for your crowdfunding campaign is where you have the first iterations of a working and demonstrated functional prototype where it's not just all idea but that you can demonstrate the fact that you're committed to this, that you can demonstrate the functionality of it, and show that you've considered how it's going to be made and that it's not actually going to change massively. Because I think what you can sometimes see is people can go to Kickstarter prematurely. And then when they're actually getting into the manufacturer of the product, there are some fairly large compromises that need to be made or the fact that the idea isn't feasible and they can't make it. The ideal time to go to a Kickstarter is where you've already thought through all your user scenarios. You've got a very clear perspective on what the problem set is that you're solving and that you can then demonstrate that with a working prototype. And that doesn't need to be pretty or visually pleasing because you can have your beautiful render next to your functional prototype. I think that's a great time. CHAD: And concrete information on the feasibility of manufacturing it. NEIL: Absolutely. So I think in part of informing your working prototype, I think you need to have early what you'd call DFM, design for manufacture feedback which is where you've spoken to a manufacturer or a tooling engineer and said, "What are the key considerations I should take into building this assembly?" And often is, the case for people who perhaps haven't gone down that road very, very far is that there are some fairly significant adjustments that you need to make to either the visuals or the functionality of your design. At least having a few initial conversations with those factories very clearly integrated into your product considerations is really, really critical. CHAD: So I have to ask, is there something that you're personally pursuing now and working on? NEIL: At the moment, not via Kickstarter. I think the thing actually I'm doing in my spare time is a bit of a passion project with regards to furniture. I think certainly, from my perspective, every designer can pay homage to architecture as the mother of all design. What more is an in-depth user experience and journey than the spaces we're all sitting in every day? And a big part of that is furniture. So I'm designing an armchair in my spare time. This is a way to, [laughs] as you mentioned earlier, with my current role as how it is just making sure I keep sharp my sketching skills and design skills, even if it's just for myself. CHAD: What does that look like for you? Is it sketching on paper now? And how far do you think you'll take it? NEIL: At the moment, it's just sketching on paper and asking my kids which ones they like, they dislike. [laughter] And I think, thankfully, with the abilities I've developed and some of the resources I have access to, we'll probably build a functioning prototype just so I can have a nice new armchair in the kitchen. CHAD: Does that mean creating it yourself, or what does that look like? NEIL: Again, I can only speak for myself. But being a creator and having come from my past, as we mentioned at Dyson, I think my true passion is creation, so keeping my hands very familiar with materials and screwing things together. So I think what that will look like for me is actually just getting all the raw materials myself within the woodwork, the metalwork, and doing all that work myself. I haven't got much of a passion yet for upholstery, so I'll probably outsource that part. There's something really rewarding in physically making something with your hands which I've never let go of, and I think I'll always enjoy. CHAD: That's great. I want to come back, as we wrap up, to those three pillars that you outlined, which I thought were really great. What does someone do who's really passionate about the idea that they have, but they hit roadblocks on one or more of those pillars? NEIL: Hmm, if somebody wants to start just themselves and you have an idea, and you don't want to necessarily engage with a company or service providers yet, I think what you can really do and start with is engaging with groups and doing research yourself so around desirability and feasibility. There is a world of products and reviews out there. There are a lot of resources there. So what I would encourage if somebody has said...you know, let's use your keyboard example again. CHAD: Yep. NEIL: What are the best-selling keyboards out there? And is there a silver lining in between all of them in terms of what makes them sell so well? Is it their functionality? Is it their design? Is it the ergonomics? So I think people can really do a lot of research around what develops and constitutes a really desirable product. As well as then in terms of the feasibility, like, are the things you're putting together can you find them freely on, say, a website like Alibaba? Or can you fundamentally make a keyboard out of wood at scale? Again, there are a lot of resources online that you can do for yourself. And then around viability in terms of, like, what would your margins have to be? Again, I think there's quite a lot you can do there with yourself with regards to what is available on the market today? What are their unique selling points? What are their suggested selling prices? And where do you think you could competitively position yourself? Typically, how I find that works out is a matrix of ideas. And I think people really need to not be precious about the one idea they have but really be adventurous around, like, what are all the ways that I could potentially solve for this problem set? And then just market against that matrix of desirability, feasibility, and viability and see which one is enough of all of those that actually gives you your best shot at success? I think, typically, you see a lot of creators who are very precious about an idea. And actually, maybe, again, it's entirely machined out of aluminum. Well, you know, you're really going to struggle to make that at a competitive price. CHAD: Right. You're not necessarily Apple. [laughs] NEIL: Exactly. You haven't got that economy of scale available to you. [laughs] So I think having a very clear goal in terms of, like, where do I think I can position this in the market? Do I think people will like it? And could I make it for that much? CHAD: Yeah, I think that that's true across the entire spectrum of digital and physical product design and development. We work with a lot of founders who have an idea. And compromise problem-solving through the many challenges that you face is critical. And if you're not able to do that, it's very difficult to actually get a product to market in any reasonable time frame or financial sustainability. NEIL: I completely agree. CHAD: Well, I really appreciate you stopping by the show and sharing with us, Neil. NEIL: Thank you so much for having me today. It's been a great conversation, and I've really enjoyed it. CHAD: If folks want to get in touch with you, or follow along, or learn more about Gembah or anything else, where are all the different places that they can do that? NEIL: So you can certainly find and connect with me on LinkedIn if anyone would like to follow up with me personally. And if you're really serious about getting a product to market and engaging around that process, you can just look us up at gembah.com. CHAD: And I can also personally say if you like looking at pretty things for inspiration, Neil's Instagram is also pretty good for that. [laughter] You can subscribe to the show and find notes for everything that we just mentioned, along with links and a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter @cpytel. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks so much for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success. Special Guest: Neil Macqueen.

Chloe Sweden is the Founder and CEO of Plants and Perks, a service for rewarding employees with sustainable perks. Chad talks to Chloe about supporting employees on plant-based sustainability journies by gifting free samples and high-value prizes, choosing a co-founder, and being strategic with the types of businesses they've approached. Plants and Perks (https://www.plantsandperks.com/) Follow Plants and Perks on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/@plantsandperks/), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/plantsandperks), or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/plantsandperks/). Follow Chloe on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/chloe-sweden-014/). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) 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 Chloe Sweden, the Founder, and CEO of Plants and Perks, a service for rewarding employees with sustainable perks. Chloe, thank you so much for joining me. CHLOE: Thank you for having me. CHAD: So you officially started Plants and Perks, at least according to your LinkedIn, in July of 2020. But I'm sure, like many entrepreneurs, you incubated the idea. The idea was in your head for longer than that. So, where does the idea from Plants and Perks come from? And when did you start to noodle it? CHLOE: It's a really, really good question. I also think that the LinkedIn algorithm isn't 100% correct. CHAD: [laughs] CHLOE: And it always seems to add time. I always get this sort of like, "Oh my God, you've been doing this for like two years?" I'm like, "No, I'm sure it can't be. It must be shorter than that." So Plants and Perks, Plants and Perks originally started out life as the Green Shoot Institute, which, I think, if you Google us, still there's remnants of the Green Shoot Institute that exists. That is still our company holding name. And that was kind of, I guess, the first thought of the idea. I was at the time heading up commercial relationships at a large parenting platform in the UK. And we had started to go on our own plant-based journey, so thinking about cutting back on meat and dairy consumption. I guess that was sort of my own personal journey that started to make me, as a parent, and as a consumer, and as a senior leader within business to, start to think about things outside of myself, and my family, and my business. And really, that was kind of the spark of thinking about how we, as employers, don't really do much to support employees on the plant-based sustainability journey. That was the sort of the embryo of the idea. And that came from the fact that I had spent 20 years of my life in advertising, marketing, and then ten years within that in talent as a former head of talent and culture really thinking about how we embed talent and how we help employees, and how culture is so important to businesses, and how we get employees really to be the face of our brands. But we don't really do much to invest in people beyond the kind of traditional benefits that exist but also in terms of training and things like that. That was kind of where things were coming together, sort of thinking about the future of work and thinking about how people go through these huge life moments and how the businesses really support them. So that was kind of the start. I won't give the whole game away, but that was, I guess, the beginning of a kind of, hmm, there's something there. And I didn't really know what it was at the time. But yeah, I guess it wasn't so much before I actually incorporated the company. I incorporated in September 2020. That's what it says on my Company's House printout that I have on the wall just to remind me of when that momentous day happened. But pretty quickly, from coming up with an idea, I incorporated the business and just went, this is something I have to do. CHAD: Yeah, the feeling of this is something I have to do is something that I've felt myself and that I hear from a lot of entrepreneurs and guests of the show. You were working at Mumsnet at the time. How did you start while also having another job? CHLOE: Not just having another job, running a large sales team, and homeschooling two children during a pandemic. CHAD: Oh, homeschooling. Okay, yeah. CHLOE: And my son was definitely diagnosed with having additional needs at the time as well. I guess it was all of those things that kind of came together that made me realize, I mean, I had joined Mumsnet actually to head up Mumsnet's talent function, which was all about creating a flexible working product platform for parents and those looking for flexible jobs to bring them together in a marketplace. But Mumsnet wasn't going to actually continue to invest in that product, and I moved to a more commercial role. But I moved there to build a product. And that's what really triggered it for me. I realized in that moment when I'm homeschooling, and I'm running a large sales team, and I'm doing all of these things, that wasn't why I moved to this role. I actually moved because I'm at the point in my career where I want to build something, that I have it in me to create something, and build, and connect people, and do something bigger than myself and bigger than a day-to-day job. And so that itch was there. I was also, as part of that role, going out and speaking to heads of HR in large enterprise organizations and talking to them about what was troubling them. And funny enough, looking after their working parents was not troubling them, but sustainability came up a lot, and general well-being came up a lot. And so that was kind of, I guess, it started the percolation. But really, I guess with most things, the idea came about in its most embryonic stage, and then I took it to market really quickly. I basically gave it a name and then just reached out on LinkedIn to anybody I knew and people I didn't know as well just literally reached out to those people. And I spoke to one person who I won't name her or the company but probably one of the largest global companies in the world and at a very senior level. And she was actually working out of the States. And she said to me, you know, "This is new. [laughs] You need to do this. Nobody is doing this. We need this in our lives. And I haven't heard of anybody doing this in the States. You need to go and build this." And that was, I guess, the impetus to do it. And so I worked weekends. I actually was working four days a week at Mumsnet. But my fifth day, I was working full time for Mumsnet but not being paid. And so I clawed back my fifth day where I wasn't being paid, and I worked all weekends, and I worked all evenings. And I just worked and worked, and I haven't stopped until this conversation. [laughs] CHAD: To actually work on it, did you start to gather a team, a group of people? Who were the first people that you brought on to help you? CHLOE: So my co-founder, Ellen, we were on the senior leadership team of a creative agency. I was the head of talent and culture. She was the head of operation. So we had worked side by side in this organization. So we kept in touch. And she had contacted me about some health issues. And we were talking about cutting back on meat and dairy as one of the things that she could look at, given my own experiences with it. And that really bonded us. And because I am marketing, sales, creative, and she is digital, tech, product, it kind of made sense, in the beginning, to bring her on. And I just said to her like, "I'd really like you on this journey with me." And she resisted it for quite some time. [laughs] We are very different personality-wise, very, very different. I'm yes, she's no, and so in that way, we're very much yin and yang. CHAD: Oh, but I think that that can be the perfect combination for a co-founder team. I know that I've needed that in the past for myself. Someone who balances the risk-taking with reality can be very helpful. CHLOE: Yeah, absolutely. And I think I'm actually not a risk taker, but I am a natural optimist. And so I'll have a meeting, and I'll be like, "It's amazing. It's solved all of our problems." And she'll be just like, "No, it hasn't. What's changed? Nothing's changed. There's no contract, nothing signed," [laughs] which I think in the moment is really not helpful. [laughs] But it's really helpful as we grow the business. It really is a good balance. I bring all of that energy and drive to get us very quickly to the next level. And she brings all of the understanding, all of the pauses, all of the rigor, all of the data, all the things that are just the complete opposite of me. So I brought her on pretty quickly. And then we had a bit of a false start around getting a CTO on board. But we knew we needed to build the product quickly. And in the end, we built the product ourselves on a no-code/low-code platform, just the two of us. And I recommend any entrepreneur to do that because you learn a lot. [laughs] CHAD: Is that the reason...so you learning...because I think that that is super important, whether it be someone like yourself actually building the product or just being very close to it. When I've seen entrepreneurs get too far away from the product too soon, they end up regretting it later on. CHLOE: Yeah, I think -- CHAD: Or building the wrong thing. CHLOE: Or building the wrong thing. I do really believe in you've got to do every job in order to then understand who you need to hire and to then have an appreciation of that role. So obviously the product evolved very much and very quickly. We were very lucky that one of our first clients was Lacoste, who we launched to here in the UK with our MVP. But we also did some other paid consultancy work with Uber and with other clients as well. And then PopSockets came on in the States as well. We weren't ready to launch in the States, but they really wanted us to. So we're like, you know, let's do it. [laughs] CHAD: I noticed those three names on your website. And I do think that social...being able to have those testimonials there with names people recognize lends a lot of credibility to the product. CHLOE: And they were my first three clients, [laughs] genuinely my first three clients. CHAD: So, did you seek that out, or did it just happen? How did that work out? CHLOE: Obviously, my background is commercial sales, so it's not something that I shy away from. It was connections; it was talking to people. And we were recommended to PopSockets, which was amazing. They came on as an early investor as well, which was phenomenal. Again, having clients who love what you do so much they want to invest is brilliant because you get to have some really interesting conversations and backers in your corner. But yeah, of course, we've been quite strategic with the types of businesses that we've approached, but we are very lucky that we are attracting the right type of businesses as well, which is lovely. I mean, talk a little bit more about what Plants and Perks does, but the way in which we have evolved the product and evolved the types of clients that we're talking to is not an accident. And I think it goes back to the conversation we were just having about building the product yourself. Really being in the weeds, I think, is really important. Now, it's going to be a challenge to me as a founder moving forward to make sure I'm extricating myself from the weeds as time goes on, although I'm pretty happy to step away when needed. [laughs] But knowing that and being able to talk to your clients and being really clear, well, this is what this client likes; this is what's happening here; this is what's working well here, I think is really important. You've got to know your product. You've got to know your audience. We've got two...actually, we have three clients, technically. We have clients; we have employees; we have client employers; we have employees; and we also have Perks' partners. We have sustainable...we promote sustainable products and services on our platform. So we also have partners as well as our clients. And I think you've got to know them all really well. Now, I was a head of talent and culture, so I know the employee piece quite well because I was always advocating for the employee. I spent 20 years downsizing, so I ran client accounts. So I know how to look after clients, I guess, from that perspective and work in large organizations. I also used to literally do the marketing for PepsiCo and Wrigley's and big brands. So I can do the partner piece quite well. And I think it's really important that you've done that and you've lived through it. And I've never built a tech product, but I did literally roll my sleeves up and get stuck in to build the MVP, which was kind of the bit that I was missing. Now, I haven't built the app; that is beyond me. [laughs] But luckily, we've got a brilliant team around us now, which we've built up since our last raise that's enabled us to get that talent in. And yeah, and it's just been an amazing team effort to get us to where we are now. CHAD: That's great. I want to dig into more about what the product actually is. But you've already alluded a couple of times -- CHLOE: No, let's keep it mysterious. [laughter] CHAD: You've alluded a few times to the evolution. And one thing that's stuck out to me as you were talking about that is that going to the website now; it's not specifically about eating less meat and dairy. You're talking more about sustainability. CHLOE: Yes. CHAD: I'm sure that's still a component of it. CHLOE: 100%. CHAD: But what drove that change? CHLOE: Oh my God, [laughs] about a two-week period where we had an existential crisis. I think this is really interesting, I think, for our journey, and I think us as founders as well. So we ideologically always believed in the reduction of meat and dairy as the number one thing you can do for personal and planetary health. That's it. Like, that was it. We were all about eat plants, get perks. We encourage employees to cut back on their meat and dairy consumption, and we reward them with plant-based perks. That was the product. That was the concept. Tested really well. People really bought into it. People liked that they were being rewarded with perks. They absolutely understood that it is unsustainable to consume meat and dairy in the way that we are moving forward for the planet and also for personal health. So when we're having these conversations, everyone was like, thumbs up, get it, love it, buy into it, it's all great. And then what was happening is that I kind of got to a point where I was like, we've had all these really positive conversations, but no one's biting. Everyone's sort of saying yes to me and then nothing. I'm actually really proud of us as a team for very, very quickly going and identifying the problem and fixing it because we could have stuck to our ideological guns and gone, no, no, no, but we are all about the reduction of meat and dairy consumption as the number one thing. But no one was telling us that it was that that was the problem. What we had to do was read between the lines because nobody would ever tell us that. But what they would say was, "Well, how would it land with a 58-year-old man working in our distribution center?" And we're like, "Really well, why?" [laughter] But I had to understand what was coming behind that question. And what was coming behind the question was I don't want to launch a benefit where I feel like we're judging somebody's life choices. Like, that's not going to wash. So the people we were talking to were super keen on it, then when they took it up the line, they were essentially saying, "Well, this is a plant-based benefit, Plants and Perks." And I think that's where the sort of record scratched, and it didn't go any further. But no one was feeding this back to us. This we had to discover ourselves. And so we had this kind of existential crisis where we're like, well, we've always been about sustainability, like, absolutely the reduction in meat and dairy is all because it's unsustainable for us to consume meat and dairy and fish in the way that we are. So why don't we broaden ourselves out to more? We already held sustainable products and services on our platform anyway. It was just the language; it really was. It wasn't actually as big a pivot as it sounded. It really was just softening the language. So we don't talk about plant-based; we talk about planet-friendly. And we just kind of expanded out some of the articles and content that we contained anyway. And that unblocked everything, like genuinely overnight unblocked everything. So it became something that what we were hearing was that companies wanted to introduce a new green benefit, and now they felt that they could because there wasn't the kind of...and we always said that this is non-judgmental. This is completely supportive. These are very small changes that you could make. You don't have to sort of introduce me to it. But now it makes sense to everybody. And I think we as a business just needed to go through that moment where we were like, is this the type of business that we want to be running? Is this the business that we want to be owning? And we were like, absolutely, because this is still...our mission actually didn't change at all. Our mission is to help a million employees live healthier, more sustainable lives. That has not changed. And so the fact that our mission hadn't changed, it was just some of the language needed to change to make it more palatable to a wider audience, that's fine. We could live with that. CHAD: Yeah, that's great. So now, what does that actually mean in terms of what the product is? Companies sign up. CHLOE: Yep. CHAD: And what do employees do? CHLOE: Yeah, so it's a really good question. So the other sort of big moment, I guess, inflection point that we had is that we introduced a freemium model. And that, from a product perspective, was quite a big thing because I started realizing in conversations as well we were giving too much value away. And actually, some of the value that we were giving away clients didn't necessarily want. Some clients really wanted it, and some clients didn't need it. And so we introduced three different products. So we introduced free, so we now have a completely free Plants and Perks app that any employer can take on for their employee base. And it will give them discounts of sustainable products and services. It will give them article content on how to live more sustainably, embrace more sustainable living. And it will give them planet-friendly recipes on essentially more sustainable, healthy ways to eat. And that's the core free product that we've created. CHAD: And are you still making revenue on that through partner relationship? CHLOE: Yeah, absolutely. So, although, you know, we're not about excess consumption. What we are about is...I think what we really realized is with Plants and Perks; we are bang smack in the middle of a cost of living crisis. And actually, what we can do is level the playing field when it comes to green and sustainable products. There's kind of like this green tax that gets applied. And what we're trying to do is very much look at price parity. So what we talk about is it's harder than ever to make the most sensible choices when costs are spiraling all around us. And so what the reductions of planet-friendly products does is enables you to just try things that you might not have tried before because of cost, and it mitigates against that. So we do go into relationship with partners, and they can promote their products through the platform. But there are also chances for employees to put their reviews and tell them what they think. So it isn't just set up for advertisers in that way at all. But what we found is there's an amazing thing which is that brands need to connect with a new, wider audience. They don't just want to talk to early adopters within the sustainability or plant-based space. And we are talking to every man and every woman in large-scale organizations. So it's actually quite difficult to access those people if you're these niche brands who may not even have listings necessarily in large retailers yet. Or if you do have distribution, it's really difficult to get a sell-through. So we enable those partners to offer sampling, to offer freebies, to offer significant discounts, and to offer in-store redemptions as well. So we are offering quite a significant route to market for sustainable and plant-based products and services. CHAD: That's great. Okay, and so what is the second tier up? CHLOE: The second tier is plus and what that gives you is we start to give employees plant points, and you collect plant points. It's incredibly gamified. You can collect badges. Every action you do basically has a reaction. So when you read an article, you basically can answer some questions on the article, and you'll be rewarded with points. You can rate a recipe; you can like a recipe, try a recipe. You can buy a product or a service. You can also get a free...in the UK, at the moment, you'll be able to get a free meal once a week, like a free lunch through one of our partners, and loads of freebies as well. So the value is much more significant in the plus model. That's kind of our core offering. And we talk about rewarding employees with sustainable perks. And during the time at the moment, employers are really looking for ways in which they can support their employees through the cost of living crisis. How can we give our employees free stuff, interesting stuff, whilst also helping them on the sustainability journey? And so therefore, this is something that genuinely really works for both employers and employees. So that's the plus model. CHAD: One thing I noticed as you lay out the benefits that you get under this model, I'm surprised then by the per-employee cost. It seemed very low to me [laughs] when I saw it. Can you talk more about that? CHLOE: Yeah, so that is a from price. And I do think I need to make it; I mean, I do say it's from, and I think I do say there's a bit of an asterisk. I do think I need to potentially change it as well. So it's good [laughs] feedback because I think quite a few people say that. So that is for large-scale employers. So we are talking to large retailers with 20,000, 30,000 40,000 employees. So that is the cost that they would pay. It is a sliding scale back from that cost. But, I mean, we've purposely priced ourselves to be reasonable. We are a mission-led company, and for any investors listening, don't worry; we are also revenue-generating. CHAD: [laughs] CHLOE: But for us, it's really important that we are an affordable benefit. We're very aware of the costs on everyone. So, for sure, that price is pretty low. But we think that it represents quite good value, incredible value for the client. But it's something that makes sense for them to bring on. It should be a no-brainer; that's basically what we say. Like, it's a no-brainer. In terms of the amount of freebies that you're getting for your employee, it's certainly a no-brainer in terms of the return on investment. On the pro version, by the way, the added value on the pro version is that it's fully ring-fenced for that organization. So it's fully branded. They get full account management. It looks like their platform, essentially. And employees can talk and access the information together. So it might be that Bob in IT in Denver has uploaded a photo of himself cycling to work, and somebody else can comment on it. Somebody else has uploaded a curry recipe in Scotland, and someone else has gone, "Well, I tried that recipe." "But, you know, how was it? How much chili did you put in it?" So people are kind of joining together and really creating that space to talk about sustainability in a much more accessible way. So that's the pro version. And also we're then building on sustainability metrics and also sustainability reporting. So we'll be able to talk about employees' own carbon footprint and also how that scales up to the overall company's sustainability goals. CHAD: You mentioned that the mission is to help one million employees on their sustainability journey. Can you tell me where you are [laughs] along that metric? CHLOE: Yeah. So, look, the app launch is tomorrow, so [laughs] ask me in a couple of months. And we're really...actually; we're genuinely new. CHAD: You've been in private beta, I guess, is the way to describe it. CHLOE: Yeah. We're basically with the MVP. We've been helping a couple of thousand employees up until this point. We got around 25,000. About 30-plus companies join our waiting list, which was then around 25,000-30,000 employees that represented. We've just confirmed that we're going to be launching with a very large retailer in the UK as well, so that will then -- CHAD: Congratulations. CHLOE: Thank you. That will then double, so it will be about 50,000 employees that we'll be hitting this year. And then we are in quite far down the line talks with quite a few other companies that would take us to potentially just under our target, which, by the way, the million employees is not like it's a target for 2022. It's like a...it's our ongoing mission. [laughs] CHAD: Right, a long-term vision. CHLOE: It's a long-term vision. So we're significantly further ahead than I thought we would be on that. I mean, look, what we've said from the start is the million is a sort of fairly arbitrary number but what it is is it's scale. So we're not here just to look after, you know, we're not here just to help very, very small companies; we can now with our free product, which is great, but it gives us that scale. And it shows that we, as a business, want to be global, want to be talking to enterprise clients and then helping them live healthier, more sustainable lives. For us, it's both of those things. You can't just live a healthy life, and you can't just live a sustainable life. It needs to be a life of purpose. And so the mission really keeps us true to those things. 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. CHAD: You mentioned you have essentially three client bases: you have the employers, the employees, and the partners, which essentially means you have a multi-sided marketplace. CHLOE: Yes. CHAD: And one of the challenges of building any marketplace, especially the more sides you have, is bootstrapping it, you know, creating a momentum. The partners want to know, hey, how many people are on the platform that we're going to be bringing into? And in the early days, you don't have much to offer there. So how have you made that work? CHLOE: Well, so firstly, we don't see ourselves as a marketplace, which we should. [laughter] We should see ourselves as a marketplace. Secondly, I learned all about building a marketplace because, in 2010, I launched a dating app before there were apps. Actually, it was a dating website...and completely on my own. It was complete madness. And I totally did not understand the power of a network. I didn't understand the marketplace dynamic. I didn't understand that you needed buyers and you needed sellers. You needed, in this case, men seeking women and women seeking men. [laughs] You needed both sides of the equation. And you needed volume on both sides straight out of the gate. I just didn't get that. I was like, build it, and they will come. [laughs] And so I was fully burnt from that experience. So that was still ringing in my head. So I think what was important was building up, firstly, building up our partners. So it was really, really important to build up the number of partners that we have on the platform. And for them, it's a completely low-risk strategy. It's like, come on the platform and offer discounts and people who are interested in sustainability. Like, that's really easy. We can do that. And then for the companies, we've got everything...beyond the partners, we still have loads and loads of value. We still have value in the articles. We still have value in the gamification. We have value in the recipe. So there's still value even if there wasn't value in the perks. But what we've done is we've been able to build up both sides. So actually, we've got over 200 brands, which represents about 45,000-plus individual discounts on the platform. And now we're building up the number of employees. Now we're able to revenue generate more off the partners because we've got the volume on the other side. CHAD: You mentioned that you are primarily focused on the UK now. But you've had interest from the U.S. and demand that you've not rejected. What does that look like for you now? And how do you balance that going forward? CHLOE: Yeah, I have got quite a lot of interest from the States. And it's really hard not to be pulled over there. And we see a lot of interest from there. We have to -- CHAD: Why are you holding back? CHLOE: Because we just don't have the team size at the moment, and we need to get the...there's two things really. Well, there are a number of things. There are about 22 things. [laughter] I know I said there are two things; there are like a million reasons. We need to make sure that we've got the best product possible; that's number one. We need to test in our home market. We need to make sure that we've got the robust mechanic with the Perk's partners and with the employees. We need to get all of that working really well because the States is a completely different market because of the nature of the products and services. We're not on the ground there. So it's easier for us to have really good relationships with partners now. There's going to be a conference on Wednesday in London, so I'm going to be meeting a lot of our partners there; super easy. It's like 20 minutes on the train for me. Harder to go to the States and make sure that we have really robust relationships with partners there; not impossible, just it would be time and effort to be able to build it in the States. I think we'd be able to find the clients actually more easily or, I guess, quicker if that makes sense because I think there's a need in the States. And then there are just cultural nuances. So we just need to make sure that all of our content is really relevant culturally. So PopSockets, we are with PopSockets in the States, and I think they're quite fairly near you in Boulder. So we are already aware of some of those cultural nuances. And our editorial teams are quite good at making sure that we're representing that. So, yeah, so I think it's just about making sure that we do a good job of it. The hard thing, I think, is actually launching across Europe because of the language barrier and because of the very different cultural nuances when it comes to sustainability, local government policy. CHAD: Also, expectations around employee benefits and how they work. CHLOE: Exactly. Expectations around employee benefits and also attitudes to food as well because obviously food is still a part of what we do, and so all of those things actually make Europe slightly harder. So I think, for us, it would be a launch to the U.S. before we would go to continental Europe, but, again, not impossible. Interestingly, our clients massively want us to be global quickly because they are all looking for global benefits. They want to be able to homogenize their benefits offerings globally. They do not want to have one thing being offered in the UK, something being offered in the States, especially when it comes to benefits. Things like pensions, things like healthcare are so different in those countries, and they won't change. Just in terms of how many holiday days you guys have versus us, they can't make it a level playing field on many things. So if they could have a level playing field when it comes to sustainable benefits, they would love to do that. So there is a real need driving us to go global very quickly. And, look, going right back to the conversation we had at the beginning, I'd do it tomorrow. I'd move my family to the U.S. and just start building it. But my very kind advisors are like, slow down. [laughs] Get it right in the UK. CHAD: Well, I think that is a good indicator that you do have a marketplace business because all of the pressures around scaling are the same ones that marketplaces have. CHLOE: Yeah. [laughs] CHAD: And marketplace businesses very often benefit from in the early days focusing on specific markets. CHLOE: No, you're 100% right. I think I've had an epiphany on this podcast [laughter] that I'm running a marketplace. CHAD: I want to come back to the actual tech of the product as we wrap up here. I'm super impressed that you used a low-code platform to build the MVP yourself, and that has taken you through today. So how did you go about moving beyond that? CHLOE: [laughs] So we always knew we'd have to ditch it, so we were very aware. And that's the beauty of doing an MVP which is you don't fall in love with it. So that was great because we knew we were going to ditch it. We didn't fall in love with it. So how did we go about it? So we've got ourselves...we got a CTO on board that Ellen had worked with before. And we've got an amazing UX-UI designer. And we've got some devs. And we just ran at it. We just said, right, what are we taking from the MVP that we want to put into...and we knew it had to be an app really quickly. We actually weren't going to develop the app this year, but then it was sort of, you know, the demand there was all for the app. So we've gone app first. So we just said, "What's important from the MVP that we want to be taking here?" We knew that perks was going to be the first thing that we wanted to launch with because of the cost of living crisis. And we wanted to make it really about perks, which is why I know it sounds silly when it's obvious to you that we're a marketplace. It actually isn't that obvious to us because before perks, none of those things are marketplace. All of the other products and services that we offer aren't marketplace. CHAD: You mean the content and that kind of thing. CHLOE: The content, the gamification. We've got a whole thing coming down the line all about how to calculate your carbon footprint. Like, none of that is marketplace. But because we've really leant heavily on the perks because we know that there's a massive need for that, I guess that's why it's a surprise to me [laughs] that we're a marketplace. But yeah, so we knew we wanted to get perks out first. So then we built a product with perks at the heart because that was testing really well. And then yeah, and then we've just kind of literally just gone hell for leather head down. The team has been in build mode. We've been in sell mode and creation mode. And, yeah, we've just gone really, really fast. It's not in our natures to sort of go slow on these things. And we just need to be out there. People love what we're doing. And now it's the real test. Now it's literally employees now getting access to it, and that's the scary time. CHAD: Has it been what you expected actually, you know, building custom software in terms of time, and cost, and that kind of thing? Or has it been different than what you expected? CHLOE: Yeah, that's a good question. So I guess over the years, I've had the opportunity to build products internally in companies. You're always in a waiting list for other people that need other stuff. So in a way, it's been quicker because it's my team, and they've got nothing else to concentrate on except this. I'm really open with what I don't know. So I'm like, okay, could I do, just out of interest, how easy is it for us to switch off that function and launch this? Is it a week? Is it a month? Is it like a year? Like, I just have no idea on timings and scale on that. So I try to work that out quite quickly. But I think it's been quicker than I thought it might be. And if you've got an internal team, then it's cheaper. As soon as we started to look at external teams, it was prohibitively expensive and no control. And I think we knew quite early on that we wanted to build it internally. CHAD: How has it compared to the process of using the low-code tool to get started? CHLOE: [laughs] In a way, if I had an idea, it was up and live an hour later...[laughs] and, you know, I guess there's much more pushback now. It's like, "Do you really need that feature?" And I'm like, "Yeah, you know, just do it. What's so difficult?" So I guess I've had to put more rigor and thinking behind some of the features and functions that we now have versus just sticking it up there. I mean, look, we were really, really frustrated with low-code. We were really frustrated with what it could do. It is so limited really in what we were trying to do, but it got us to a certain point. I'll always be forever grateful to it. [laughs] And my partner and I were able to completely tag team on it. So I would do all of the front end, and she'd do all the back end. It worked really well from that perspective. But we've got a great team now who are really engaged in what we're trying to do and trying to achieve. I guess I want everything yesterday. So as with most things, I'm getting updates going, "This is broken, and I'm having to turn this off for the launch." And I'm like, "No, I want it there. I want it in there." CHAD: So, on that note, why do you have a specific launch date? CHLOE: We've got a client we're launching to next week. [laughter] So we're launching -- CHAD: So you've made a commitment to launch for a particular client, and so you need to hit that date. CHLOE: Yeah. We are. We're launching it to...yeah, we've got quite a lot of clients, actually. We've got launches almost every day from next week. So this week is friends and family launch. So we need to get it out and get it tested. And then it goes into the hands of real-life users, which is scary and interesting. CHAD: I wish you all the best with that. I really appreciate you taking the time. CHLOE: Any advice? CHAD: Well, what I was going to say is a question I often like to ask. And I'm curious, before launch, is there something that you wish you could have done differently or realized sooner? I'm sure this question might be different post-launch. The answer to this question might be different post-launch. But from where you sit today, is there something that you wish you would have done differently? CHLOE: Oh my God. I almost want to say everything and nothing. I don't want to go, no, I don't regret anything; everything's been a learning experience, [laughs] so there's nothing I would have done differently because it's all led me to this point. But then, on the other hand, I think we've made the right decisions with the data that we've had. I think we need to...there's stuff that we need to be doing much more rigorously now moving forwards, which is making sure that we are very, very data-driven with what's coming back. Now we're in the hands of real users in a meaningful way with the app. We need to be taking all of that feedback on and not just relying on the gut instinct with a lot of things. It needs to be much more data-driven now that we've got the data coming in. So I don't think that's a regret necessarily because I think you've got to kind of go with your gut to get a product out the door because you could be completely hamstrung by research. And that would have taken us into a whole nother territory. So I think...does that make sense? So whilst I'm not regretting but like -- CHAD: It does make sense. And you asked me for any advice that I have. And this is a very small piece of advice, but it's one thing that I've made the mistake of myself and seen many other teams do. If you want to seek metrics on something and you don't instrument it, you don't set up those metrics; then you don't have them. CHLOE: So true. CHAD: And you realize, oh, we should have been tracking this click, or that click, or this flow. And then you put it in place once you realize that it's not there, and you have to wait 30-60 days in order to get the data. And that time feels terrible while you're waiting for that data to accrue. And so my general advice is to instrument basically everything. Instrument as much as possible, even if you think you're not going to need it. Track as many clicks as possible in the app so that you can really then say, oh, we didn't know we wanted to track this flow. And you already have the data where you can piece it together instead of waiting. CHLOE: Yeah, 100%. So we were challenged by...so we're backed by sustainable ventures on the accelerator program. And we were challenged by them to make sure that we've got all of our KPI metrics in place for the product. Of course, we've just been head down building it. And actually, it was a great moment where it's kind of like, but how many points do you want your users to collect in a day? Maybe there's an upper limit that you want, which we hadn't really thought about. Well, I don't know; we just want them to collect points. Like, you know, we want them to live their best life. And so in setting the KPIs, we've also had to set what we're measuring, but it was like two pages long. [laughs] There are so many things that we're trying to...what our KPIs are. And I think we can also...I think a learning is that maybe we need to be a little bit more focused with also what we're trying to measure and also what we were trying to see because we, again, can't focus on everything. We can't update and upgrade and iterate absolutely everything as a priority. What's going to shift the dial the most? What's going to have the biggest impact? Yes, we can change the color of that, or we can make that button bigger. But actually, if that's not going to lead to the KPI that we're trying to measure, then actually, there's no point. So yeah, so I think that's been a learning as well. I mean, there are so many thousands, billion learnings on this whole journey. [laughs] I could write a book. I don't think anyone will read it, but I could definitely write a book. [laughter] And I don't have time to write it. If I had time to write it and if anyone wants to read it, I'll do it. [laughs] CHAD: Okay. Well, maybe a few years from now, you can write that book. CHLOE: Yeah. CHAD: And, Chloe, thank you so much for joining the show and for telling us all about your journey. I really wish you and Plants and Perks the best over these important next couple of months. CHLOE: Thank you. We're raising, by the way. We're just about to go into our seed round, so yeah. CHAD: Seed round. CHLOE: Yeah. CHAD: Perfect. CHLOE: I know, perfect for Plants and Perks. That's the next inflection point whilst obviously also launching an app. And we don't do things by halves, so that will be the next learning journey. CHAD: If folks want to find out more, to follow along with you, to get in touch with the company, where are all the different places that they can do that? CHLOE: Don't look at the website because we're in the process of updating that. [laughter] And, frankly, now I'm going to change the pricing after this conversation. [laughs] But yeah, no, don't do that. Just email me; it's the easiest way. Or find me on LinkedIn; LinkedIn is probably the number one way. Or email chloe@plantsandperks.com. I love; literally, I love hearing feedback: negative, positive, anything. I love having conversations. I love doing partnerships. I love helping people on their journeys; just reach out. CHAD: Wonderful. And 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 hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter @cpytel. 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 was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success. Special Guest: Chloe Sweden.

Guillaume Kendall is the Founder of Zedosh and Attention Exchange, which is working to build a safe place for advertisers, publishers, and consumers to all benefit from fair access to human attention. Chad talks with Guillaume about open banking, changing up who the beneficiaries of consumer attention and data are, and giving companies opportunities to advertise without interrupting consumers with ads. Zedosh (https://zedosh.com/) The Attention Exchange (https://attentionexchange.co.uk/) Follow The Attention Exchange on Twitter (https://twitter.com/attnexchange) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-attention-exchange/). Follow Guillaume on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/guillaumekendall/). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) 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 Guillaume Kendall, the Founder of Zedosh and the Attention Exchange, which is working to build a safe place for advertisers, publishers, and consumers to all benefit from fair access to human attention. Guillaume, thank you for joining me. GUILLAUME: Thank you so much for having me. It's a real privilege. CHAD: If I'm not mistaken, you and I first met in person for lunch one time in London when I was visiting London in; I think it was...I went back and looked at my calendar. It was March 10th, 2020, if I'm not mistaken, either that or it was that Friday of that week. GUILLAUME: It must have been one of the last weeks pre-pandemic. CHAD: It was. I literally woke up on Saturday morning for my flight to come back to the U.S. to the headlines that all flights from Europe were being shut down. [laughs] And I almost dropped my phone until I realized, oh, that's the headline, but the real detail is I can get back. It's all the rest of Europe, not the UK, yet. That was the following week. I made it home, and then the world changed. GUILLAUME: I sure did, didn't it? [laughs] It's funny, isn't it? Because the two-year period in between seems to have flown by. It feels like just yesterday. I remember I think, even what I ate. CHAD: [laughs] And at the time, you were working on a new application, and we were talking about that. But I want to fast forward a little bit to today. Tell me more about Attention Exchange, and then we're going to rewind a bit to how you've arrived. GUILLAUME: So the Attention Exchange...by way of background, I come from the fintech space rather than adtech. And it really, ultimately, the Attention Exchange is a matching engine, using financial terms, that matches the right video content to the right consumer based on their spending data rather than their browsing data. So it's a matching engine. And it looks at rules that ultimately we're able to derive, or actually, I better use the phrase, we can bridge the gap between attention and intention based on our audience's spending patterns. And the reason we can access those is because they give us explicit permission. We have something called open banking here in the UK. It's actually across most of Europe now. But it enables the consumer to own their data and share it outside the bank if they so wish to with other regulated third parties. So we're such a regulated third party, and they share that data with us, as I said, to be matched with video content from brands that are relevant to their spending instead of their browsing. What it ultimately means is we're very well-positioned in this apparent post-cookie world that seems to be heading our way eventually because we don't rely on any other tracking technology to spy on our audience. They voluntarily give it to us. And I guess the kicker which is...people are probably asking themselves, why would they do that? That's because they get paid. So we put cash directly into the bank account or one of the bank accounts they've connected to our platform in exchange for their immutably valuable attention to that content. CHAD: So correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like open banking has had a significant impact not only on the data sharing that you're describing but just on the banking ecosystem in general in the United Kingdom and now Europe. GUILLAUME: So I think if you were to speak to the purveyors of open banking, it hasn't had as big an impact as they felt it would have had. I think we reached earlier this year only to fact-check this, but about 6 million people in the UK now utilize open banking in one form or another. But I think what was very interesting is that the ecosystem that sprung up around it was mostly around changing the user experience for the end consumer to have a better handle on their financial health, which is a really important topic. And the reason that is is that before, it wasn't really in the bank's interests to tell you if you're about to hit your overdraft or go over your overdraft because they'd charge you an extra 20 pounds for an unplanned loan, and then you'd have to pay it. Your balances (This is going back a little. I'm showing my age. ) was always two or three days out of date, which was weird. So open banking; the first thing that sprung up around it is we'll connect your bank accounts. We'll give you this holistic view of your mortgages, your credit, your debit, your net worth really across various assets. And we've moved progressively towards more of open finance rather than just open banking. You can connect via APIs a lot of your financial identity to these open banking providers. But having said that, no one has looked at it in the way that we have, which is actually this is an advertising play, and it could be potentially a real change maker in the way that consumers benefit from this $400 billion industry which is advertising rather than all the fintech stuff that's been happening around open banking. But yes, so it's not to be sniffed at, you know, several million people are using open banking. But most people, I don't even think, realize they're using open banking. They open the Revolut app, and it says, "Do you want to see your Monzo balance inside our app?" You say, "Well, yeah, okay, that means I don't have to open Monzo." And lo and behold, you share that data. CHAD: Right. Yeah, that's a really good perspective. I think from my perspective; I was thinking it's sort of made it...there's a separation between the banking backends and the user experience, and I think that in part has given rise to these challenger banks and made it more possible for them to do that. GUILLAUME: Yeah, that's a very fair point. I think, certainly, if nothing else, it certainly forced the incumbent players, those that have been around for a few hundred years, to really buckle up their ideas and think about how to react to this new threat. At first, they thought, geez, open banking is going to cause us all sorts of problems, but I think as it's gone full circle. You find that, actually, most people are looking for that user experience, and the banks have been forced to provide it within their existing ecosystem. So now, most banking apps provide really super UI or UX, meaning that you don't have to go use third-party tools to get such a lens. And in fact, the most interesting one I've seen of late, which I think is definitely worth a mention, is a company called Cogo; and Cogo used open banking to carbon score your spending and let you offset it. So if you spent four pounds at McDonald's, it would guess that that's X kilos of carbon and give you several options to offset it. And actually, in the end, NatWest formed a partnership with them. This is a classic use case where actually, now the carbons offseter is available within that NatWest app, and you don't really have any idea it's Cogo. That's what you're seeing is ironically, those who have had success in innovative, exciting use cases have been pulled back into the ecosystem being offered because they still want the scale overnight. They had access to 8 million NatWest customers or whatever the number is. So, yes, I think; certainly, all banking apps have had to, even the banks themselves, have had to reorganize and rethink how they deliver technology to retail consumers who probably had had very little churn in the past because the options were very limited. CHAD: That's great. So tell me about the genesis for this idea and realizing that you could use open banking to view people's financial information and to develop a profile that could be used to opt into advertising. Where's the genesis of that idea for you? GUILLAUME: Sure. So actually, several threads came together very neatly in quite a tight timescale, the first of which is I spent a lot of money, relatively speaking, on a company called Patch Plants. And Patch Plants deliver plants to your house, [laughter] and they have quite a nice way to go about it. All the plants have got human names, and they come with little booklets about how to look after them. And I felt very positive about the relationship I felt I had with Patch Plants until for the three, maybe four months following that purchase, there wasn't a website, or a social feed that I was on that didn't have Patch Plants all over it. And I really took note of my sentiment towards them [laughs] where I thought, go away, Patch Plants. I'm a customer. Why don't you know better? With the amount of data that we provide to the web, you just assume...and maybe this is where it all starts to click into place that actually, it's not that smart. CHAD: The interesting thing is I think it is possible for companies to on target you once they decide to do it, but it seems like nobody does that. [laughs] And it's like, I've just bought a stove. Why am I seeing stoves all over the place? [laughs] I'm not going to buy another one. GUILLAUME: Yeah, again, I think it comes from the underlying infrastructure, which is basically this concept of cookies, which we accept on every single website before we can do anything with it. And you've probably got a number of unchecked-out stoves across the web. And it's not locking on to the fact you've got one checked-out stove. But of course, we're connected to the bank account. And so when we see that transaction, we see the counterparties. We know for a fact that that person has made that transaction with that vendor, and therefore, you probably need to change the message. And that goes from daily purchases right through to the massive, heavy items we can see when people started a car leasing agreement. Well, if you want to get them to think about considering your brand of vehicle in two or three years or three or four years, there's probably a journey that you should take that person on. But then again, once they've made the purchase, don't keep hassling them. So that's the first thing. If you saw my bank account...so I worked with open banking innovation [laughs]. I guess that's pretty important. CHAD: [laughs] GUILLAUME: So I was acutely aware of how the data could be shared and analyzed, so that's the first point. And then, pretty much at the same time, Netflix brought out this documentary, The Social Dilemma, really putting across that these social media applications were basically designed, maybe it's not a surprise, but pretty much as gambling apps. They're exceptionally addictive. And the reason they're addictive is because the longer you spend on them, the more advertising they can slide into; now, I think one in every four posts. And now that we've moved on to short-form video content, there's infinite scroll. We're all on these apps for hours a day. But the only way they generate revenues is through advertising, and the only way they get advertising is by you spending more time. And it sort of didn't sit too well with me, especially after we had the Euro Championship in football or soccer here. And there was a ton of racist abuse that went out to players across social media. Lots of brands and advertisers started pulling away from it for a very short period of time to express their protest. But I realized then that, actually, there is no alternative. If you want to attract attention, you have to fund social media or Google, and that's kind of it. Those are your options as a brand or an advertiser. And the former being social media is really not a very healthy place to spend time. Sure, some good comes out of it. But I would argue that the bad that comes out of it far outweighs any of the good that's come from social media, certainly in the last five years or so, I believe. It's at the center of some major divisions in our communities. But it's all funded through advertising revenue. So that was the second point is that there really is no alternative. And why should Mark Zuckerberg be the beneficiary of my attention, my data, my value whilst putting absolutely no effort in changing or being an arbiter of the content? They're keeping their hands up saying, hey, we're not a publisher. If that content is there, it's there. And it becomes a very complicated argument very quickly around free speech and all of this sort of stuff. But ultimately, there's a ton of really nasty stuff. And then we had a family friend, specifically, who really put herself in a lot of danger, a young girl. And that was a very real impact on human life close to us that was all driven from what she was able to access with alarming ease via Instagram. So those sorts of threads all came together. And then the more sort of...it's one of those things, right? Once you see a yellow car, you're looking out for a yellow car. You keep seeing them. But I don't think I was proactively looking out for it too much. But it seemed that every day almost, there was a new-new story in the front pages of the papers where Facebook was in some sort of trouble, and that obviously materialized last year with the Facebook leaks. And everything we've been just discussing now they've known about. They know about it. They're choosing not to make a difference. So we had a really powerful motivation to try and bring about a different mechanism for this $400 billion industry to operate. And rather than exploit our data, exploit our mental well-being, exploit our communities and everything else in order to drive advertising revenue, maybe the advertiser could have a more direct relationship, a fair and more transparent relationship with the consumer with whom they want a dialogue. And I think it's been the biggest learning curve for us is that brands and advertisers feel weird about paying consumers to pay attention. But we're saying we think it is weirder that you pay Google and Facebook to track these people all over the web and interrupt them everywhere they don't want to be spoken to. Why not just pay them to have a fair, transparent dialogue? I know you have money. I know you spend it with my competitors who are in my market. I want your attention, and this is what I have to tell you. There we go. So that was the sort of the kernel, the genesis. CHAD: I can totally see why advertisers are...scared is not the right word. Just, you know, it's just they've never had a relationship where they're paying the consumer directly for any kind of advertising that they do [chuckles] whether it be TV historically. There's always an intermediary. And the idea of paying people directly is not only different, but in some ways, I can imagine people view it as crude. Like, it's one thing if it's going through an intermediary and you're paying them, and advertising is being run, but it's another to just pay someone to pay attention to you. GUILLAUME: Yeah, but I think this is the point about the open banking. I completely agree with you; if you're paying somebody based on their cookies or any of the other data, the first-party data or third-party data, that's abstracted several layers from that pair of eyeballs that you know has a tendency to buy X on Y time horizon. That's never been possible before. And so through your television, it's scale. You're paying the broadcaster because they've got 3 million people watching Coronation Street on, I don't know, whatever. But it's always based on these tiny, tiny fractions of engagement, and that's always been the way it is. So you need the intermediary for scale. But I think what I'm hoping, what I've literally bet my house on [laughter], that's one thing that's going to change. I sold my house since we started to do this. All those marketplaces are completely saturated, and they are not getting less busy; they're getting more busy. And so okay, TikToks appeared, but the medium through which video content is provided to the consumer, you're lucky to get a quarter of a second or half a second with that person. And so you're right, but what is now the alternative to actually getting a minute, a minute and a half, two minutes with somebody where they're not skipping; they're not going past? You know they're a real person. You know they're human. All of our consumers have to have a bank account. They have to have transactions, and they have to have an income in order to be valuable and receive any adverts into their feed. So it's just never been possible before. The scale play, the intermediary, was always sort of, I think, accepted, and it still is today. There's going to be a bunch of fraud. I think there's like 15 cents in every dollar spent online digitally for advertising is lost. I think it's a $100 billion problem by next year. So I guess the point I'm making is the intermediaries historically and to today have existed because you need to reach millions of eyeballs in order to get a very low interaction rate. With our model, we're able to target thousands of people and achieve a 19.6% average click-through rate even after a minute and a half worth of content because they're engaged and you're not interrupting them. So we think it's a relatively elegant model for what is a saturated, noisy world where eventually also the very mechanism by which they do track and target you is going to be replaced at some stage by Google and Chrome. 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 user-centered product journey, a clickable prototype or Proof of Concept, and key market insights from focused user research. We'll help you to identify the primary user 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 roadmap for your new product. Get started at: tbot.io/sprint. CHAD: You have this idea. It's really challenging the status quo. You're working in open banking innovation at the time. What did you start to do then, to try to bring your idea to life? GUILLAUME: So the first thing was actually my background is in sales and business development but within the fintech and open banking space. So I've worked with a lot of very smart people. And the first thing I really needed to do was quickly validate whether or not this is something. So a guy that we brought on...he's not so much a co-founder, but the other director of the business is a guy called Matt McBride, who's this global head of UX at a company I used to work for. And that was really the first thing is to try and rapidly prototype what the experience would look like and ultimately go out to our target audience, which was Gen Z here in the UK, and ask them whether or not this is the sort of thing they'd engage with. And the responses were actually really very positive. "Hang on; you're going to pay me to watch ads that are relevant to me? No-brainer, please do." And then, we were able to raise 100 grand, 150 grand, which enabled us to take that prototype and build it into something that, after a few obstacles with Apple in the App Store, we were able to get live. So that was really the first thing, I guess is, figuring out the way and the people that I needed to help me out to take this idea into something tangible and then tested it before I went much further with it. I was very fortunate, or I am very fortunate, that my partner is a corporate lawyer; my wife, sorry, now; we've been married since we started. [laughs] And so, actually, the mechanism through which we were able to raise the really earliest funds meant that we didn't have to give very much of the business away at such an early stage, which I think was a key learning point that I certainly share with other founders is you don't have to go give away 25% of your business for a little bit of money just to get it off PowerPoint. There are other ways. CHAD: So I think I remember what I told you when we met and talked. Do you remember what it was? GUILLAUME: You shared lots of very valuable insights with me. CHAD: My memory is that at the time, it was only advertisements in the app. And I think I said, "I get that people are going to want to be paid to look at these things." GUILLAUME: Oh yes, right. CHAD: "But if there's nothing else here, it's going to be really hard to bring people back to do that." And we had seen that in another client of ours that was paying people to browse. And what they'd do is they do it for a while, and they'd hit whatever monthly cap of return that they could get, an amount that they thought made sense. And then, they would switch back to their other browser because it was a better browsing experience. So they were only using it because they were getting paid. And as soon as that incentive went away, they would stop using it. GUILLAUME: Yeah, so I remember that. And you were right. And I guess there are a few things that came about from that, so the first thing is that Apple agreed. So we couldn't get the app onto the App Store if it was just a feed of adverts that remunerated the user to watch them, incentivized the user. So we put quite a lot of additional features, I guess more traditional fintech features, open banking features within the application in order to give the user insights into their spending, week-on-week analysis, and categorization of spend. And we also built this what we call the level up section where every week, you get refreshed pieces of content around, you know, very Gen Z-focused again, but what's the difference between a credit card and a loan? Is buy now, pay later a good idea? What's open banking? So we generate all this content, which they don't get paid to consume but is there, and they do. But more importantly, I think what we realized is that actually what we've got...this is the difference, I guess, between the Attention Exchange and Zedosh being the app; it's the plumbing and the matching that is the real value here. It is the models we're building that understand people's behavior and propensity or intent to buy something based on the data they're sharing with us. And so, actually, what we've built is a solution where you should be able to log in to any publisher that has the additional content, and experience, and value that you're speaking about there, places you ordinarily already browse and frequent. But if you want to, there's a separate tab where there are ads waiting for you that remunerate you, but you go into that tab. So we're trying to remove the interruption, you know, the pop-up even having to accept cookies from your user experience with the publisher moving into a separate, dedicated tab. And the reason the consumer is still going to go click on that tab is because they know that there's some content that's relevant and pays them, but they're still able to enjoy all the other benefits that the publisher provides. So it's kind of weirdly trying to flip this premium subscription model where you pay not to have ads. Actually, you're the first recipient of the ad income, and you share that with the publisher. CHAD: I think this is really cool, and yet I think it also rubs up against or hits up against something that is just so different than the status quo. The idea that companies would not interrupt you with advertising is probably so foreign [laughs] to people that I imagine you get reluctance to that. GUILLAUME: The last two years have been a steeper learning curve for us and all the advertisers and agencies, and players we've been speaking to. But what I'm grateful for is the fact that what we term the ad-pocalypse is coming. And so I was just at an event called MAD//Fest last week, which is basically all the advertising industry got together in London, the UK advertising industry. And every single panel discussion talk was about the post-cookie era. And all that most people are speaking about is how do we gather more data in other ways from the consumer in order to keep doing more of the same? And all of a sudden, when we're talking about the fact that our users give us their banking transactions, we see how much they earn and where they spend it and, therefore, can also attribute without the use of cookies, which is the holy grail of advertising. We started generating an awful lot of interest from really big players. So I think you're right; the status quo is having the rug pulled from underneath them, right? Look at Meta's share price this year. I haven't checked it this week, but last time I checked, it was down 52%. And that's because iOS app tracking transparency is stopping the ability to track and monitor and, increasingly, ultimately, the ability for the user to remain more private. And they all are doing it. Why would they want to be less private in order to benefit Meta? In our platform, they're opting into their most intimate data being shared because they stand to be rewarded fairly for it. So I completely agree; up to this point, "What? No way." This is how it works. And certainly, the thing that will probably remain true is to do more with less isn't of interest because agencies get paid a percentage of the budget. They don't want to do [laughs] the same with less budget. But my point remains that with iOS app tracking transparency...apparently, Android is going the same way, and Chrome is replacing third-party cookies. The status quo simply cannot continue. Something has to change. And so I think with this identity solution often is what we're building. The consumer stands a chance of being the first in line to receive a reward for their attention. And I'm very pleased actually we've got some competition as well since we last spoke, which is new. But this concept of rewarding consumers for attention, I think, will just...how else are you going to get their time? They're not listening to you on TikTok. [laughs] CHAD: I'm happy to hear that you're viewing competition as a positive thing. And I agree competition raises awareness that this is a thing and a potential, and most people will shop around or research it further. And that's a chance for them to discover you. GUILLAUME: I hope so. This company has done a big advertising campaign all over. It's on TV, radio, and the underground in London. And the amount of people who've reached out to me... "Is this company doing what you're doing?" And ultimately, they're paying users in a way for their attention to advertising. But they don't use open banking, and they don't have the data that we have. CHAD: That's an important distinction. One of the things that I've seen our clients worry about...and I saw it happen to one. Even though lots of people worry about it, I've only ever seen it happen one time, but it's still a risk, and that is when competitors come along. And unbeknownst to you, they dramatically over raise and therefore are just able to flood the market, saturate the attention, and build way bigger and faster at a loss than you are willing to do. GUILLAUME: Yeah, or able to do. [laughs] CHAD: Or able to do, right? Because they've raised 500 million [chuckles] or something like that. That's what happened with our client, who was in the group buying space at the same time as Groupon and LivingSocial. And so that's the only time I've ever seen it happen, but it's something that people are worried about. How are you...is that something on your mind? GUILLAUME: It's interesting. So they've raised 15 million Series A, and they've been around since 2012. So they've been around a long time. And it almost feels like they... [laughs] I'm not saying they did, but it almost feels like they landed on my LinkedIn. And we're very anti-social media. The message is really strong on anti-social media. But ultimately, they built an app. And so I think we've already matured past the point that in terms of our scaling and our ability to integrate with any platform, our strategy already goes beyond competing on a direct basis of an app that serves ads. In fact, if anything, at some stage, I'm hoping that they could plug into our engine and our pipes and add an extra layer of data and personalization to the adverts that they serve. So ultimately, when they came, and it was during the Champions League final that they had their first big launch because one of the backers is a football player, my phone just went berserk. Because it was like, wait, what? And at first, I was a bit worried but ultimately, no. I only really, really see it as a positive at this stage. But obviously, yes, they can advertise. They can speak to brands. They've got much more market presence. Everywhere you go on the underground, there are those posters. But we have a very clear, distinct proposition that is quite different. As I said, really, this pulling apart what Zedosh is and what the Attention Exchange is; the Attention Exchange is really potentially the plumbing, the rails for this post-cookie advertising model. CHAD: So that being said, you are doing some fundraising now. That's right? GUILLAUME: Yes. In fact, I don't think I've stopped fundraising [laughter] since this started. And certainly, that wasn't something I was anticipating despite the fact that...I mentioned I'm married to a corporate lawyer. She told me, "Your role as a CEO, as a founder, you're just going to be fundraising." I thought, yeah, well, I'll get some money in, and then we can focus on doing the stuff. But every time money comes in, most often you sort of have already spent it. It's allocated; it's gone. You need to look for the next lot. But yes, we are fundraising. Currently, we're still focused majoritively on angels. We're looking to prove our scalability model with this existing raise, at which point I think we'll be ready and looking for institutional funds. But we use something called EIS funding which is UK-specific but is so, so rewarding for UK taxpayers. Basically, they get 30% back off the tax amount of their tax return, which is a great incentive, and all the gains from the equity is free of capital gains tax as well. So it almost becomes a no-brainer for people who have money that they're looking to invest in early-stage risky businesses. They're already really risking. The capital risk is under 50% of what they put in because there's also an insurance element; if the company goes bust that you've invested, there's something called loss relief. CHAD: So it's really attractive to angel-level investors. GUILLAUME: Correct. So you have to be a UK taxpayer as an individual to benefit from this specific relief. Of course, I mean, we have had some non-UK people still invest through the same sort of advanced subscription agreement. But yes, it's very attractive for UK taxpayers. CHAD: And do you think...[laughs] you've already answered this question. But I guess when do you think you'll stop fundraising? GUILLAUME: We're looking to change the way the internet works. [laughter] CHAD: Right. GUILLAUME: And so if we're mildly successful even redistributing the 100 billion of ad fraud which is currently being lost out there, we're entering a very cash-rich market looking for solutions at this moment in time. So if we're to raise some cash that enables us to put in place the plumbing and the pipes that we're looking to connect to, then actually, we should be relatively profitable relatively quickly, at which point, I guess we'd no longer need to fundraise. But at which point we'd probably say, "Well, actually, the U.S. is now ready for this. Let's go." CHAD: [laughs] GUILLAUME: I don't think we're particularly a cash-thirsty business. It's all built on AWS. CHAD: And you're right. That's why I asked the question because if your model is working, if you're having the impact you want, there's a lot of money in advertising. And so you should get to the point where you're able to do that profitably. GUILLAUME: Absolutely. CHAD: And start being as big as Google, right? [laughs] GUILLAUME: Yeah. I read a book called Life After Google. I don't know if I shared that with you the last time we met. But it's weird. It was written five or six years ago, but it's coming true. I think this whole premise of Web3, and this decentralization of data, and the ownership of data, the profiting of data at the individual level, is coming to the fore. And I can think of no better way to bridge your value and identity online than having it connected to your real-world assets, income, and spending behavior. CHAD: I was wondering whether you are going to mention Web3. [laughs] GUILLAUME: Huh. CHAD: Because this decentralization of the advertising money directly to users is a very Web3 idea. GUILLAUME: I agree. CHAD: [laughs] So how much do you talk about Web3 in your pitch or when you're talking about it? It hasn't come up until now in this conversation, so maybe not so much. GUILLAUME: It's a double-edged sword, I feel, because I think most people think Web3. They think crypto. CHAD: Yes. GUILLAUME: And we're paying cash in fiat, and although there's every possibility we could have a token-based solution, we're not looking at that because the core immutable value of your attention is linked in your spending behavior on earth and online, but through real transactions with real merchants. 99.999% of transactions, I imagine, aren't crypto yet and don't live on a blockchain, so until that point, I think we steer clear of it. Whether we could have raised more money more quickly if we [laughs] had mentioned it more, I don't know. But for me, there are quite a few steps to go in our journey as I see it having matured from the app to the plumbing, the plumbing now going to more publishers, more publishers meaning more audience, more audience meaning more attention, more advertising. At which point, as I said, the U.S. will probably be there with open banking. There are a lot of things in Web 2.0 that could be resolved. And yeah, if we make it that far, I think we'll be in an awesome position to have an identity solution for Web3 or Web5. [laughs] CHAD: Well, I wish you all the best in that journey. And I really appreciate you stopping by and sharing with us. GUILLAUME: My pleasure. It's been real great and nice to hear from you again. And I hope our paths cross in the real world soon enough. CHAD: Yeah. If folks want to get in touch or learn more or get in touch with you, where are all the different places that they can do that? GUILLAUME: We have two websites, so zedosh.com is the consumer app, attentionexchange.co.uk is our other website. Otherwise, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. And on Twitter, I'm @G_Zedosh. I'm not massive on Twitter. There are a lot of bots on that. CHAD: [laughs] I guess I'm not that surprised. So you can subscribe to the show, find links to everything that was just mentioned along with notes and a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter at @cpytel. I'm also not very active these days. 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 was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success. Special Guest: Guillaume Kendall.

Alice Loy is a Founding Partner at DaVinci Ventures and the Co-Founder and CEO of Creative Startups, the leading global startup accelerator and company builder for design, food, immersive, and creative companies. Victoria and Chad talk with Alice about what she means by creative companies, how much judgment she must pass as an investor with a love for the "weird and wonderful," and some of the challenges faced in bringing diversity to the rest of the accelerator world. DaVinci Ventures (https://www.davinciventures.co/) Creative Startups (https://www.creativestartups.org/) Follow Creative Startups on Twitter (https://twitter.com/createstartups), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/createstartups/), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/createstartups/), Substack (https://creativestartups.substack.com/), YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1SCTGPWdes6ArrYJU0YJ-g), or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/global-center-for-cultural-entrepreneurship/). Follow Alice on Twitter (https://twitter.com/aliceloy) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/aliceloy/). Alice's Blog (http://www.aliceloy.com/) Etkie (https://etkie.com/) Embodied Labs (https://www.embodiedlabs.com/) Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) 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. VICTORIA: And I'm your other host, Victoria Guido. And with us today is Alice Loy, Founding Partner at DaVinci Ventures and the Co-Founder and CEO of Creative Startups, the leading global startup accelerator and company builder for design, food, immersive, and creative companies. CHAD: Alice, thank you so much for joining us. ALICE: Thanks for having me. CHAD: Can you tell us a little bit more about Creative Startups in general but also what you mean by creative companies specifically? Like, isn't every company creative? [laughs] ALICE: Yeah, it's so funny. That's often the first question. And sometimes people I can feel their sense of indignation in thinking maybe I think they're not creative. CHAD: [laughs] ALICE: First of all, the creative industries are pretty well defined globally by the World Bank and entities like that. I'll come back to that. Yes, all human beings are creative. I like to joke that that's what got us out of caves in the first place. But more importantly, all entrepreneurs are very creative regardless of what sector you're operating in. So when we're talking about creative, we're just referencing the set of industries that are measured as the quote, "creative industries." They include film, our museums, design certainly is a core element of that. Increasingly, we're seeing more and more people move toward the creative industries as mechanized labor takes over things like building cars or even running data analysis. CHAD: Has getting support and funding and that kind of thing traditionally been easy in the creative space or hard? ALICE: No. I know you know the answer to that question because you're a designer. [laughs] CHAD: I usually don't ask questions that I don't know the answers to, so... [laughs] ALICE: But it's a great question because actually what it uncovers, you guys, is that it has changed dramatically for people who I call creatives or creators in the last two or three years. It's a little tough to measure with the pandemic, but we know at least $2 billion have gone into platforms that support creators, businesses led by creators. The creative industry has really turned a corner. So when we started this work 15-16 years ago, I co-founded the organization with a gentleman named Tom, who is now in his 80s. But he had come out of what's called the cultural economy, which was the precursor to the creative economy. And, of course, now we're all living in the creator economy. So like every other industry, it evolves. And one turn in this evolution is that creatives are now understood as economic drivers, not just people who add nice flourishes to things at the end. When you're building new products, people think about engineers, but it's really a creative process. And people increasingly bring in creatives from the outset to think about how the design process can be more humanized, can be more effective to solve people's problems so that your products really delight customers instead of just get the job done. CHAD: Is there something you can point to that triggered or pushed along that turning point? ALICE: Well, not to be overly philosophical, but I would say the general sense in the U.S. and increasingly in other countries where we work is that human beings don't want to be cogs in a wheel. They don't want to just be bit parts in a system. When you talk to Gen Zers, they understand that they are complete human beings. And somehow, I think older generations bought into the idea that you have the same job for 40 years. You go to work at 8:00; you come home at 5:00. You repeat the next day. I think the sense in the economy is that people want to be fulfilled. If they're going to give that much time to a job, they want it to be meaningful and valuable. And they want it to solve some of the big problems. Frankly, big tech is not approaching the world in that way these days. And so I think younger people are looking for values-aligned opportunities. And the creative economy is a space where values tend to align with really reaching the full potential of each human being instead of just extracting their physical and occasionally mental labor toward building a capitalist system. And so I think that zeitgeist has helped open the door. I also then think when you look at the kinds of technologies that are being utilized, they're still fundamentally about communicating ideas, and art, and inspiration. That's what Facebook is. That's what TikTok is. That's what even news channels are. And as more people come into the world of saying, "Oh, I can share my ideas, my art, my jokes, my music, my whatever," they see themselves as creatives, and they go, "I wonder how I could get paid for that?" I mean, there are a multitude of factors weaving together to shift. I also think, quite frankly, the SaaS investment area has become so saturated. I mean, if you walk down the street in San Francisco, if you don't bump into three venture capitalists who are SaaS investors, it's like, what are you doing? And so I think other types of investors with a different background maybe are saying, hmm, what about this area over here? How could we make money? So that would be another thread I would say is helping drive. CHAD: It strikes me that what you've shared sort of creates a self-fulfilling cycle too. ALICE: Yes. CHAD: Because once creatives have examples of other creatives that have done this, it becomes an aspirational thing that they understand that they, too, could do themselves. ALICE: Yeah, 100%. So our goal when we started the startup accelerator...we launched the first accelerator for creative founders in 2013 in the world. And we said to ourselves, if we get one company that becomes the poster child for this creative movement and demonstrating that you can be, as we like to say, weird and wonderful and build a company, then we will unleash a flood of people who now see themselves in that light. We were very fortunate in that we got that one poster child, and that has really helped us paint a picture that's clear for a lot of people where they see themselves as entrepreneurs, even though they're a tattoo artist or they're a hard rock Navajo metal band from the reservation or whatever their background is. Now they look and go, "Oh yeah, I could do that," and they certainly could. Being an entrepreneur is really hard but not intellectually challenging; it's more heart-challenging. CHAD: Oh, that's really interesting, more heart challenging. ALICE: Yeah. I mean, you're an entrepreneur. You guys have built a business, so you know that being an entrepreneur is more about being able to just sort of stay calm in the waves than it is about building the world's best boat and being able to steer toward that destination no matter how the winds blow. CHAD: Yeah, I've often referred to it almost as grit, like the ability to, no matter what happened yesterday, get up and do it again. ALICE: Get up, yeah. And unfortunately, I think there's a myth, maybe at least in the U.S., that what drives most people to get up and go, again, is money. And I don't think that's true at all. I think what drives people to get up and go again is their love of customers or end users. And their feeling they're just irrefutable despite there being no evidence feeling that this is going to work. This is going to make a difference in people's lives. And that's why the sort of slog. And there are days when...one of the things we always start a Creative Startup's program with is find your tribe. Cling to the people who believe in you. Ignore the naysayers. The naysayers are ten to one. Blow them off and cling to the people who say, "Wow, dude, that sounds cool. I bet you could do that." Yes, do another coffee meeting with that person. [laughs] Because sometimes you just need people who can say, "You got this. You got this. Just do another day, man." What do you guys do? Let me ask, what do you guys do when things get really rocky for you? How do you guys collect that internal okay, I'm going to get back in the saddle. CHAD: I've talked about this with people before, and I actually think that this is going to be a non-answer, but I'll do my best. I actually don't know exactly what does this for me. But I do know a side effect is I also don't celebrate the wins as much as other people wish that I did. And I think it's because I just move on very quickly from things. I don't dwell on the downs as much. I also don't dwell on the highs as much. And so I don't know if it's just something about me that does it or I just trained myself to do that. But it does have some downsides to it. ALICE: That was a real answer. That wasn't a non-answer at all. CHAD: [laughs] ALICE: Victoria, what about you? VICTORIA: I think to add on to what Chad said is kind of that thoughtbot mentality of viewing things as an experiment. And so if you come in with that mentality, like, this is the experiment. We'll see if it works or it doesn't. And if it doesn't work, there are some lessons to be learned, and we can grow from that and do better next time. And if it does work, great; [chuckles] this is cool. And I actually like to celebrate the wins a lot. I like to really dwell in those moments and feel like we did something right. We should remember this and learn from that as well and then try to repeat it, right? ALICE: Yeah. Oh, I love that. CHAD: You mentioned that when you were first starting Creative Startups, you hoped to get one win, and you did. Which one was it? ALICE: To be clear, as a mom, we don't have favorite children, okay? [laughter] And there are different companies that have had enormous impact in different ways, so let me tick some off. Let me name first Etkie. It's a design company built by a woman named Sydney, who grew up in rural New Mexico with a passion for working with indigenous communities. Her design company makes spectacular handmade bracelets, average price point around 250 bucks. And she sells in about 100 different high-end galleries around the world. She creates 40 jobs for Navajo women on the reservation at twice the annual pay that they would receive if they worked any other job there. Pretty astounding, pretty astounding. Those women have gone on to reinvest their money in things like rebuilding the school, putting in wells for family. The Navajo Nation lacks drinking water all over the place. So really fundamentally shifting the economic and social trajectory of that community. She designs every single bracelet with a woman, and you'll see they're named after the women. And they just do a recollection process where the woman recalls something from her childhood, and they weave a story around that. And then, they create the bracelet design. They're beautiful, Etkie, E-T-K-I-E. The next one I would say that has really inspired me is founded by another woman who does...now she's doing more XR AR, But they started as a virtual reality company doing films for medical providers who needed to better understand the disease experience of their patients in order to come up with not just solutions to their lived experience but actual medical procedures, and technologies, and pharmaceuticals that could shape the outcomes of that patient. So that company is called Embodied Labs, founded by a woman named Carrie and her team out of LA. And they're now selling to hospital systems across California and increasingly in the Midwest, et cetera, changing thousands of lives. And then the one that most people do point to us and say, "Hey, good job," is a company called Meow Wolf. We were their first investor back in 2014. They've gone on to raise upwards of $250 million. They're kind of a competitor now to Disney. So they're in the immersive art and experience realm. They had a million visitors in their Denver spot. So far this year, they've had about a million visitors in their Las Vegas spot. They were founded here in Santa Fe, our hometown. And we didn't even know they existed. They didn't know we existed. [chuckles] The night before our application was to close, somebody wandered into a meeting they were having where they were talking about dissolving the art collective. And somebody said, "Oh before you guys make a decision, you should check out this thing." [laughs] So in some ways, it was angels on our shoulders in that it's a homegrown company, and Santa Fe is a small city. We needed a shift here around our creative economy. And they needed somebody to believe in them. They had gone to every business support organization they could find and had been told, "Well, you're probably trying to start an arts nonprofit." And they thought, "That's not really our vision. That's not...we want to build a company. We think art is something people will pay for if it's put forward in a way that blows your mind," and Meow certainly blows your mind. CHAD: That's really interesting. I mean, I totally get why people would say that just because...but that's like saying...when Disney was getting started [chuckles] people saying "It sounds like you're trying to create an arts nonprofit." ALICE: Yes. And I'm guessing a lot of people did. The future happens when we're all looking backwards, and very few people are looking forwards. And so I think it's important for entrepreneurs to keep in mind you're probably just statistically talking to somebody who's looking backwards because human beings tend to do that more than they look forward. And so better to find people early on who say, "You know, I'm not exactly sure what you're talking about because you're the expert in your startup, and I'm not. But let me ask you this, how could I be helpful?" That's the right question. If they give you an answer and they don't even know what you're talking about, you probably don't need their help. And that's hard for entrepreneurs because there are so many doubters out there that you have to kind of keep plucking through to find the one or two people who say, "That's really interesting. That seems like it might work. How could I help?" Did you guys have somebody at thoughtbot early on who you can remember sort of said, "Huh, that's interesting. How could I help?" CHAD: I think it was our early clients who most did that. ALICE: Oooh, yeah. CHAD: Because we're a consulting company, because we're an agency, finding clients who believed in us and wanted to work with us in part because they liked us was an important aspect to that. If it wasn't for those early clients, no amount of passion would have kept us going because we needed to support ourselves. ALICE: What a great insight, honestly. I think the sort of rhetoric around passion is really abused. Because there's now this sense that, well, if you have passion, you can build a business, and that's just not true. That's not true. I hate to say it, and people are always stunned when I say it because they think that I lead Creative Startups; I must be the core passion champion. But here's what I would say is if you have a passion for solving your client or your customers' problems, then you might have a business. [laughs] There's a huge difference there. There's a difference between well; this is what I want to make. This is what I love doing. That is not necessarily going to answer the question is anybody paying you to do that? And I like to encourage people to think about if you have passion for doing something, you probably have a hobby. If you do stuff that people want to pay you to do, you might have a business. And crossing that bridge is an analytical and a heart-wrenching process. Because usually, what you end up with is I mostly get to do what I love to do. But I do a lot of stuff I don't want to do because that's what building a business is, just like being a parent or any other really amazing, wonderful thing in life. Running a business is not just about doing what you love doing all day; it's mostly about doing what people want to pay you to do. And if you're doing what people want to pay you to do and you love it, that is beautiful. That is a blessed position to be in. It's rare. And you have to ask yourself very real questions and be brutally honest with yourself, or you could waste your retirement savings. You could spend a year or two away from your family before you figure that out, not to be depressing. [laughs] But we always say from our programs we look...not from our more advanced accelerator programs, but we also provide programs that are more; how do you figure out this idea? You have this idea, or you have what we call lucky revenue. A lot of creatives get lucky revenue where their friend sees them doing something, and they go, "Man, would you do one for me?" And then somebody else wants one, and now they have lucky revenue. And they're ready to say, "I think this might be a business." And those people we say you have three outcomes from our programs. One, you realize this is not a business. It's just not going to make any money. The business model does not pan out. Two, this might be a business if I do it differently, and now I need to figure out if I want to do it differently. And three is, yeah, I'm on track. Now I got to go grow it. And all three are valid outcomes. Because we've worked with people who came to us late, took out a loan. And we said, "Well, what's your plan for paying it back?" "Well, we don't know." That's bad. That's really dangerous. That can ruin families' economic futures. And so we're much happier to catch people before that happens so they can ask those critical questions about is this really a market opportunity? Is this a business I want to build? Is this, therefore, a business opportunity for me? And those questions are deceptively simple. In our more advanced programs, we focus on, okay, you've got revenue, you've got traction. You're ready to start maybe thinking about what's the next three years? Where are your cash flow gaps? Where's your, as people like to call it, the valley of death that you have to cross as you grow? What kind of financing can you go raise to help cross that valley? How do you get to 10 million in revenue, 50 million in revenue? People are at different stages of growing a business. 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. CHAD: How much judgment do you pass as an investor as people who are reading applications about who gets into the accelerator program? How much judgment do you pass, and how do you strike that balance? ALICE: That's kind of a peek behind the curtain; how do people really pick companies? Different people do it differently. For us, we really hue toward weird and wonderful. We actually prefer...and this goes against what people say you should do, [laughs] but we kind of go against the grain in general. And it's worked out. We prefer to look at things that we don't totally understand partly because often creatives don't speak business speak. So I'm pretty turned off by (I'm going to make something up.) the Harvard Business School grad who has a music-sharing platform and doesn't play music. I'm like, how would you know about a music-sharing platform? Whereas a musician who comes with their garage band and they happen to have a computer science degree from the college down the road and they've invented this thing and all of a sudden, it's taking off, and they're not even sure why. I'm listening, and I'm like, oh, that's really interesting. A lot of creatives tend to pick up on opportunities in the market, and they don't frame it so much as a business opportunity because that's just not the language that they've learned to speak yet. But they have an insight into a particular sector or a need that people who are not really in that space... It feels like a lot of the startup world has been overtaken by people who want to be startup founders but don't necessarily have their hands dirty in a particular sector where they know how to really solve a problem that either a lot of people have, or that very few people have but that a lot of people have in the future if you build the market. And that's where you make a lot of money is if you build a market. So we look for things like that. So what does that mean when we're reading applications? We don't ask for financial statements. We ask, how much money did you make last year, and where do you think most of that money came from? We're more interested in are they interested in analyzing their business so they understand where growth could come from next? Instead of, what is your financial statements? Most of the entrepreneurs who come through our programs don't have financial statements. They might not even have a cash flow projection, which is really exciting. We have entrepreneurs who come to us who...I'll tell you a story. We had an entrepreneur come to us who ran underground music clubs in old houses in Denver. And he was like, "I think this is a business, but I don't know anything about business. I just started hosting these a few years ago." And I said, "Well, how many people...like, if you took an average year..." and I said, "You don't charge anything?" And he said, "No, people just hear about it." And I'm thinking, okay, so you get a couple thousand. "How many people in an average year come to your basement music club thing?" "50,000." [laughs] Yeah, I think you might have a business. I mean, those are the kinds of things that you think, wow, why did that take off? What is going on there? That's really interesting. Let's talk. And he had a mohawk. He played in a metal band. Business was not his deal. And so that wasn't the lens he was applying. I think a lot of designers and a lot of people who invent products and solutions start with; I'm doing this for myself, wouldn't this be rad? Without even knowing that, they touched a nerve in the market that now is kind of catching on fire. Those are really exciting entrepreneurs for us to work with. They do have to turn a corner on I'm building a business now. I'm not just doing something that's cool with my friends. And that can be a difficult place because it means you have to cross a bridge into the world of finance, and you're probably going to have to hire product managers. And now you go hire that Harvard Business School grad and they work for you. And a lot of people frankly don't want to turn that corner. And I get it because when you come back to that topic of, is this values-aligned? A lot of that world is not yet totally values-aligned. That's shifting, more impact investors, more investors who want to see more different types of people starting companies, but we're not there yet. And so there's this cultural clash. When creatives walk toward that space, they go, ew, I've been fighting against the man my whole life. And now you want me to get in the car and go on a long road trip with them? No thanks. [laughs] And I'm sitting there with the Doritos going, yeah, man, but I got all the good munchies, let's go. It often does work out. But I also understand why people say, "You know, that's just not my deal now." VICTORIA: Yeah. And you have a tremendous amount of diversity in your alumni. ALICE: We do, yeah. VICTORIA: And so do you find that there are some challenges in bringing in that group to the rest of the accelerator world? ALICE: Yeah, you know, funny, I was thinking about that yesterday. So about 70% of our alumni, and this has been true across the board from day one, are people of color or women. At one point, it was around 30% were women of color. I haven't looked at that number in a while. We've worked with about 550 companies worldwide. In the Middle East, half of our alumni are women-led companies. In the U.S., we are fortunate to be able to work with a lot of indigenous communities. New Mexico is home to a large indigenous population. And it's a lot of the reason our culture is so dynamic and beautiful. So for us, that was always a no-brainer that that was where a lot of the interesting creativity would come from and that that was where the rising markets were. We, for example, accelerated and were the first investor in a company called Native Realities, which is a comic book. And they founded the first indigenous Comic Con, which is now called Indigenous Pop X worldwide. And they saw obviously before even Black Panther, and it became kind of like people said, "Oh yeah, superheroes come from all communities." They saw that that market was rising. There are 300 million indigenous people worldwide. There are two comic book companies. Let that sink in. [laughs] It's like, oh my God, what is the possibility then not just around comic books, but gaming, animation, all kinds of creative tools, film, music? That's a huge market that has not been served at all. And we understood early on that that was an area where people want to tell their own stories. People want to understand the stories of other people. And then people want to build new stories together across those cultural or geographic boundaries. And the technology had shifted such that that was possible. In 1980, that wasn't really possible. The distribution channels of film were such that you had to raise money in Hollywood and have Tom Hanks and whatever. That's just not true anymore. So we saw that early on, and that has helped attract a lot of entrepreneurs who share our passion for really telling those stories. However, I would say for people who want to support rising entrepreneurs out of what I'm going to call distressed communities or communities that have been literally discouraged from becoming their own economic leaders is that the burden that most of the people bear who are building businesses, for example, from Black communities, or native communities, or women in the Middle East, those people tend to bear a larger burden than someone from a more privileged background like myself. They're often the person in their family and for their community who is helping to ensure that people get the health care they need, that that kid was able to visit the college that they wanted to apply to. They become that sort of anchor of support for more people than in situations where we have more support and more what I call margin. They have really little margin. And so to ask them to, for example, join an accelerator full-time for 12 weeks that just doesn't work. Because the decision that they're making, you know, from a very privileged position, we can say, "Well, either you're dedicated to your business, or you're not." But really, what we're saying to them is, well, either you do your business, or you love your family and your culture. That's the question we're asking them, and that's a totally unfair question. That's a ridiculous question. Every single one of us would say, "I love my family. Thanks, see ya." CHAD: So how do you balance that? ALICE: Well, it's tough. I mean, first of all, we have adopted in the programs where it's more for early-stage entrepreneurs, and we're opening doors to entrepreneurship. And we are being first and foremost patient, patient with they're crossing that threshold. We understand that our core outcome is that people come always saying, "I'm an entrepreneur. I'm ready for the journey." That means we do things like, first of all, we do all online. If possible, we do a meeting upfront, so everybody meets each other in person because that kind of sets a tone of just it's a lot of fun. We have food and drink, and we have a good time. And then we do 6 to 12 weeks online, and then we do a gathering at the end. And we build a community first and foremost of people who are understanding how they can help one another. So Creative Startups is a little different in how we do accelerators. We do not ever have people stand at the front of the room and tell people what they should do with their business partly because we're educators first and foremost, and we understand...I have a Ph.D. in entrepreneurship. I understand that entrepreneurs tend to be experiential learners, not all but many. And we're not going to be there in a year building their business. They're going to be building their business. We have to build their self-confidence. We have to build their ability to say, "I know how to row the boat. You're along for the ride." I'm just along for the ride. [laughs] That requires us to do things like, okay, so let's work on your business model and really carefully chunk out here's one piece of that. Let's go deeply into understanding that. Let's tackle the vocabulary. Let's look at how people talk about it online. Let's open that door culturally so that you can take that into your experiences and say, "Oh, I already kind of do that. I just use a different language," which is what a lot of designers do. A lot of designers, whatever your background, already do entrepreneurial processes. They use different language, and it's just a translation. It's literally just vocabulary. So we help people understand that the best way to figure out your client's needs are by listening; all people know that. If you want to understand someone else, listen, and unpacking that into then business speak a little bit, and then giving them opportunities to go do that in the real world. And being patient with how they might do that or why they couldn't get it done this week. Or maybe they want to come back with a different way of describing it than maybe a White person like me might describe what they experienced. And just giving a lot of latitude to people to have that own experience themselves. That honestly...I know that sounds very philosophical. But it breaks down into tactical things that we do in an accelerator that opens the door to a lot more entrepreneurs. And our Net Promoter Score is 9. Over 90% of people would recommend our program. People love our programs. And 70% of our alumni are still in business. So I think it's working. We have a lot of learning to do. We're doing an indigenous accelerator right now, and it's a lot of learning for me. It's very eye-opening. CHAD: As an accelerator specific to indigenous peoples, what made you decide to do that? Some people I know, thoughtbot included, sometimes hesitate to do things like that because we don't want...there's some hesitation around doing something like that. ALICE: So we share all of those hesitations, and we think they're spot on. We are doing this in partnership with a group called Creative Nations out of Colorado. They are all indigenous people. They're a new group. And we envision Creative Startups moving more toward a place of being kind of like the intel, you know, the old intel inside. We are inside, and we're an engine within another organization. So here in Santa Fe, we partnered with Vital Spaces, which serves Black and Brown creative entrepreneurs and artists. And our goal is to help build their capacity to be able to keep doing programs as they see fit for entrepreneurs. And we're standing by as they would like us to help. So we took that same approach with working with Creative Nations. It's been a fantastic partnership. The lead working with us is a woman named Kelly Holmes. She is Lakota Sioux. She's from the Cheyenne River Reservation. And she founded Native Max Media, which publishes Native Max Magazine, the world's first fashion magazine for indigenous entrepreneurs. She is a brilliant, creative entrepreneur. She is self-taught. She eked it out. She has been around ten years now. It's astounding. And you see the magazine, and it's spectacular. It is high glamour, beautiful. And it is reshaping the way not only indigenous people see themselves but how White people see indigenous people. And those reframed stories are so important to building a more equitable society. So I was over the moon to partner with her. Then I learned her mom is one of the few Lakota language teachers. So Lakota is her first language. Her mother teaches Lakota and teaches teachers how to teach Lakota. So she grew up with an educator. So she has taken to building this, again, patient, very exploratory online environment for indigenous entrepreneurs. And then I bring sometimes the more technical like, oh, you're asking a specific question about how to do structured interviews with customers. Sure, let me talk a little bit about that. But as we started out this conversation, you guys, entrepreneurship is not an intellectual challenge usually; it's a heart challenge. I don't mean that in a way to disparage how important it is to be really strategic and smart about your business. But I think at the outset especially, you just have to be able to hang in there and keep doing it. And then, as you grow into that opportunity, you start to see that the intellectual challenges unfold because your opportunities become more complex. But at this outset with Kelly, it's been a conversation with people who are frankly reframing themselves as business leaders, people who own businesses and have employees based on their creative output. And that's a really exciting space to work in. We wouldn't work in this space if we didn't have a partner who shared our vision and who wanted to be that native leader of a program like this. It just wouldn't really feel exciting. CHAD: I think that that's great advice and a framing that helps me think about the things that we've tried to do in the past and the things that we hope to do in the future and realizing that really genuinely partnering with someone in the actual community that we're trying to serve or to have an impact with is sometimes an important missing component that we need to incorporate. That'll help solve a lot of the hesitations that we might have around doing something. ALICE: Yeah, yeah. VICTORIA: Right. And we've all heard before that culture eats strategy for breakfast, which I think -- [laughs] ALICE: That's my favorite line, Victoria. You nailed it. VICTORIA: It makes sense that the more connected you are to your culture and to your community, that's where you'll be the most successful when your heart is in it. ALICE: Yeah. And I want to give sort of a plug for stepping outside of the zone of the way...I went to business school. I have an MBA. I'm really well-versed in that whole world. I'm married to a venture capitalist. He teaches how to do venture capital at Stanford. That whole world is very familiar to me. And it seems to not be helping us solve the problems that we have now as a society. And so one of the reasons I encourage people to go to those partners, go to those places where you're like, I don't fit in here; I don't understand what's going on here; these people speak a different cultural language, form, way of doing things, I encourage that because I think that for people who want to build a different world, we have to stop looking to the world that we already have. And we have to say, "Well, who does things differently? What could we learn?" One of the most beautiful things about working with the entrepreneurs in the cohort right now, the indigenous cohort, is they first talk about taking care of their people, that's first. And it's like, wow, if that's your entire frame, you start to make really different decisions in business. If you're talking about well, I want to take care of the people in my community; I want people to be healthy and happy and be able to pursue their own dreams; that's a really different frame of mind for a baseline for decision making. The other thing that Kelly talks about that I love (I'm stealing it from her.) is she talks about fighting for her business, fighting for her business. And that, to me, is such a great way to feel like, okay, if I'm fighting for my business, I know how much Creative Startups has achieved. I'm not fighting for myself. It's not my ego. It's none of that. It's fighting for my business so my business can keep having the impact. Everything that I think about now in terms of working with indigenous entrepreneurs is this has nothing to do with me. Their frame is very much my community, my people, my business, which is over there. And it's a humble way of understanding one's place. And that is a really exciting reframe for me to think about how we can solve problems like the climate crisis, like the disparity between rich and poor, like the disintegration of our democracy. What if we had a different frame? How could we solve problems differently, maybe better? So for us, these partnerships unlock a whole vast area of new thinking, new ways of doing business, new ways of taking care of other people. And at the end of the day, that's what gets me back in the rowboat [laughs] is this idea of, wow, we are having an impact on other people. And doing it with people who have a different starting point has really shaped a lot of the work that we do. CHAD: Well, I'm sorry that we have to wrap up. Otherwise, we could keep on going and solve the climate crisis and unraveling of our democracy, but -- [laughs] ALICE: Yeah, I have an appointment at 2:00 where I'm doing climate crisis. So I'll let you know how it goes. CHAD: Okay, wonderful. ALICE: [laughs] CHAD: Alice, thank you so much for joining the show and sharing everything with us. We really appreciate it. ALICE: Yeah, I was delighted to be with you guys and hope to continue the conversation. CHAD: You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. VICTORIA: And if you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. CHAD: You can find me on Twitter at @cpytel. 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. CHAD: Thanks for listening, and see you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success. Special Guest: Alice Loy.

Joe Barb is Executive Director and Founder of LGBTQ+ Family Connections Center. They have a mission to strengthen and empower all youth, however they identify, to overcome obstacles by providing housing, supportive counseling, community education, and advocacy. Victoria and Chad talk with Joe about identifying needs for the center, his own lived experience and connection to the LGBTQ+ community, and deciding what services to provide and evaluating which are most impactful. LGBTQ+ Family Connections Center (https://lgbtqfamilyconnectionscenter.net/) Follow the LGBTQ+ Family Connections Center on Twitter (https://twitter.com/center_lgbtq), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/lgbtqfamilyconnectionscenter/), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/LGBTQFamilyConnectionCenter), or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/lgbtq-family-connections-center/). Follow Joe on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-barb-978ba0204/). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) 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. VICTORIA: And I'm your other host, Victoria Guido. And with us today is Joe Barb, Executive Director and Founder of LGBTQ+ Family Connections Center, with a mission to strengthen and empower all youth however they identify to overcome obstacles by providing housing, supportive counseling, community education, and advocacy. Joe, thank you for joining us. JOE: Thank you. I appreciate it. VICTORIA: Wonderful. So you started the center over two years ago. If you could go back in time and give yourself advice to when you were first starting out, what would you tell yourself? JOE: Wow, very similar to for-profit companies, having the tenacity to keep knocking on doors, never accepting no for an answer, and understanding that tenacity is everything. Nothing happens without continuing the fight every day. VICTORIA: Great. And how did you first identify that need for the center? JOE: A million years ago, when I was a late teenager, my parents had a pastor in their church suggest to them that in order to bring me back to God and back to their church, that they should cut me off financially, you know, I was a young freshman in college prod me in that direction. So my parents took the advice, and I found myself in my second semester of college with no funding. The check for the second semester had been canceled from my family, and I didn't know what to do. So I called a friend in South Dakota that we had met on vacation. And she said, "You know what? I have an apartment building here. I just had an apartment become vacant. Why don't you move to South Dakota, and then we'll work on everything else?" So that lived experience kind of proded the whole thing. And then meeting the youth who had been displaced from home for being a trans youth caused the rest. CHAD: Well, I'm really sorry for that personal experience that you had. But it's pretty powerful and that you've gone on to help others in similar situations is really admirable. JOE: Yeah, it's been quite a journey. And my lived experience, honestly, I was with stability within 24 hours. The more I became comfortable and complacent in my life and then met somebody who wasn't; it brought me back to that. And then just looking at statistics, looking at how youth end up in a houseless situation created something in me that I had to address. VICTORIA: So you had your own lived experience and that connection to your community which helped you identify that need and start out on the center. Did you find there were a lot of resources for building nonprofits? JOE: There isn't. And it's really something that when you go into it, you believe that when you create a nonprofit and you finish that application, you send it into the IRS, and you get approval, that you put a great idea out there and that the community will respond and that everyone will immediately jump on it and say, "You know what? You're right. This is needed. We need housing. We need to make sure that youth are safe." And that's not the way it works. It doesn't work that way at all. It's a lot of connections and community and getting involved and putting the statistics and the numbers out there so that people are aware of it. But it's mostly connecting the stories. The more youth that I've met and worked with and connected them to a story and told their story, the more people respond. VICTORIA: Right. And so, what have you found to be the most impactful in sharing that story and in managing that content to get to the right people who can help you with this need? JOE: The most impactful part is people just aren't aware. We all know that there's a homeless population. No matter where you live, there's a homeless population, and it impacts communities. But what we aren't aware of is we all typically believe that the government is funding these things and it's being taken care of and that maybe those people just chose homelessness and don't realize that the resources are very limited. Until those resources are able to show a data of need, that person may not be counted that you saw on the corner. CHAD: You're pretty active socially online. I think where I first saw you was through a mutual connection on LinkedIn, and your posts started to be in my feed, and I liked and subscribed, I guess. How much of the awareness that you're putting out there is coming from social networks and online versus in-person and local communities? JOE: I'd say it's probably a good mixture of both. Locally, obviously, I'm deeply involved with other service providers, and I'm involved with local government. I'm on any kind of board that you can think of that impacts youth homelessness. So there's that within my community but having those LinkedIn...just this weekend, we had our pride, and at our pride, someone walked over to me, started talking at our booth. And he said, "Well, I know you from LinkedIn. CHAD: [chuckles] JOE: I noticed your picture with Sylvan Lake behind you from your LinkedIn, and I just had to come over to meet you and say hi." And I thought, how impactful is social media that someone who lives in Florida happened to be in South Dakota came to pride and recognized me from a picture? VICTORIA: Wow. Yeah, it makes our world feel a little smaller sometimes, doesn't it? JOE: Absolutely. VICTORIA: And the problem of youth homelessness and LGBTQ+ homelessness is very complex. And I think other nonprofit founders might be interested in how you decide what services you're going to provide and how you evaluate to see which ones are the most impactful. JOE: We did things kind of backwards. So I formed the board of directors, and typically what happens with the board of directors is they want to become your advisors. And I thought these people have great professional experience. We have doctors; we have PhDs, we have scientists literally on our board. And those people don't have the lived experience. So I thought, who do we go to to develop programming and support for people that are in need? And the answer was glaringly clear; it had to be the people who were in need. So I formed a Youth Action Board with the State Continuum of Care. And it comprises of youth ages 13 to 24 who have lived experience. We keep it at 66% have to have lived experience. And technically, most of them have even much more than that. But we connect with them through service providers who assist youth. And those were the people that we used to formulate what they needed, decide what was most beneficial to help them during vulnerable points, and then help them get out of situations. VICTORIA: Right. And I think that user experience, that experience bringing that into the products and services that you're creating, just makes a lot of sense for us, and that's what we bring into our design as well. JOE: Yeah, I mean, we do it in almost every industry. Whatever you create, whatever product you create, whether it's something tangible that you hold or whether it's a service, you bring in a test group. And that test group typically is people that you're seeking to utilize or buy your service or your product. And in doing that, we end up developing a better product. It's the same thing with a nonprofit. We had to get the voice of those who we would be serving in order to make sure that we were doing what they needed, not what we thought as professional people or personal opinions was the way forward. CHAD: Was there something as you were talking to people and learning that surprised you? JOE: Probably the same thing that everyone develops is an opinion of homelessness. We all think that people that experience homelessness it's typically through some self-inflicted issue; typically, drugs and alcohol come to mind and some type of cause that brought you there that you had influence on. And I've learned that most of the kids that we serve had no influence on their homelessness other than to be born where they were or to who they were born. A lot of our youth are coming from, oh, they've lived in shelters, or foster care, or aged out of foster care. It just changed my dichotomy of thinking that we would be serving people that had addiction problems or alcohol problems when in case of the youth...currently we're at, I think 68 youth served. I've only met one youth that had a previous addiction. CHAD: It's really just that lack of a safety net. And all it takes is your family not supporting you and not having a safety net. JOE: Absolutely. And that's just it. You said it very well. Most of us, when we have an incident in our life that we need some help because there's a vulnerability, we have people around us that we go back to. We have either family or close friends that we can say, "You know what? I lost my job. I need a little bit of help here," or "This medical incident happened, and could you assist us?" And we get a response from our family or friends that typically is supportive and helps us find a way. A lot of youth, especially youth that experience homelessness, don't have that connection to family. So that's where we need to bring in community to support them. VICTORIA: Right. And do you find there are unique challenges to supporting youth experiencing homelessness in the Midwest in South Dakota where you are versus in more urban areas? JOE: Absolutely. Carl Siciliano is my TA advisor. He created the Ali Forney Center in New York, which is the largest housing support for homeless youth for...they specifically only target LGBTQ youth in the United States. And in talking to him and in looking at our demographics, it was very different. For them, people in larger cities will just seek out their services. They learn about it word of mouth. They find out that there's a shelter in place. Here, our homeless population is much more hidden. And typically, what happens here is youth will gather together. And it'll be six or eight of them who will become friendly, and they will try to support each other by one of them will get a hotel, and then six or eight of them will live together. Or they're doubled up in one person's apartment, six or eight people live in somebody else's apartment, which truly isn't housed because it's not their place. And they try to support each other. So they're very hidden in our communities. CHAD: It's unfortunate there's a lot of stuff happening in the U.S. and worldwide with legislation being passed now anti-transgender. I think South Dakota was the first state in the country to pass an anti-transgender bill this year. Are there particular challenges to doing the work that you do in today's climate? JOE: Accessing mental health services, we had to overcome that obstacle by forming relationships with counseling services so that we could make sure that any youth, whether they were insured or underinsured, or uninsured, could immediately access mental health. And that took quite a bit of work on our part in order to make that happen. It should be easy. It should be easy to access mental health. And that's probably one of the biggest challenges because I can stabilize anyone tomorrow with either a hotel, or a house, or an apartment. But if you don't have mental health to help with what got you there, you're still living in trauma. If you're living in trauma, how can you focus on things like going back to school or having a career or what even tomorrow means for you? Because you're living in trauma today. So, absolutely, to answer your question, mental health. CHAD: And is that a matter of providers not wanting to provide services or not being able to pay for it? JOE: Not being able to pay for it. There are things that you can access if you're uninsured or underinsured if you meet the guidelines to get into mental health access. The problem with that is if you need to help today, that's a process. We wanted to skip the process. We wanted to make sure that if you walked into our drop-in center today that this afternoon I can have you with a therapist of your choice. 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. CHAD: You have a website. You collect donations online. And we definitely want to link all of that stuff in the show notes. It will be there, and I hope people contribute. But when it comes to the tactical stuff on the product and business side, are there particular tools or resources you were able to draw upon to put together online donations, the website, that kind of thing? JOE: As far as platforms, is that what you're asking? CHAD: Yeah. JOE: There are some great platforms that have been built specifically for nonprofits in order to help get the word out and help fundraise. That for us hasn't been the primary. In this type of nonprofit, typically, most of our donations are not donations or grants. They're things that we...like, I just spent two years on a grant that is quite substantial. But it was two years of work, literally 40 hours a week for two years. So there are those tools, there's the GoFundMe, and there are all kinds of tools for sharing on social media in order to get people to donate. They're great, but you have to have a large circle in order to utilize those. And you have to have people that are willing to do that as well. So I don't think we have the tool that's the best tool yet socially. CHAD: What would something that was better look like for you? JOE: It's more getting corporations and businesses and private companies involved in what a lot of companies are already doing. They will seek from their employees giving initiatives. And they will seek information to what does the company want to support as a community? Because that's what their employees care about. I think those things have a more sustainable development and a more sustainable footprint for nonprofits that when organizations get involved that are private and then offer to their employees a way to donate, that works best. CHAD: Yeah. For thoughtbot, to honor Pride Month, we collected a series of donations that we were going to make. And there was team suggestion...because we have teams all over the place, we wanted to have a local impact. And then when it came to actually doing those donations, I think we had 10 to 20 organizations that we wanted to donate, not a huge amount of money to each one but hopefully, it makes a difference. And the way that we needed to do that a person at thoughtbot needed to go and either find the donate link, the place to do it, and some of them didn't even have it. And we wanted to, you know, maybe it's a place in Brazil or something, and we need to get them the money somehow, wiring it or something. And so that was a fair amount of manual work to figure that out and then to make the payments. JOE: And I think because it goes along with we're learning as organizations that we have to take care of the social and emotional part of employees just as well as we do the work environment. It's part of the work environment. So I think that that kind of goes back to HR, which is my background. HR should look at those things in advance and find local nonprofits to support local ideas and then maybe some national ones as well. We all know of The Trevor Project and some of the great broader campaigns that do a lot of really good work. And have that ready so that when somebody joins your company you can show them and say, "Hey, by the way, these are some local organizations that we can do a payroll deduction for if you like, or we can buy annual contributions," and let the employees see that the company cares about the local area and also cares about things on a national platform that impact employees. VICTORIA: I love that. I think that's a great way to involve corporations in giving back and connecting employees to their local communities and the local groups that need support. Is there anything else that you want to tell our listeners in order to support the LGBTQ+ Center or in general? JOE: The majority of our youth are LGBTQ+. And that's because statistically, across the United States, the majority of youth seeking housing services unaccompanied are LGBTQ+, up to 40%. But we don't turn away any youth. It doesn't matter how they identify. It doesn't matter what their circumstances are. The only thing that we ask is if you're telling us you're homeless, then we're going to assist in that. We do have age criteria of 16 to 24 because that matches the federal guidelines for the programming that we're in through federal dollars. So other than that, I mean, we still would help anyone of any age, but that's the big thing to know is that we help any youth however they identify. And what could listeners do? Obviously, on our website or look into your community as well and see what is a support in your area and find something that you can contribute to. VICTORIA: That sounds great. Thank you so much. Do you have any questions for me or Chad? JOE: I think that what you're doing is great. I like that you are thinking of nonprofits as a company as well because a lot of people view it differently when it's actually a company. You have to figure out a way to sustain funding and bring money in just like any other organization in order to do the work. CHAD: Yeah, I think that's a common misconception that people have. And I'm sure it's not the case with you and your organization. But I like to remind people that nonprofit really just means that it can't show a profit. So there are lots of nonprofits out there that just end up spending all of the money that they have. That is really also technically what it means sometimes. JOE: And you bring up a great point. There's an IRS website to look up any nonprofit organization, and you can look at how they spend their money. I do that all the time before I make a donation. Because we've all heard those stories of CEOs, who make 30 million a year or whatever crazy number. You can always look up any organization and see how they spend their money. CHAD: Yeah, that's a really good tip for people to do before you get involved with an organization with donations or your time and really making sure it matches your values and that kind of thing. VICTORIA: Great. All right. I think we're about at time. So with that, I will wrap us up and let everyone know you can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. CHAD: If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on Twitter at @cpytel. 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. CHAD: Thanks for listening and see you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success. Special Guest: Joe Barb.

Lucy Hall is the Co-Founder of LOANHOOD, an online fashion rental platform and community that allows users to loan inclusive, diverse, and creative styles for an affordable price. Chad talks with Lucy about being a peer-to-peer fashion rental app, building a community, and reducing the impacts of the fashion industry on the planet and people by helping to create a sustainable future. LOANHOOD (https://www.loanhood.com/) Follow LOANHOOD on Twitter (https://twitter.com/loanhoodlondon), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/loanhood/), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/loanhood), TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@loanhood), YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCzWBlASKUfH1OsdPEJOKxg), or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/loanhood/). Follow Lucy on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucy-hall-616b1614/). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) 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 Lucy Hall, the Co-Founder of LOANHOOD, who are changing the face of fashion. Lucy, thank you so much for joining me. LUCY: Thank you so much for having me, Chad. CHAD: How are some of the ways that LOANHOOD is changing the face of fashion? LUCY: So we're starting off with a peer-to-peer fashion rental app, which we just launched ten days ago now. CHAD: Congratulations on the launch. LUCY: It's been a long time in the making. And, like I said, we're starting with a fashion rental app. But there are so many different ways that we want to change the face of fashion. It definitely needs a facelift. CHAD: What caused you to start with the rental platform? LUCY: It was something that we were really passionate about. So my co-founders and I actually worked in the fashion industry for the majority of our careers. So we could see first-hand how it was changing, how it's developing. And sustainability started coming into our lives, and we could see that things had to change. And we know that the fashion industry is quite archaic. Big fashion businesses are like these huge ships. It's so hard for them to change their course and to actually implement sustainability into their supply chains or their values. And we knew that we could do it quicker and better and faster than them. So we started testing the idea of circular fashion by doing clothes swaps which is a kind of an entry-level way to circulate fashion for free or relatively cheaply. And we started getting this amazing feedback from people like, "Oh, we would love to do this again. And have you thought about monetizing it?" And, of course, that was our...to get to scale, we knew that we had to monetize this sharing of clothes. And that's how our peer-to-peer fashion rental app grew and was born. CHAD: That's great. So you have two co-founders. LUCY: I do. CHAD: Jade and Jen. Were the three of you working together at the time? LUCY: Funny story, Jade and I are actually best friends. And Jade was my model back in the day. So Jade has been a fashion model for 12-plus years. And she was on Britain's Next Top Model. And I was a model agent. She came into my agency as one of the runner-uppers, and we forged a lifelong friendship from there. And we've both been passionate about fashion. And then, as I said, our career paths, we could see the detrimental effect of the planet. And Jade decided to go back to university and start studying. She did her master's in fashion futures at London College of Fashion. And that's where she started seeing sustainability. And the idea of a peer-to-peer rental came from that course. She was studying the future of fashion, and she knew that this was the only way we can move forward. And Jen was a friend of Jade and is a graphic designer by trade and is an amazing brand builder and amazing designer. So we were asking her for some advice. And she came on as a co-founder at the beginning because she just knew this was the right path for her. CHAD: You started with these swaps. Were you doing the swaps as friends because you felt it was the right thing to do? Or did you have an eye towards this could be something more? LUCY: Well, we knew from the beginning that we wanted to do something big. We knew we'd got to a certain point in our careers where we were like, right, let's use our skills to really make a change. But we were also working, and we all had jobs, so we were kind of doing it as a side hustle, just testing the idea and going, "Oh yeah, we'll do this." And then it started picking up, and we got a contract with a local council. And we were like, wow, people are really interested in this. Let's keep going, and then the pandemic hit. CHAD: How did the pandemic affect you? LUCY: [chuckles] Well, as you can imagine, people weren't really doing clothes swaps or renting or even thinking about those things at the beginning of the pandemic anyhow. So we kind of just put it on hold and did what everyone did in the pandemic, hunkered down. And we started learning as much as we could about the circular economy, about sharing economy, trust economy, marketing, product, really teaching ourselves from the bottom up what it takes to make a global brand. So we were quite lucky in the respect that we had that time away to really hone our skills and focus on what we wanted in the long term. So post-pandemic, when we came out of the lockdowns, although there were multiple back and forth, as you know, it was definitely a stop-start for us, but we knew that it actually...it just allowed us that time to really focus our minds on what we wanted and a long-term plan, not just like, oh, let's try this out. We know what we want for the next 5 to 10 years, basically. CHAD: At what point did you decide, okay, we have to make an app? LUCY: It was a difficult one because we thought Shopify, Sharetribe there are all these amazing platforms. You can just get a business at the click of your fingers. However, for peer-to-peer fashion rental, it's a much more complex model. Even Sharetribe, which is supposed to be for those kinds of models it's not as detailed as we needed it to be. So we tried to build a website from scratch. And, again, we just knew that we're very much focused on Gen Z. And when we were talking to our audience, we knew that they wanted an app. So we just scrapped it and said let's just go for it. But having no technical background was a real difficult decision for us because we had no funding. We'd all just left our jobs. The pandemic had happened, so we didn't have any savings really. So we had some money from the clothes swaps. And we did a rewards-based Crowdfunder, and we raised £14,000 from friends and family in our community that were buying free rentals for the future and just believed in the mission that we were on. And we were able to get that £14,000 and put it into the start of building an app. And as you're aware, apps cost a lot of money. CHAD: [laughs] LUCY: We didn't get that far. And we learned a lot of lessons with the build because we tried to project manage it ourselves. Having no technical background, that was tricky. And we offshored it to a team in India who were lovely and amazing but not as skilled as we needed them to be. Because we had no technical background, we really needed somebody to lead that for us. So we had a starting point, but we knew that we had to actually get a technical lead on board pretty soon. And we were lucky enough to find a partner in a company called ON, who are based in the UK. And with them on board, they led the tech from there on. CHAD: Continuing to work with that team in India, or did they actually provide the entire team at that point? LUCY: We switched to another offshore team because it costs so much money here in the UK. CHAD: So when was this all happening? LUCY: Last year, mainly. 2021. CHAD: To give folks an idea, you make the decision to start building an app. You start doing that in 2021. You just launched. But your business is more than just the app. Were you right up to the wire with the app being ready? LUCY: Like you said, we're building a community. And what we learned from the pandemic is that you can't rely on one part of your business to help you succeed. You need multiple things. And what we're passionate about more than anything is community. And what we found with the fashion industry is that it can be quite elitist. And if you want to work in the fashion industry, you have to move to London or New York or Paris, and you have to probably know somebody in the fashion industry, and we wanted to change that. We wanted you to be able to start your own fashion journey wherever you are based. And what we also saw was that all this money that people were spending on fashion was going to big fashion businesses and to probably one guy at the top of that chain, whereas, with peer-to-peer rental, you can actually circulate that money within communities. You're lifting communities up so they can create their own sustainable fashion future. So what was really important to us was to have community as one of our main pillars going forward. CHAD: And how have you gone about building that community? LUCY: Organically so far, which has been really nice. And again, the events that we do have been part of that. But to scale, we really need to start building out ambassador programs, referral systems that can help us hit those kinds of network effects. CHAD: So I know you're only in the UK. LUCY: Correct. CHAD: What are the limiting factors to expansion beyond the UK? LUCY: Money, obviously. CHAD: [laughs] Okay. LUCY: We're on a funding journey at the moment, and that's a ride for sure. So we kind of use the Depop playbook. Do you know Depop? You're probably over 25, so that's probably why you don't know it. CHAD: [laughs] Yes. LUCY: A third of 16 to 25-year-olds are on Depop in the UK. It's the 10th most-searched-for resale platform in the U.S. And they started off in the UK, and they organically grew into the U.S., which is nuts. We probably won't do that, of course, but we plan to go to the U.S. potentially next. But it depends on investment, on what our audience is saying, where they're based. What we find with our audiences, the universities that we partner with we have a lot of international students. So they're taking that idea back to their hometowns, which is really interesting. But on a tech front, going into the U.S. is easier because it's an English-speaking country. Going into Europe is a bit more complex because you have lots of different languages, although you have one single currency, which is helpful. CHAD: Since your model is peer-to-peer, individuals are sending the rented item directly to the person who's renting it, right? LUCY: That's correct, yeah. CHAD: And so I suppose one potential barrier is you don't need to be able to receive centrally or to handle things in the United States. But you need enough people in the U.S. to make it worthwhile for individuals to be sending each other things to have enough rentals and activity. LUCY: Always, the problem with the marketplace is the cold start problem. There is a great book by Andrew Chen called The Cold Start Problem. And we really need to build both the supply side, which we call the loaner, and the demand side, which we call the borrower. So we have been working really hard in the UK to get as many of the supply side on board because we know the people that we want to be on the platform, so emerging designers, young makers, and creators. And because we have our fashion backgrounds, we can identify those people quite quickly. And we've done things that are totally not scalable, like messaging them on Instagram and scouting people in the streets. But as a small startup, you kind of have to do those scrappy things as well just to kind of build the supply side. CHAD: Right. And I think that's why so many marketplaces end up focusing on particular geographies even if they could expand because that focus helps you do those unscalable things that you need to do in the early days to bootstrap that community that you need for the marketplace. It hadn't occurred to me until you just said it that I've been thinking that this would totally be individuals, but for an emerging fashion designer to be on your community offering up their clothing for rental, that hadn't even occurred to me as a possibility. LUCY: Something that we're passionate about, especially post-pandemic, a lot of young people that are either at university and didn't get the real university experience had to make some extra money started these side hustles of teaching themselves to crochet or teaching themselves to knit. And now they have these amazing pieces, and they're open to renting them out as well as doing their retail side of it. And what we found from the resale people, so the Depopers or people on Vinted, was that they'd get this kind of seller's remorse. So they'd upload the item, take amazing pictures, and they'd sell it once. But with rental, you upload it, and you can rent it out over and over and over again. And you still get to keep it and wear it yourself, so a bit of a no-brainer. CHAD: Yeah. So you went on the journey of creating the app, creating the community. You've just launched. So are you actively fundraising? LUCY: We are actively fundraising. We're just closing our pre-seed round. And we were very lucky to have an incredible lead investor come on board. He just got the idea instantly. What we found difficult is being female founders who don't have tech backgrounds; it's definitely a couple of negatives against us. [laughs] But we're going to use it to our advantage, and the people that are on the journey with us now 100% are behind us and believe in what we're doing. Because we're an impact business as well as we want to have profit alongside people and planet, that's what's important to us to make impact socially, environmentally, and through the industry. So the next step of our fundraising journey will be a crowdfund, an equity-based crowdfund. So we did the rewards-based crowdfunder last year. This year, it's going to be equity-based because we really believe that we're building this platform for our community, our audience. So they should be able to invest in us and come on that journey with us. And hopefully, the business grows to huge proportions, and that they can get some money back out of that later in their lives. CHAD: Are you going to be using a platform to do that? LUCY: We are undecided, although I'm leaning over to between one and another. There are only two platforms really in the UK, so Seedrs and Crowdcube. And I've spoken to some other founders that have done both platforms. And I've spoken to both the companies. I've looked at articles trying to find which one's the best fit for us. One interesting thing that we had with the Crowdfunder was we were deciding between Kickstarter and Crowdfunder UK. And Kickstarter is very much more focused on men, more sports, definitely a male demographic, so that's why we went with Crowdfunder. With Seedrs and Crowdcube, they don't have that; it's a very equal split. So it's just on the feedback that we've had from other people that have used those platforms. So I'm leaning towards one, but I won't say yet because I haven't fully decided. CHAD: So you're only allowed to do that with people in the UK? LUCY: I think it can be global, actually. CHAD: Are you planning on having it be global? LUCY: We have friends and family all across the world. I spoke to somebody today in Lithuania. I spoke to somebody the other day in Australia. I speak to people in the U.S. all the time that are like, "When are you coming to us?" [chuckles] CHAD: Yeah, that'll be interesting; the fact that you're able to do the equity crowdfund anywhere, but people won't be able to actually use the product right away. You know, it's sort of a catch-22; you've got to have one before you can have the other. And so, hopefully, people go along on the journey. LUCY: Chicken and the egg. We need the money to build the tech, to build the audience. But we need the audience and the tech to show the investors that we've got engagement and traction. And yeah, there's always something. I think we're doing pretty good. MID-ROLL AD: As life moves online, brick-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. CHAD: You mentioned that your three female founders have faced some bias, it sounds like, especially in talking with potential investors and seeking to grow your community. How has that been for you? LUCY: You know, I don't want to put it down to being a female founder. I actually think the statistics tell us that, unfortunately. But I think what's the problem is that most of the people that I speak to in investment, either VCs or angels are guys, middle-aged guys between, say, late 30s to the 60s, and they are investing in businesses that they get. They don't generally get a peer-to-peer fashion rental app for Gen Z. They're like, "Oh, they're going to want to ship things to each other, and like, what about the packaging?" And they've never heard of Depop. It just got bought by Etsy for $1.62 billion. It's a huge industry, and rental is just an evolution of resale. And they're like, "Oh, okay, kind of get it," but they don't really. We have to hand-hold them a lot through the pitch deck and get them excited. But that's, the problem is that we don't have enough women in the investment space or ex-founders. I know in the U.S., it's a lot different. They have a lot more ex-founders investing, especially angel investors, which is great because they get the journey. Whereas if you have somebody with a financial services background, all they care about is the math of it. And it's like, you know what? Startups don't always just succeed on the math; it's the vision, it's the idea, it's the network effects, it's the audience. There are so many different things at play here. And if you've never started a business yourself, you just don't get that. CHAD: There's a lot that goes into creating a company. And it may not be the fact that your female founders directly contribute to it but in an environment where they're looking for a reason not to invest. LUCY: Exactly. CHAD: That bias can creep into all of the excuses or differences that someone might point to and say, "Oh, this isn't going to work," or "I don't get this." LUCY: 100%. If you've got a good business idea and you've got a strong pitch deck and a strong financial model, then that business will do well, for sure. However, there are so many other factors at play. And when there are so many great businesses competing against one another, they unbiasedly go with one over the other. CHAD: So you also mentioned you have another excuse that people might use is you just don't have a technical founder on the founding team. LUCY: That's definitely a struggle. We will be bringing in a CTO later in the year, which will be really exciting because it's definitely the missing piece to the puzzle. We have domain expertise in fashion. We have that side of it down. But yeah, the technical side of things, I think all the founders that I have spoken to that do have a CTO in the founding team or even have brought their technical team in-house just say it's a game changer. When somebody is invested in your company, and they're using the platform every single day, they can see the bugs. I mean, Chaz from Fat Llama, which is a great rental app, said that his developers would pull out a laptop in the pub and be like, "Oh, I just saw a bug. Let me quickly fix it." I mean, wow, that would be insane. Our developers finish at a certain time, and that's it; they're gone. So if we have a problem on an evening or even because they are in India they have a different time, we can't get hold of them. It's so frustrating. CHAD: So when you start to build a team, will you be doing it based in the UK? LUCY: Or based in Europe, at least. I think another thing to come out of the pandemic is this remote work, and I think that's great. I think there's so much talent across Europe, across the world. But for the timezone issue, I think Europe is definitely a better fit for us because we don't want to be having the same issues that we're having now with the time differences with India. But yeah, there's so much talent across the whole of Europe. CHAD: Yeah, that's what we do at thoughtbot. We are all throughout the Americas, all throughout Europe, Middle East, and Africa. We've built our team. But we're grouped in by timezone. So people work with clients and with each other. And there, it's based on the timezone that they're in. And so that does make a big difference around how communication can work and how a part of the team you're able to feel because you're online at the same time as each other. LUCY: Yeah. Definitely, that's a great show. CHAD: But I definitely recommend casting as wide as possible. It definitely allows you to hire the best person for the job. LUCY: Yeah, I think we need to find somebody that's passionate about the mission and who understands working with three co-founders that don't have a tech background that we probably do need a little bit more hand-holding than another founder would. We're learning so much as we go. Hopefully, we'll be coders one day. [laughter] CHAD: I actually don't think that. Some people might say, "Oh, you really should learn to code yourself." And I think that that does a disservice to what you are bringing to the table with your domain expertise and with your ability to really understand the industry and know what needs to happen from a business perspective. LUCY: Yeah, I would totally agree. You can't be an expert in every part of the field. You can't be an accountant; you can't be a CTO. You need to be good at exactly what you do. And I'm the CEO, so I have an overview of everything. And that's what I love is kind of have a little finger on each little project that's going on and really get an understanding of across the board. But you need those people that are drilling into, like, we have my co-founder, Jen, who's a graphic designer by trade, but she's our Chief Creative Officer. And she really drills down into the creative side of things. And she knows what she's talking about. And she is the expert in that, and that's so valuable. CHAD: And I think that that's the important thing to founders to do early on is to really understand what their product and business are. You don't necessarily need to learn how to code. But I do think it's a mistake when early founders start stepping away from the product too early. LUCY: Yeah, you need to be super close to the product. And you need good communication across all different divisions. So marketing and product have to talk to each other all the time, so we can tell our audience what's happening in the product, and then we can build the features that we need to grow from the marketing side of things. It's all about communication. And it's so hard as a startup because there are so many different things going on and so many people pulling you from left to right. There are metrics to hit; there are bills to pay, there's audience, the community to keep happy. And it's like, oh, you can't drop the ball on anything. You really have to just do as much as you can. But if you communicate to each of those stakeholders, we're doing our best. I mean, we had a mail-out the other day that said this is a business built by hands. It's built by people. I know we're a tech company, but there are real developers there hammering on their laptops. We're all here writing the copy and doing everything that we can to make this the most successful business so we can make real impact on the climate change and communities. CHAD: I want to talk about that impact, but before we do, I'm curious, so you're all in the same general London area? LUCY: No, we're not, actually. So Jade and Jen are based in London. And I actually moved out of London a couple of years ago, and I live in New York in the north of England. CHAD: Oh, okay. LUCY: See, definitely a different dynamic. And another reason why I'm passionate about bringing the fashion industry outside of London is because I travel up and down all the time, and I'm lucky it's like an hour 50 on the train. But that becomes expensive, and it's difficult to travel all the time. CHAD: So, are you meeting in person with each other? LUCY: We try. I just saw the girls last week. I'm seeing them again at the weekend. We speak every single day on Slack, WhatsApp. We have weekly calls, and we jump on pretty much video calls to each other every day. And that's, again, another thing from the pandemic that's been a game changer. Because when I actually left, it was just before the pandemic. We were like, oh my God, how is this going to work? But I knew that it was the right decision for me. And then the pandemic hit, and everyone was on video calls. And we were like, oh, this is so easy. This is great. [laughs] CHAD: Yeah, it really opened that up to everyone's expectations. LUCY: Yeah, and I think it's great. I think it's much more flexible. And we will get an office for sure. But I would love to have an office here and an office in London so we can have teams across the nation. Because I think we don't all have to go and live in a capital city to get the same out of the fashion industry. CHAD: Yeah. So let's talk about sustainability, the environment, and climate change. I am somewhat aware that an enormous amount of resources goes into creating new items of clothing. LUCY: It's crazy. So the fashion industry accounts for 10% of the global greenhouse gas emissions at the moment. And if nothing changes by 2050, it will use a quarter of the world's carbon budget. It is insane, and it affects not only the planet but people. The garment workers are paid nothing. They're treated badly. And this is all part of the supply chains of fashion businesses. And like I said, when I started in the fashion industry, e-commerce really was only just starting, and Jade, who is the model, was working for Asos, which is a big fashion brand and big fast fashion brand. So when she started working for them, she was shooting like 10-15 items, 20 items a day, and when she left, so five years later, they were shooting like 70 items per day. They were just churning out more and more fashion, more options. And you can imagine most of the clothes are made...well, we have this whole disconnect about clothes. So I actually had a restaurant for three years in between my fashion career. And that's where I found sustainability because you have that connection with food. And you know that eating organic or eating locally and seasonally is better for you and better for the planet. But nobody thinks that your clothes come from the ground. They're made from plants. Or if they're not made from plants, they're made from oil. It's nuts that people don't have as much education around it. And that's partly because the fashion industry doesn't want people to know, and it's a lot of smoke and mirrors. It's a very opaque industry. We went to one university, and they said that they thought all clothes were made from machines. They had no idea that there was cotton and linen. And so, like, wow, this is crazy. CHAD: So given that it's the magnitude of the size of the problem but also the industry, there are two ways of looking at that, I'm sure, one is the potential for your impact is huge. The other is how do you get started? How can we have an impact there? So how are you tackling that? LUCY: I get asked a lot by people, like, how can I start my sustainability journey? I feel so much pressure to do things. I should be vegan, or I'm not recycling enough. I got a plastic bag, oh, I feel terrible. And it's like we are all on a journey. And you just have to start one day at a time and just be more conscious. So whether that's instead of buying one dress for a wedding that you are probably just going to stick in your wardrobe, why don't you rent it? Try one of the platforms that are out there, and you can rent a really cool dress, and that's probably someone else is going to rent it, and someone else is going to rent it. And by prolonging the life of an item, you can save so much energy and water. And those small things that we can each do will make a huge impact globally. There's a lot of mindset shifting and behavioral change that needs to come with rental. As we saw with Airbnb when they started, people were like, "Oh God, I don't want someone sleeping in my bed," and now I Airbnb in my house all the time. And it's a great source of secondary income, especially for a startup founder [chuckles] but also giving people the opportunity to have these experiences in small communities, which I love. And that's what we want to see with fashion is that people will start being more conscious. And how LOANHOOD is different to other more traditional rental systems is it's much more affordable. And it's much more accessible because you can meet in person. So how we see it growing is these hyperlocal communities where you can meet people in person, a bit like Facebook Marketplace. They've done super well in more of the suburban areas. You can drop off your dress to somebody around the corner. So you're reducing the cost of delivery and reducing the emissions by meeting in person. So those hyperlocal communities will be really important in helping people adopt this behavior. CHAD: Are you worried from a business perspective that if it's just renting to someone around the corner that they might not want to do it through LOANHOOD? LUCY: I think people will still do it through the platform because of the added value that we give, you know, rental protection. I could go and borrow people's clothes like my friends in the area. I wouldn't do that. I might do it once or twice. I think if it's not somebody that you're really friendly with, then you would definitely do it through the platform. CHAD: Yeah. And by rental protection, you mean if something gets damaged or that kind of thing, it's protected. LUCY: We don't have full insurance yet because, again, the sharing economy is a new economy. And, of course, insurers are very old school. And it's hard for them to grasp the fact that there's a new industry here, but that is changing. And as soon as we have more data, we'll be able to get full insurance for these items. But right now, we do it in-house and protect items, minor damage, or repairs. And if it isn't returned or damaged beyond repair by the person that's renting it, then they have to cover the retail price of it. CHAD: Yeah, makes sense. What's beyond rental platform in terms of this is where you decided to start, but your goal is to change the face of fashion? What's beyond? LUCY: There are lots of different verticals that we can do within rental or in fashion. So we're really passionate about digital fashion. Jade, my business partner, is actually doing her Ph.D. in digital transformation in the metaverse. So how can we bring sustainability and ethical practices into the metaverse with fashion is something that we're really passionate about and something that we're exploring, renting different things so femtech, or skiwear, activewear, all those kind of things and then just creating a space for our community to grow creatively. So entrepreneurship is really important to us as well, and giving people the opportunity to be...especially Gen Z they have this way that's called pay to create. So they're passionate about making money out of things that they can do themselves, whether that's creating content, renting out the things they own, upcycling. We want to expand on that and give them the tools to actually create their own career paths. You don't have to go down the traditional university routes. We see a world where there's a LOANHOOD campus where you can come and learn how to be content creators or all sorts of different things. It's a really exciting time. And our 10-year plan keeps getting more bigger and bigger. And we're like, oh God, it's just exciting. CHAD: Yet do you worry about spreading yourself too thin and compromising on the early steps? LUCY: We always come back to the point of why we're doing this and who we're doing this for because what's the point? Otherwise, we're doing this to reduce impacts of the fashion industry on the planet and people. And we are doing this for our community and to give them the options and give them the power back. As we've seen with governments around the world, people in leadership roles are not doing enough, and we can't rely on them. So if we want to create our own sustainable future, we have to do it ourselves. And we want to give people the tools to do that. CHAD: Well, I wish you the best of luck in that. I'm very confident that you're going to have the impact you're looking for along the way, and I wish you the best in that. Thank you for stopping by and sharing with us. I really appreciate it. LUCY: Thank you so much for having me. It was great to chat too. CHAD: If folks want to find out more or get in touch with you or follow along, where are all the different places that they can do that? LUCY: Check out our website, loanhood.com. If you are a founder and you want to talk about funding or building a product, marketing, you can email me lucy (L-U-C-Y) at lucy@loanhood.com. And we are on Instagram and TikTok @loanhood. CHAD: Wonderful. You can subscribe to the show and find notes which include a link to everything that Lucy just mentioned along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter at @cpytel. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll see you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.